Your thoughts on recycling games.

[Xero_Daxter]

People may have mix feelings about this but why can’t developers make new games and not recycle old ones?

For example Skyrim has been milked forever and is on almost every platform. Not saying Skyrim is a bad game because it’s an awesome game. But do you really have to make not 1 but 2 remasters? What’s next?They’re gonna remaster a remaster?

Give me your thoughts. A civil talk plweeze and thank chu.

[Blargo]

Sometimes I forget GTA V was released in 2013.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

I don`t mind if it`s done well and enables more people to enjoy this game.
Sadly most of them are minimal effort cash grabs, often not even bothering to properly map controls.

[Dutchgamer1982]

Xero_Daxter eredeti hozzászólása:

People may have mix feelings about this but why can’t developers make new games and not recycle old ones?

For example Skyrim has been milked forever and is on almost every platform. Not saying Skyrim is a bad game because it’s an awesome game. But do you really have to make not 1 but 2 remasters? What’s next?They’re gonna remaster a remaster?

Give me your thoughts. A civil talk plweeze and thank chu.

-> in the 90s and early 00s.. the market for games was different.
-pc gaming was over 70% of marketshare
-games were made almost all exclusively for ONE platform.. and there were still about 7 different consoles around unlike the 2-3 we have now.. giving those consoles a very narrrow marketshare
-not everybody owned a pc, usually the people who owned one and did game were the chess-club geeks kinda characters, male 16-26 years old who usually are also very IT savy and were the tech support for friends and family
-no or very basic (call in) internet, ment that you HAD to release games on a fysical medium, in a very well bugtested and working state for it was not as easy to just patch issues later.
-advertisement had less influence than it had today.. as those geeks are less seceptable to it and thus games had to depend more on having a well recieved product
-and if not them than at least the brick and mortar stores..
-profit margins were much tighter... as numbers of sales were lower, fysical publishing costs upfront money..
(the cut brick & mortar stores took is comparable to what steam takes and usually a little lower.. so that one is no issue.. but you did sometimes have to pay as a new developer brick and mortar chains to put your game on a shelf to start with.. as their fysical space for titles was limited.


effect of this was that new developing studio's were created every year.. but also many went bust every year.. for 1 slighly bad recieved release and you would either be finished or be finished at the release of your next product.. even if that next one was good.. since most people would have lost trust in you.. and no marketing budget could overcome that.
-> great for gamers.. the best games ever come from this era
-> less secure for investors.. and therefore most studio's were ran by their own funds.. without external investors..


now look today :
-there are only 3 console brands left.. of them only 1 kinda still does their own thing.. the other 2 now have mostly the same games as on pc.
-marketshare of pc games has dropped to about 30% of marketshare with the rest going to consoles

games are made for console first and than ported to pc.. where before they were made for pc and only in rare occations ported to console usually a decade later as console hardware was always way behind pc hardware..
-> the average console player is more "causual" aka lower attention span, usually a little younger (more like 12 on average) and has a larger share of girls
**this in turn had reflexted on the type of games being made now (genres like strategy that I love always played horrible on console and would not be liked as much by casuals so the number of them remaining have decreased and what is left is dumbed down.

than there is the internet... with digital releases.. they took the entire 2d hand market away.. for pc games (and they tried multiple times to also take it away for console.. but because of their larger marketshare their backlash has caused the big ones to back down for now..)
without 2d hand market.. you removed most competition for a re-release
-
bugfixes can be more easy released after the fact.. and with also the old customer rights severely limited (in olden days you had 14 days right of return without any limit on hours played)..
-
and this different audience is also more seceptable for advertisement.. so while a game now costs 5 times as much to make than it did 20 years ago... the actual budget for programming it has decreased by 10-20%.. the primary chunk of that bloated budget goes to marketing.. for once they made a sucker buy their product.. it does not matter how badly recieved it is.. unlike days of old.. there is no more way to return or 2d hand sell it.
->
and people these days also have less real contacts and way more digital ones.. making the effect of advertisement even easier.

-> all this decrease of risk and increase of the market and marketshare has lured in investors... their vast capitals have made the risk of bankrupcy go almost entirely away.. but also made the hurdle to become a developer yourself much higher... and if you somehow make it anyway they just flat out buy you out... much less independant publishers.
***
so instead of artists running a development firm being directly involved and passionate.. running the show.. that were fine with small 5-10% profit margins and were more likely to bet on new and creative ideas it is for profit investors running the gaming industry now.

those investors do NOT like risk. so new idea's are not funded instead remakes and sequals are low risk.. as you already had prove people liked them..
-> also betting on as large an audience as possible (casualisation) is the best way to get many sales aka lots of profit.. a mcD corporation makes more profit than a fine diner run by a michelin star chef.. despite the latter having a better product.
-> so that explains the casualisation...


the final nail ironicly is the REMOVAL of quality control... if one would be making games like days old... say a 10-100 million budget.. with a team of 30-100 well educated bacharor-master degree level programmers and artists... you would not be noticed amids the 1000000sands of 1 man in their garage titles that are also on steam..
-> in days old.. the cost of fysical releases.. would scare those smaller 1 man in their garage in free time people away.. and you would only have to compete with like 1000 copies present in the gameshop... and giving away a few free samples may be all it needed to get the ball rolling.. a good product used to sell itself.. now not so much...

so that means.. we only have left a few struggling michelin restaurants of days old who were forced to yank up prices way up.. and on the other end the junkfood mainstream bulk of sold games.. and than a legion of streetcorner vendors... the small mom and pop restaurants with both good food aka games yet fair prices... have been all but pressed out of the game market.

