How the fuck did remasters/remakes become such a huge genre in 2025?
How the fuck did remasters/remakes become such a huge genre in 2025?
2020 and forward*
because game development got so bloated they save cost on reusing old blueprints that have shown to work, gamers also voted with their wallet that they are ok with this
Lack of creativity from developers, all the talent are either dead or retired. Sometimes you'll get the odd surprise but its very rare.
There are no new ideas and even if there were it's always safer to just remake stuff. What I wonder is what the hell do these developers do when games even these days take 5 years to make from huge teams up to 1000 people. Back in early 2000s it was like 50 people, including voice actors and such, working on a game/sequel for year and they made goty.
I guess part of it is the people paying the bills can stall or give conflicting demands for developers which is why it takes years and years to make very average games or rather remakes.
Live-service dev pipelines got obliterated by studios that weren't asleep at the wheel a few years ago and now with no inspiration, no talent, and nothing better to do, just rerelease old shit.
Lack of talent, devs of today can only polish old masterpieces
Yeah, no one has ever been forced to buy a video game or at least I hope so. People will complain endless hours how they know a game will be shitty and then in the same sentence tell you they already pre-ordered it. They don't want to miss out even on shitty and cheap remakes, it's a social convention that everyone buys a crappy game and rants about it on youtube comments and reddit.
If they're good games what does it matter?
because current games fucking sucks compared to 2005
Barrier to entry on joining a game development team now too high, teams too bloated, managerial class needs a new yacht. More cost effective
It's less risky for the suits.
1. It's a project that can be done with only a partial team, for example you don't need to iterate on character designs or scripts, it's already done
2. as a result of the above, it's possible to develop them piecemeal
3. it's a good way to train new staff.
Anon Babble fundamentally fails to understand how budgets work. When a game has a certain budget, that doesn't mean that's how much the game cost to make. The budget is the expenditure over the period of time that the game took to create. If you don't create the game, that doesn't mean you aren't spending the money. You don't just send your developers home because they have no game to make.
The issue with full scale development is that at some point, certain parts of your team are simply finished. Their jobs are done. Remakes and remasters are small projects that otherwise unoccupied staff can work on and be productive in between full scale productions. This is why many of them launch so close to the initial announcement, they simply aren't announced until they're ready, because they're a persistent long term backburner project that gets a bit done here, a bit done there, and it's eventually ready when it's ready.
Businesses cost money to run even when they're not doing anything. as a result, small and uncomplicated projects that have the potential to cover your operating costs between large jobs are always going to be a thing.
There are no new ideas and even if there were it's always safer to just remake stuff
this. Movies were already a few steps ahead with shit like stretching them out(pirates, hobbit), rehashing something from 500 years ago(star trek, robocop), or more recently turning any game that's existed into some kind of show or movie
What I wonder is what the hell do these developers do when games even these days take 5 years to make from huge teams up to 1000 people.
Games don't take either of those things. Don't confuse bloated budgets, time, and teams with necessity. It's just pure mismanagement, nepotism, and various forms of corruption.
Also, there are plenty of new ideas, just none of the people in charge are willing to hire or fund those ideas. Right now the industry is stuffed to the gills with people who just want to play it safe. Don't confuse a hesitancy to invest in new ideas with a lack of new ideas.
Because in the current risk averse climate remakes are safe. Executives are very aware that the current crop of developers are largely lacking in the competence to execute new ideas, which makes their risk aversion even greater. Remakes and remasters are safe, because even the largely incompetent developers in studios at this time have a greater opportunity to do a halfway decent job since 80% of the work has been done for them and they can just concentrate on getting it updated and working properly.
Literally zoomers getting filtered by old tech and games
because millennials are the only ones who have money to buy games and they only buy from IPs they're familiar with
zoomers okay F2P gacha shit
Modern day games are awful, making old games more attractive
Old games are far cheaper to remaster or remake than to do somerthing new
There are people out there that want to poison old games with woke propaganda
I hope this helps
because the video game industry can't die soon enough
gaming is hyper-capitalized. remakes are free untapped money
Why don't they just go back to making ps2 graphics games?
