The video game market is drowning in remakes – it is naive to believe that because of the love of developers for the audience

Gamers may have noticed that recently major video game publishers have increasingly begun to release remakes and remasters of their iconic video games (a remaster is a project to improve an existing video game with new textures, lighting and more, and a remake is a game created from scratch on a new engine) . True, this is due, of course, not to the crazy love for the audience of fans and the desire to please players from all over the world, but to more banal corporate things. Let’s take a look at some of the inner workings of video game developers to understand why releasing old games with a new sauce is much more economically profitable than creating something new and incredible. Although, of course, the answer to this question lies on the surface.

Risk minimization at its finest

You need to understand that when a publisher allocates some funding for the development of a particular game, then this is, in its own way, a common form of investing in a risky startup. And startups, which is quite natural, can fail – and they do it with enviable constancy. For example, in the United States, investment companies select ten out of a thousand proposals, and only one out of ten makes a profit, while the rest do not. With games, the situation is similar, because every time the publisher allocates money for a new video game, the publisher risks being left with a hole in his pocket, since no one can guarantee that a fresh AAA or AA game will be successful and make a profit.

Accordingly, in order to reduce the risk of failure and increase popularity among the audience, the publisher uses focus groups at every stage of the development of a video game. We created the concept of the virtual world – showed it to the focus group and collected feedback, after which we made adjustments. They came up with a setting – the same thing. We developed the first prototype – showed it to the focus group and made changes. This is all, of course, a very expensive pleasure, but not so much because of the cost of the services of the employees of these same focus groups, but because of the time spent on all these processes of collecting feedback.

After all, instead of giving the development team a clear task that specialists will work on day by day, the publisher is forced to constantly interrupt the process and perform analysis, demanding changes. And the longer the game is developed, the more expensive it is – programmers, designers and screenwriters are paid monthly, like everyone else. It turns out that the publisher has two options – to take a chance and send a project that seems good to production without using focus groups and analytics, or to spend a lot of money and have a slightly lower chance of failure. More precisely, there is a third way – why take risks or pay fabulous money if you already have a successful game ten or twenty years ago?

The publisher does not have to spend money on focus groups in the case of launching a remake, and the risks are already minimal, because if the game was successful at the beginning of the century, then it will be successful now. As a result, development time is greatly reduced, since the team can be given a specific task – to redo this, this and that. There is no need to waste time on working out the concept of the virtual world, mechanics, characters, storyline and other points, and if you do not need to spend time, then money is also spent less. At the same time, the chance of failure is minimal, unless you are Rockstar, which outsourced the production of a remake to the Indians.

Screenplay, voice acting and staging

While it may seem that today’s major projects have no writers at all, especially when it comes to the next Ubisoft game, in fact, this is an impressive expense item for any studio. Quite often, to write the plot, a contract is signed with some well-known writer or an experienced screenwriter, plus the script is always written in a team – there are scriptwriters for dialogues, social interaction, individual people are engaged in lore, character development, and so on. All this is also expensive, especially when it comes to fantasy, where the work is usually the sea.

In addition, when the script is written and the setting is clear as daylight, the text needs to be voiced, and the characters need to be filmed. Probably, avid gamers have noticed that the main characters of AAA projects are no longer drawn in a 3D editor, but filmed with a special face scanning technology, because it turns out more realistic and richer. Yes, and the cost of voice acting is sometimes simply insane, especially if the game is released in many regions at once and they want to localize the speech of the characters into several languages. For example, in Russia, professional announcers charge $50 for one sheet of A4 in 14th font. But this is Russian-language voice acting in Russia – imagine the prices in the USA with the participation of famous people in Hollywood.

But these are all flowers. Berries for developers begin at the moment when you need to make cut scenes that cost fabulous money. Do you think why many studios make cut scenes in the game engine, and do not draw them separately? It’s just cheaper that way. High-quality framing, editing, 3D modeling, special effects and computer graphics are all extremely expensive. And here we come again to the advantages of a remake – the publisher does not need to hire screenwriters and pay a team of five to ten writers for the story, because it has already been paid for. Developers don’t need to pay to voice characters because they’re already voiced – they just need to improve the quality if the content is old.

In certain cases, you can save even on cut scenes – why draw everything anew if there are tools that allow you to simply increase the resolution of existing content. And even if you redraw it again, it’s still easier than inventing everything from scratch. So it turns out that in this regard, the publisher and developer also save money, since they already have the lion’s share of the content they need. It is enough to refine it in a modern way, reducing the cost of developing a supposedly new project to the limit.

Ads you don’t need to invest in

Completes the list of bonuses of any more or less high-quality remaster is the ability to catastrophically reduce advertising costs. Yes, video games are actually advertised, it’s just that they do it most often in the USA – there banners with the new Call of Duty are put up everywhere. And, accordingly, the costs of a marketing campaign are also impressive – you need to show trailers on television, push a couple of posters into streaming services, put up various signs in specialized video game stores, order advertising from bloggers. For example, some video game reviews from overseas content creators can cost a fortune.

All this is necessary for one banal goal – to notify the gamer that the game is being released. Otherwise, he simply won’t buy it, because he won’t know about its existence – not everyone reads our site and knows that another shooter or RPG is coming out on PC and consoles. But if we are talking about a remaster, then you can save a ton of money – just launch a couple of news and press releases that the cult game from twenty years ago is coming out. Fans who played this game a long time ago will be delighted and will immediately add it to their wishlist even without banners in the city center.

Money, money and more money

Video games are a huge lucrative market that has long since become a regular business. Publishers invest money in new releases, earn profits, work to mitigate risks, and in fact it is no different from investing in real estate, securities or stocks. Moreover, the cost of AAA projects has skyrocketed – the budget of Red Dead Redemption 2 amounted to $ 256 million, excluding an advertising campaign. Naturally, in case of failure, the publisher will simply go bankrupt, so no one wants to take risks, and a remaster is the case when the risks are close to zero.

Accordingly, all major studios sometimes or very often (hello, Capcom) release remasters – this is a win-win option to make money on a ready-made foundation. We take a finished project, transfer it to a fresh engine, improve the graphics with lighting and that’s it, you can safely sell for 60-70 dollars what they will definitely buy. For gamers, of course, this is terrible – instead of something new, bright experiments and unusual mechanics, the audience will receive a wagon and a small cart of “remakes” of cult video games. But nothing can be done about it – only indie developers can save the situation, but they are not of the caliber to radically change the rules of the market.