【Game-Time News】
Recently, the gaming community seems to be extremely active.
In February of this year, “Night Ward”, which many Chinese players called “the first work of enlightenment” (yes, Hirasaka Ryuji’s famous line came from here), was remade by RG REMAKE, a new brand under DMM GAMES. It is officially released (named “25th Anniversary Remake”), and the original painting is by the well-known dark Galgame artist Ueda Miguel, who can evoke everyone’s muscle memory.
On March 23, the classic butter “Shameless Moon” released in 2000 was announced to be remade after 24 years. The name of the remake was also decided: “Shameless Moon: The Night of the Twins”.
In fact, if you look at the visual novel/text AVG game remake schedule in the past few years, you will find that there are many works with this plan.
In February 2022, the 1990s “Taishan Beidou-level” gentleman’s masterpiece “Same Level” debuted as a remake for the first time. It received nearly 1,500 comments on the Steam platform alone; two years later, the remake developer FANZA The brand FG REMAK also announced that its sequel “Group 2 Remake” will also be released in June this year (it is worth mentioning that ELF, the creator of the “Group” series, happens to be working with Mink, the developer of “Night Worker”). The association originates from the same source).
Almost at the same time, TYPE-MOON also started the remake work of classic old games such as “Magus Night” and “Tsukihime”; among them, the high-definition remake of “Magus Night” has been launched on NS, PS, PC and other platforms. The production has gained a lot of praise, and the work has received “rave reviews” on the Steam platform (more than 2,100 reviews).
Are the manufacturers that are keen on remaking classic games from the 90s and 00s just Japanese companies that make butter and visual novels? No. Looking at the actions of overseas travel companies in recent years, there are only a lot of companies that are willing to “put old wine in new bottles”.
SE even split the RPG masterpiece “Final Fantasy 7” of the 1990s into a trilogy of remakes with a huge project and a development cycle of more than ten years. It also incorporated an open world framework and wrapped it in more exquisite art packaging. After sorting out a fuller main and branch plot and adding various exquisite mini-games, the remake was made large and full.
In addition, the remakes of “The Last of Us” and “Persona 3” released in the past two years have achieved good results, and classic horror game IPs such as “Silent Hill 2” and “Dead Space” have also been A remake is scheduled. According to incomplete statistics from foreign media, there will be nearly 30 remakes of medium-sized and above games that have been released or will be released in 2024.
Not to mention, in the early years, classic RTS games such as “Red Alert”, “Fortress” and “Age of Empires” were remade early and became popular on Steam.
“Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition” performed quite well
Not only overseas companies, but also domestic teams seem to be making no concessions. From “Legend of Sword and Fairy IV” to “The Legend of Zhao Yun” to “Seven Nights: Redemption”, which dug out horror games from the Nokia Symbian era, many manufacturers have aimed at remaking classic old games and giving it a try.
If we look at it from the perspective of the entire entertainment industry, we will also notice that not only the game industry is like this, animation, movies, and TV series seem to be remaking classic IPs.
The reasons why many manufacturers choose to remake and renovate are actually very easy to understand: today, when development costs are increasingly high, research and development cycles are getting longer, and the entertainment consumer market is full of uncertainties, it is undoubtedly safer to rely on IP to attract users. a practice. The list of traditional platform games in the UK game market in 2023 is enough to prove this. The list shows that the best-selling products in this market last year were without exception from well-known IPs such as “Call of Duty”, “FIFA”, “Marvel’s Spider-Man” and “Diablo”.
In addition, the remake of classic IP does not require large-scale rewriting of the script, and the creation cost is greatly reduced; secondly, fans are willing to pay for the sentiment, and the IP can be reactivated and continued. Of course, manufacturers are more inclined to do this business with low investment and high return rate. Something higher.
Not long ago, an executive from a major domestic company bluntly stated in an interview with foreign media: Making new games based on popular IP is one of the current ways to avoid risks, because in this way, the possibility of failure will be reduced to almost A negligible level.
It should be noted that IP remakes seem to be very timely. Data from a white paper shows that in terms of remakes of games, remakes of games originally released 11 to 15 years ago perform best, followed by games released 16 to 20 years ago. Judging from the timeline, from around 2005 to 2010, it coincided with the stage when 2D games of the PS3 generation had reached maturity and 3D games were beginning to show their prominence. During this period, a large number of high-quality and highly popular IPs were also born. From this point of view, as 3D imaging technology has made great progress today, it is more reasonable to renovate the classic IP from 15 to 20 years ago.
It is foreseeable that as the global game industry enters a phased contraction, developing sequels and remaking old IP products will still be one of the most stable and lowest-limit development paths for manufacturers.
