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Have you noticed how many remastered video games have been released lately?
Remastering music and film for newer formats has been standard practice in those industries for some time, and the games industry now has enough history behind it to mine older titles and bring them to either nostalgic audiences or players who are experiencing a classic IP afresh.
Given a market in which so many publishers are highly risk averse and costs are typically astronomical, it's easy to see why the relatively low costs of remastering are so appealing. With consumers hungry for classic content, especially during this nostalgia wave we're witnessing, it makes perfect sense for publishers to capitalize.
Looking at the UK charts, remasters of Mario Kart, Wipeout, Crash Bandicoot and Final Fantasy XII have all topped the charts in the last two months. And in the US, NPD told us that remastered/ported games have accounted for 11% of total dollar spending life-to-date for physical game sales on PS4 and Xbox One. Nearly 80 remastered/ported games have been released for PS4 or Xbox One (or both) since November 2013, representing about 15% of all titles released at retail for those consoles.
Recently, during Activision Blizzard's earnings call, Activision Publishing boss Eric Hirshberg gushed over the success of Crash Bandicoot.
"We knew that there was a passionate audience out there for Crash.... but we had no idea - it's hard to tell whether that's a vocal minority or whether that's a real mass audience until you put something out there. And Crash has surpassed all of our expectations by a pretty wide margin," he said.
"And a couple of stats that underscore that point where it was the number one selling console game in June based on units, even though it was only available for two days during that month. And Sony reported this morning... that Crash is the most downloaded game on the PlayStation Store in July."
Activision has enjoyed the fruits of remastering before with Modern Warfare Remastered, but you can bet it will look at more easy wins in this category moving forward. In fact, Activision's counterpart, Blizzard, is planning on releasing a remastered StarCraft in the third fiscal quarter.
"This is a strategy that clearly has our attention... I think you can be confident that there will be more activity like this in the future with more great IP," Hirshberg added.
As NPD analyst Mat Piscatella noted, publishers are able to offset some of the inherent risk in AAA development by pursuing the remastering trend.
"On average, remasters/ports sell less than games that are new to the platform, unsurprisingly," he said. "However, given the dramatically lower development costs when compared to new game development, the ability to outsource porting to speciality houses which frees up internal development resources to create new games, and the ability to mitigate risk since a clear demand pattern exists to determine which games should be remastered, the benefits of the practice are readily apparent to publishers."
Publishers we queried wouldn't state exact costs, but it's clearly something that can vary on a case-by-case basis. A much older title would likely need new artwork, whereas something closer to the current generation may only need a touch up with textures or polygons.
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