Remaster: a strange era of the video game and movie industries
Bogdan LashchenkoThe Internet is full of various jokes about the era we have not entered but rushed in. Now, you can see remakes of the best games of the previous years in gaming shops. Are there any serious reasons for it or publishers just want to earn more on the things that have already made good budgets for their creators?
Perhaps, it is worth beginning with that the gaming industry is a business and not fun entertainment. First of all, every publisher and developer will think about the income they are going to earn from the development of the game, everyone wants to eat tasty food and live well. So before the product is rereleased, the economic feasibility of the product is evaluated, the work has to bring, at least, some income.
Game developers have an option to rethink the project at the stage of the creation of the game. They can make its gameplay more dynamic, detailed, and make it better and brighter. Remaster usually provides less than one-third of innovations in development, which are added on top of the existing mechanics if they are not fully remade. All this allows publishers and developers to save remarkable sides of the game, which they initially developed, and players will not think that they are playing a substantially different game.
Mafia: Definitive Edition by the studio Hangar 13 can be considered the remake made by all the canons. They recreated models, improved the in-game graphics, and significantly finished the gaming mechanics. The remake definitely appeared to be pretty expensive but the studio had evaluated the costs and profits in the right way, so it was worth it.
Publishers frequently are not ready to risk a lot with the re-release of a game. So they often resort to remasters, the easy-in-production way to re-release a game, which is adopted for modern platforms. Usually, the production process affects the graphics and texture improvement, adaptation for the new hardware, and general interface improvement. Changes and fixes of existing bugs are not even made, mostly.
The remaster of the Mass Effect trilogy could become an expensive project. First of all, it would be pretty long, secondly, the development of three games from the very beginning at the same time is an enormous amount of work. As a result, the series has received a more modern look, becoming available on all platforms, which provided a new audience. Definitely, it is not profitable for a company and its employees to resort to high costs, the cheaper it is the better it is, and it is even better to be free. Free is not a myth, for example, free slots by VSO are available for everyone and everywhere. On the website, you will find not just the way to entertain for free but will find out how to receive welcome and non-deposit bonuses and, also, know about the best tendencies on the market.
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On the whole video game market, there has recently been a tendency to hold a player’s attention with the number and quality of the in-game information. It appears that it is more profitable for publishers and developers to release a game once in two years than making games monthly. That is why we can see games as a service, which are based on buying in-game content, and it brings its developers the desired income.
Many developers use the marketing term “the deep ocean”, which means the unused part of the market or the unused variant of a product. So the one who is the first to release a new product on the market frequently becomes the only player. It means zero competition, at least for some time since the release of the product on the market. Apple had a similar situation in 2007 when Steve Jobs revealed the very first smartphone to the world.
The audience ten years ago and now is represented by really different people with different interests. However, the ones who played 10 years ago probably play now but the problem is how to connect the new generation with old games. The new generation knows about old games just from conversations or magazines but it does not understand why there is so much hype around them.
Nowadays, publishers and developers have a unique opportunity to sell old emotions to the new audience, arguing that “this game had been on the top one day and we have made it even better”. Remasters and remakes provide elder gamers a chance to experience the same emotions they have felt during the first playthrough. This approach definitely can’t compare to the release of the first iPhone but re-releases continue to be extremely popular.
Competition exists, of course, but in a distorted manner. The main stage of competition passed during the first edition of the game when the major emphasis was made on innovation and the customers’ money on the very fast market. The first Crysis seemed something supernatural, despite the fact that the company was just trying to earn a living. Back then, they demonstrated the most beautiful (at the moment of its release) first-person shooter with enormous realism. Now, the Crysis Remastered trilogy does not offer something new, besides the emotions you could experience 15 years ago.
Besides the financial aspect, publishers play on our nostalgia. So almost all remasters and remakes released are the best-sellers of the past years, which were worldwide popular. And it can even fix its reputation in the eyes of the players just in case the studio has not released something worth it for players recently.
Bogdan Lashchenko – content manager at EgamersWorld.Bogdan has been working at EGamersWorld since 2023. Joining the company, he began fillin the site with information, news and events.