Zoomers are braindead and refuse to play anything older than 2010 because "it looks too old" so developers release the same shit with a new coat of paint and sell like hotcakes
There is also the fact that new games and everything that encompasses the games are fucking garbage because zoomers are retarded, so releasing something that was successful decades ago is a safer bet because its miles ahead of new stuff
costs 2 million to produce (1 monkey crew with just enough ue5 experience)
normieslop enjoyers like them because le unreal graphics
Investors are very hesitant to support new IPs, because generally audiences don't buy them or like them, unless they somehow manage to break through and become phenomenons, which hardly ever happens. Audiences often want what is comfortable and familiar (or at least, that's what they think they want).
How the fuck did remasters/remakes become such a huge genre in 2025?
I've you want to have a real conversation about it, games are more exponentially more expensive than ever to produce and publish. Remaking an established hit is a surefire way to make profit. People that haven't played the game in 10 or 20 years with no way to access original hardware will consider it. People that heard it was good but never got into it will consider it this time, include in that group people that were not born at the time.
As the game design is largely done already. Less time is spent on bringing the mechanics up to modern standards that was spent creating the original. It also allows studio to either train new people on your engine, or get the studio up to speed with a new engine.
There's a lot to say about publishers and the current state of the videogame industry, but the reality is these companies are banking on remakes to banking on remakes to be profitable, while they make new shit.
As an aside, I think the problem with most modern games (and I personally don't think there's a shortage of good games released last year/this year), is that they have to be as safe as possible unless they have the momentum of juggernauts like CoD or some shit.
The vidya market crashed after 2012 after they spent roughly 6 years coping with audience numbers and production costs hitting a plateau, so publishers generally ramped production way down, killed studios, alienated developers or otherwise went bankrupt themselves.
We are currently seeing the industry collapse into itself and as the publishers become more consolidated, they also become less willing to do anything other than acquire known quantities with works in progress or leverage their existing holding, which means making licensed games based on their existing IP aka remakes.
What do developers do?
A good game depends heavily on good coordination between departments and a solid plan on how to move forward. With very large studios you lose a lot of time to administrative inefficiency and work being thrown out (though if you look at Concord, not throwing out your work can be just as damaging).
It's much more of an issue with management.
Poorly managed developers produce less functional work in more time.
Games are easier to make than ever. Freely available tools are incredibly powerful and easy to use compared to what they were forced to fuck around with in 90s and early 2000s.
all companies realized that theres no market for new IP, that the risk of money wasted was too much. So instead of spending less on smaller projects, theyre using less to rebuild what has already been done before. No real thought has to be used, just do the same thing but with unity or unreal. even a jeet can do it. if you want to play new shit, get used to playing fotm slop or digging through to the bottom of the barrel with random 1 man dev games, or rpgmaker shit, or whatever. or just stop playing new things, enjoy the classics as best you can.
truly a bad time to be a gamer.
Not much other than it's a symptom of society in large because even if video games are silly, they are still part of the culture. About them being good games, sometimes they are, but often it's like the games were "google translated" or the "AI" was told to make a game out of the source material. Like, they get most things right by guessing but they have no real idea what they are trying to replicate.
Because anyone who wasn't retarded or an infant through 7th gen onwards saw the casualization and deterioration of genres, and their favorite series. ""New"" games were all largely shit, unless you found something incredibly specific.
A GOOD remake/remaster, reminds us of what worked and why we liked an older game.
Ninja Gaiden 2 Black? While still based on Sigma 2, it's better than 99% of other games in the genre.
Resident Evil Remake 2? The first good Resident Evil since the original 4, and the best exploration based RE since Remake 1. Oblivion Remastered? Oh yeah, we don't need casualized garbage like Skyrim. MGS3 Delta? Oh yeah, MGS doesn't need to be open world slop.
Opposed to this is something like FFVII Remake/Rebirth, that instead of relying on FFVII's strengths - it tried to just warp it into a modern game that was nothing like the OG. Lo and behold, it was dogshit because of that.
If a favorite game of mine gets a faithful, good looking remake - you can bet your ass I'll be playing that instead of generic modern garbage.
