Your point is that we’ve had more and more remakes of newer-ish games.
That's part of it, but the point is really that we seem to be getting more and more remakes from big publishers, not that they're remaking recent games (although that's part of the issue). It seems like the publishers that have a large collection of classics, all want to go back and squeeze money from those classics all at the same time, and that speaks to a desire to get guaranteed sales, and that desire to get guaranteed sales means less risk-taking, less greenlighting new ideas, fewer games like Hi-Fi rush that are original and creative.
Gears of War, Halo, and The Witcher. Halo before Bungie stopped making the games was a crazy time to be playing games. FPS became huge or at least well known because of Halo. The story was never rebooted. It was asking to be remade just by being such a well known game. Gears of War was excellent and the newest entries (4 and 5) had to go off of the story they’ve already told. The original Gears of War and its sequel were what got fans to get tattoos on their chest. I think when we look at TLoU we think of that was fine as is, but the new additions in these remakes makes it worth revisiting. There’s no reason to just forget about a game you got that tattoo of because a new console gen made it look outdated.
It's not about forgetting old games, it's about the fact that companies use the nostalgia we have and might just decide to keep remaking games over risking AAA budgets on new games. I liked Halo CE, but when I played them originally (or when you played whichever of your favourite games of the past) I wasn't thinking "man, this game is so good, It'll be so crazy when it's remade in the future", I was thinking "man, this game is so good, Imagine how great the games these guys will make in the future will be". And the fact that people are still holding the games from decades ago up as the standards speaks negatively of the industry. But that isn't really the point, the point is that a growing tendency towards remakes means that publishers are getting significantly more risk-averse. I say publishers as I don't think the devs want to be remaking all their old games instead of working on news ideas.
The very first Witcher game was rough around the edges. The combat was more like Neverwinter Nights. The graphics were decent at the time. The Enhanced version made things look better, but it wasn’t like Witcher 3. I think a lot of people want to relive the stories and sometimes you forget that stuff.
Same point as my first paragraph, remakes of my favourite games are great but not at the cost of developers making new games. And the more they look towards remakes, the greater the chance they just want to make something that will instantly sell, so less risk taking on new games.
I think we are seeing a remake revival from each studio because they have staple entries for those franchises. The fans love it, so they demand more. I really didn’t like Silent Hill Downpour and Homecoming was okay. I played those games and instantly wanted to replay the classic games. Konami seems to have a big basket of Silent Hill games and the cherry on top could be the SH2 remake or the actual F main game. Either way, I still remember the plot of SH because new stuff never catches my interest or my internal thought process like those few games did. Kojima’s legacy rests at Konami. MGS remake is about the only thing they could do to allow their fans to relive why MGS is so great to begin with.
The remake revival is from publishers trying to get more money from us, not from developers who really want to be making the same games they made decades ago. Most of the time, It isn't the same devs working on remakes and so they get to enjoy games they worked on with new presentations. But ask them if they would leave whatever new project they're working on to remake their old game? I don't think many of them would accept.
I think it’s a good thing we have remakes.
Yes, playing older games with better controls and updates presentation is always good ...
Sure, new stuff is great. I loved RE7 and Village. I like new stories and plots. I also don’t have better experiences than Chrono Trigger, Parasite Eve, Vagrant Story, and many more. There isn’t an equal even with all these RTX/4K enabled graphics.
... this is where the negative look for the industry comes in. We won't get new games that surpass the older ones if publishers are too scared to make new games and can survive off the guaranteed sales of remaking a classic. If it was really about remaking new games so they would be better, we would also get remakes of the games that didn't sell well, but we aren't because it's about guaranteed sales.
The same people who worked on those classic games go on to make FFXVI for example, but that’s crossing genres at this point. So yeah, a remake does sound good when you make such a massive change.
One or two remakes a year from the big publishers, sure, but a lot of remakes coming out around the same time is not a positive outlook for the industry as a whole.