-tldr version :
in the 90s and 00s : game development was ran by artists, today by investors.
artists love to be creative, and are willing to take a risk for creative expression..
Investors hate risk.. and thus do not like new creative ideas and prefer using proven succesfull things.
so thats why we only see sequals and remakes.

[The guy from Ace Attorney]

Ports and remasters make sense within a lot of contexts. Anything that brings older games into relevance again is a plus in my book, especially if those old games are good in the first place. Having 3 different versions of Skyrim for sale on 1 storefront is insane, though

[Good Night Owl]

If it keeps selling, there's absolutely zero reason to make a new one.

People like to make fun of others who boycott games, but they never consider that that's actually how you get what you want as a consumer. It does work, it just requires everyone to be on the same page, and unfortunately that rarely happens.

[🍋 Lemonfed 🍋]

Nothing wrong with re releasing games in my opinion, as long it's not broken things like Grand theft auto trilogy remaster.

[Tiberius]

Lemonfed eredeti hozzászólása:

Nothing wrong with re releasing games in my opinion, as long it's not broken things like Grand theft auto trilogy remaster.

I share the same opinion. There are plenty of ps games that need a remaster/remake

[Ramonkey]

Better to stick to a known and proven formula than to come up with something new that might flop

[lightwo]

The recycling of Skyrim was a pretty stupid and greedy move knowing they could have released 64-bit binaries and made no other difference, for free. It wasn't released so much later than the original, instead separating the modding efforts to two games, essentially.

Other games, depends. Crysis 1 ran on the old engine which utilised only 1 thread for most things, Remastered fixed that by porting an inferior version to the new engine... resulting in a bad port.

GTA Trilogy remaster still stinks far and wide, can you imagine puppeteering the original game version and offload only the rendering and controls to the new engine? Not only is that such a dirty and ridiculous workaround, but the rest of the game was even worse. Rockstar/T2 also threatened the modding community to maximise profits, boldest move ever.

(I intended to include positive examples, but it appears I can't think of any...)

It is a mixed bag and only depends on the developer to do right.

[SMIFFY]

I don't mind them remaking really old and dated looking games provided they don't ruin the gameplay, but I don't see the point of remastering games that are only a few years old and still look good.

[Morkonan]

Xero_Daxter eredeti hozzászólása:

People may have mix feelings about this but why can’t developers make new games and not recycle old ones?
...

Because "the old way" still sells, that's why.

Is a studio going to make yet another installment on their hit series AssCreed'Rim or are they going to gamble on having to dump half their budget into Hype in order to sell "Something Fresh: The "It May Not Succeed" Game?"

Everyone wants to be successful, too, so they tend to copy successful things. It's really hard to innovate one's way to being crazy-successful, right?

And, what about those strange games that are so widely acclaimed as being innovative and wonderful? Did "Cuphead" or "Ori and the Blind Forest" become wildly successful? Well, they were both successful, right? They did well.

But, do you have them in your Steam Library or is it full of Skyrim and Call of Duty clones? :)

On Remasters: I didn't address that because I am not sure that's what the OP really meant. On the off-chance it is, then the reason Bethesda remasters Skrym so much is because they want new sales and they know people will buy it... That's because Todd is really, really, ticked off that so very many players keep playing that very old game, yet they don't keep giving Bethesda money for the privilege of playing a product they already bought. It's not fair that Todd does not get paid every time a player presses the "Play" button on their favorite, old, game, is it? 'Cause... "muh modz." You should send Todd a check, right away, because his happiness is what's really important, right?

[ulia]

Vocal consumers will always make a fuss about re-releases, or even unique releases they don't personally care for, and then heavily scrutinize the developer/publisher for it, usually not realizing that there is a market for it. For every complainer in the vocal minority, there's a dozen average consumers who will purchase and enjoy the product.

Quite commonly remastering a game wouldn't even consume equivalent resources to development of unique titles. All the pre-retopology and pre-compression art assets should be available and are handed over to the optimization and content delivery teams who may as well not be preoccupied with other workloads.

While a remastered version of something is probably not what I would purchase for myself, I won't hold a grudge towards a publisher for providing a more polished version of an older game that new customers who haven't played the old version can enjoy in much higher fidelity.

[ulia]

ulia eredeti hozzászólása:

Quite commonly remastering a game wouldn't even consume equivalent resources to development of unique titles. All the pre-retopology and pre-compression art assets should be available and are handed over to the optimization and content delivery teams who may as well not be preoccupied with other workloads.

I will elaborate on this because I feel a common misconception is that 3D art assets are created and delivered as they appear in game, when that is rarely the case at all in a modern workflow.

In high definition game development, 3D art assets are usually created in a much higher resolution (vertex/polygon count) than what is supplied with the game build. Sometimes we work with sculpts straight from zbrush with polygons in the millions, which despite polygons being way less scary than they have been in the past, is naturally not ideal if we need to cram in several of these models in to one viewport.

The high res 3D assets go through a retopology optimization step where we either re-create the model, or deconstruct sections of it that can be reduced while still representing the general geometry. Much of the planar detail (panel gaps, bumps, knurling, decals e.t.c) can be removed entirely and baked back in with textures, namely normal/height/displacement maps and ambient occlusion that can create the illusion of 3D depth on a 2D plane.

With modern tools like Substance, Quixel and all sorts of proprietary dev tools for LOD generation and compression we can very easily export higher res game-ready assets by just adjusting some parameters and hitting the export button. "Remastering" a somewhat modern title in this proactive and non-destructive development pipeline can be relatively easy and doesn't need to allocate more than a few developers.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Everyone’s gotta eat.

[проебали]

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