Peter Moore, The Chief Operating Officer of EA, spoke out saying that EA had little interest in re-releasing the company’s older titles on newer platforms. In fact, he went as far to say that a company that releases remakes and remasters is “pushing stuff out because you’ve run out of ideas”. Companies have bringing out souped-up versions of old classics to the newest and shiniest machines since the inception of the industry, so why now are people causing a stink?
One of the reasons remasters are becoming increasingly common is that, in a world of development costs that number in the hundreds of millions, re-releasing a pre-existing game is a good, cheap way to have something quickly available for release with minimal investment and in a short time. Many have complained that teams working on remasters could be better utilised by working on a new game rather than retooling an old one. This argument has merit on the surface, but many remasters are developed by a much smaller team whilst the main team works on a something new, or the project is sometimes outsourced to another developer. For example, the remasters of Naughty Dog’s PS3 games; The Last of Us: Remastered was developed by a much smaller team and the job of remastering the Uncharted games was handed to Sony studio Bluepoint Games.
Remastering games also gives new gamers an avenue to play some beloved classics, some of which are now incredibly difficult to track down and expensive. The Team Ico games (ICO and Shadow of the Colossus) were originally released on the Playstation 2 in 2001 and 2005 respectively. The two of them are critical darlings and are often held up as some of the finest examples of video games as an art form; it’s not uncommon to see the two of them place highly in your typical best video games of all time lists. As a result of this fame (and very low print runs) both games are near impossible to find. The HD collection contains both games for a fraction of the price of a copy of one of the two, and it fixes the muddy graphics and shuttering frame rate, making them by far and away the best method of experiencing these games.