I’ve played a fair few game remasters and remakes in recent years. Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Dark Souls, GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition to name but a few, and there have been games of varying qualities in there. Some pulled on my nostalgia, taking me back to childhood gaming memories, while others allowed me to explore games that I didn’t play when they were first released. I’ve been fairly selective with what I’ve played, so what’s my problem with remasters?

Remaster overload. It feels to me like there are three kinds of remasters. The first, and the type I think I’ve enjoyed most of all, is what I would consider nostalgia remasters. These are the remasters of games that are over a decade old and bring back fond childhood memories. They’ve been done to varying degrees of success, and there have been some horror stories (GTA Definitive Edition on release if you’re looking for an example). I think these games succeed the most with some quality of life improvements. Sometimes modernised graphics help the experience, but staying graphically close to the original is just fine too. For me at least, these don’t feel like too much of a cash grab as long as they’re decent quality and priced appropriately.

The second type, which I’ve also enjoyed, is the remaster used to expose people to a slightly older game, that perhaps wasn’t as popular as it could have been at release. Sometimes a sequel, or spiritual sequel, might have been released and been a huge success, and fans now want to try the prequels they missed the first time round. Some good examples are Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, somewhat exploiting the popularity of more recent games by allowing people that might not have been interested the first time round to experience the originals. I feel like these remasters are great when they stay true to the originals, without quality of life changes, but sometimes graphical enhancements are definitely worth it.

Finally, the third type, and I’m not really sure what to call these. These are the games that are remastered within the same console generation, or 5 or so years after the original release. There is very little that has changed usually in that timeframe that can justify a remaster in my view, but we’re seeing more and more of these crop up - Sony seems particularly bad for it, but perhaps I’m too far removed from other ecosystems. They’re not all bad, some remasters are free upgrades for original owners. But in some cases when games are ported to another platform, that’s an excuse for a remastered version, and often times the original owners have to pay for the privilege. Sometimes these include very minimal visual improvements or the occasional new feature that should have probably been a patch. In short, to me at least they feel a bit like a cash grab.

So how did we get here? While I’ve been playing through the GTA Trilogy, I’ve found myself thinking about this subject, and I’ve come to a couple of probably wrong conclusions. I think the remasters and remakes could be the result of the industry learning from past mistakes, combined with games taking longer and being more expensive to make. What mistakes? Publishers have learnt from the gaming crash of the 80s; that producing large numbers of low quality games doesn’t work. Instead of making shovelware like the good old days, they’re instead trying to use remasters and remakes to bring in revenue while they work on the AAA titles that are taking longer than ever to produce.

Is there an alternative? Maybe, albeit probably a riskier one from a shareholder perspective. I think large publishers need to realise that not every game needs to be AAA. In recent years we’ve seen a whole host of studios being bought up by major publishers. They’ve been tasked with building blockbuster games, but in a some cases they haven’t panned out, and we’ve seen a lot of studios being shut down.

What if those studios had been asked instead A or AA games (not that I have any idea what those would be classed as). We’re not looking to repeat the past with low quality products, but trying to produce good quality games on lower budgets with the aim of supporting larger productions. As the industry has grown, similar to the films industry, the cost of taking risks on new IP and new ideas has increased. I would love to see some of these studios working on smaller scale titles that explore new ideas, rather than remastering old titles or porting them to new platforms.

Without doing this, I fear we’re now just heading for a different type of crash. With the current console generation being considered fairly lackluster, what will be remastered, and will people bother buying them? How many more studios are we going to lose to failed AAA titles when the designers and developers likely have great ideas for smaller games?

For me, I’ll likely continue to play the occasional remaster if it strikes the right chord. But where do you sit? Are you happy with the current gaming market? Or would you also love to see more risks being taken on smaller games? Let me know on my socials.