The fact you guys are even having this discussion shows you probably all started browsing this board post 2016 (hell, 2020s lmao) and have no idea how bad genres deteriorated to slop with ""new"" games from 7th gen onwards.
Games are easier to make than ever. Freely available tools are incredibly powerful and easy to use compared to what they were forced to fuck around with in 90s and early 2000s.
This. Marketing is probably more expensive than ever, but the actual making of the game should not be more expensive or harder, if you don't account to talented people not being around anymore. The developer teams in 90s and 2000s were a lot smaller and often had stone age tools or had to make the developer tools themselves and they were able to push out incredible things.
Games are easier to make than ever. Freely available tools are incredibly powerful and easy to use compared to what they were forced to fuck around with in 90s and early 2000s.
That's incorrect. The barrier of entry is lower yes, but games are NOT easier to make, unless your specifically making games that would have been playable on hardware available in the 90s and 2000s. Anyone can slap together something in unreal, source, godot, unity, etc, but having it look and play relatively well is something else entirely. Nobody was going on about how much easier it was to make games in the 90s because they now had shit like renderware, idtech and build.
People who enter or are recruited to make the games are just not talented then.
Almost all of the people that made games in the 90s and 00s were not talented either.
Trololololo.
Ok, but I'm answering in earnest.
My two favorite genres of games - REMAKES and REMASTERS.
arcade games mog the gameplay of nu-slop ue5 garbage. all they have to show are vaseline visuals with unfitting gameplay design.
look at this and tell me everything outside of visuals doesnt look off. its peak uncanny. youtu.be
people were def more talented back then. they put a lot more effort into their pixels than anyone else does now, while also having good gameplay.
unless your specifically making games that would have been playable on hardware available in the 90s and 2000s
There is literally nothing wrong with this.
Anyone can slap together something in unreal, source, godot, unity, etc, but having it look and play relatively well is something else entirely.
Yes, that would take actual professional work and coordination, but you can achieve that without chasing the modern graphics high. Arguably the only thing that could reasonably result in games costing more to produce is higher wages and inefficiency.
Having no established best practices and working with bizarre hardware were massive barriers to development.
average development cycle of 6-8 years
average development cost of several hundred million + marketing
that's a huge fucking gamble on a game that nobody knows. much easier to greenlight a remake/remaster of a beloved classic. at least the devs have the blueprint already in front of them and don't have to spend 5 years in pre-production figuring out what the game is even supposed to look like.
8 year dev cycles come from remaking a based game into a woke/neutered one btw. normal games still take 4 years tops
because investors are too scared to fund new ideas and see demakes/demasters as a safe bet. and the mindless masses keep proving them right. it would change if you all stop buying demakes
Realistically if a studio is taking 6 years to develop a game, then they almost certainly scrapped one or more years of work.
There is literally nothing wrong with this.
No, there isn't but that's not what most people that play games want. If that's what you want there were over 19k games released on steam last year. Even ignoring boomer shooters, I'm sure at least 10 of them will meet those metrics for you.
Yes, that would take actual professional work and coordination, but you can achieve that without chasing the modern graphics high. Arguably the only thing that could reasonably result in games costing more to produce is higher wages and inefficiency.
I'm not sure what you're on about, but I'll give an example. It used to be the person making a maps was also decent at lighting, and lighting was not that complex. These days you need a whole team of people doing lighting, because lighting is exponentially more complex that it was in half-life.
Oh they scrapped way more. AAA development is like a sculptor who needs 10 years and a block of marble the size of an elephant to make a couple fist sized figurines. Of that "average dev cycle" 80% is spent on trial and error which is 100% on the clueless leadership. The designers can create the assets for a GTA-tier project in about 2 years but it's the lead producers scrapping years of work because that feature "just didn't feel right."
The audience is to blame, people can't let go of their nostalgia for the past. Square Enix is soon to be all remakes.
I thought you just needed to be a DEI to get hired
after their latest stupid ideas like turning ff into a watered DMC and god of SOI retarded inbred child
The only positive I can see out from this is Racing Lagoon will be finally be unearthed from where ever Square was hiding it.
Because (supposedly) talented developers are wasting years of their life making a game that you can already play instead of making new stuff that would actually be worth the investment.