Why Are There So Many Video Game Remakes?

What’s the difference between a remake and a remaster?

Put simply, a remasterThe same game with sharper visuals, higher resolution and better performance. The design and logic stay the same. updates how the same game looks and runs, while a remakeA game rebuilt from the ground up around the original’s story and structure, usually with a new camera, combat and pacing. is rebuilt from scratch around the original’s story. In practice, though, there are a few more stops between and beyond those two, and the lines are blurry enough that players argue about the labels under every trailer.

• Port. The same game on a new platform, with almost nothing changed.
• Remaster. Higher resolution, better performance and sharper textures, while the design stays the same, as with The Last of Us Remastered in 2014.
• Hybrid. New visuals laid over the original code, the way Bluepoint Games rebuilt Shadow of the Colossus in 2018.
• Remake. A ground-up rebuild: Resident Evil 2 (2019) and Silent Hill 2 (2024) kept the story but changed the camera, combat and pacing so much that they play like new games.
• Reimagining or spin-off. The name and spirit survive, but the game is different: Carmageddon: Rogue Shift (2026) turns a 1997 car-combat classic into a roguelite.

The neatest illustration of the whole spectrum arrived this summer. Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns launched on August 13, 2026, exactly forty years after Cinemaware’s Amiga original, and it ships three versions of the game in one box. Keep this picture in mind, because we’ll come back to it.

Why are there so many video game remakes and remasters?

Because they sell, and publishers can now measure exactly how well. Ampere Analysis tracked 42 remakes and remasters released between January 2024 and September 2025 on Xbox, PlayStation and Steam, and together they drew 72.4 million players and more than $1.4 billion in spending, with players spending about 2.2 times more per remake than per remaster.

And the queue isn’t getting any shorter. In 2026, Nintendo released a Star Fox 64 remake and is preparing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Microsoft rebuilt the original Halo campaign as Halo: Campaign Evolved, and Capcom has a Resident Evil Code: Veronica remake lined up for 2027.

The second reason is money of a less glamorous kind. According to leaked Insomniac Games documents, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 cost roughly three times as much as the first game, while the remaster of the first game cost a fraction of that, and it isn’t hard to guess which of the two numbers the finance department likes better.

Are video game remakes just a cash grab?

They’re more of an insurance policy than a guarantee. A good remake keeps selling for years: Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 remake came out in 2019, yet in a single quarter of 2026 it sold another 1.4 million copies, while KONAMI’s Silent Hill 2 remake reached 5 million, even though the entire series had sold just over 9 million by 2017. In other words, a good remake doesn’t sell once; it turns into a catalog title that pays off for years, much like a well-run live game keeps bringing players back (we looked at that side of the business in From High-Score Tables to Battle Passes).

But there are no guarantees. If you put the biggest remakes of recent years side by side, the picture turns out to be surprisingly mixed:

The industry also has an argument that isn’t about money. In a July 2026 interview with Famitsu, Shigeru Miyamoto admitted that some people feel there are too many remakes, but pointed out that younger players simply have no way to reach games from a decade ago, and that bringing old works back opens the way for new ones. Still, money explains why remakes get made far better than it explains why we keep buying them, sometimes instead of games that are already sitting on our shelves.

Why do old games feel better than new ones?

Because nostalgia, despite its reputation, isn’t really about the past being better; it’s about what remembering does for us right now. In a classic study by Wildschut and colleagues (2006), nostalgia turned out to be triggered most often by loneliness, and the hero of nostalgic memories is almost always the person remembering, surrounded by people close to them, which is exactly why nostalgia strengthens our sense of connection to others and lifts our mood. Translated into gaming, the memory is almost never about the frame rate. It’s about the couch, the friend holding the second controller, and the summer that disappeared into a single save file (while your parents were sure you were studying for exams).

Age matters too. Memory researchers call it the reminiscence bumpThe tendency to remember a disproportionate share of events from roughly ages 10 to 30, peaking in the early teens.: in one study of 470 adults, the music that played when people were around 14 triggered the most autobiographical memories, and it seems games work the same way. Whatever fills your life at 14 gets filed under “who I am.”

Now look at when remakes tend to arrive. Across nine well-known remakes released between 2018 and 2026, the median gap between the original and the remake is 21 years, and six of the nine land 15 to 25 years after the original:

Someone who was 14 when Resident Evil 2 came out in 1998 turned 35 the year the remake launched, which makes them old enough to have their own money (and a lot less free time), but still young enough to care about that game very much. The same study also found a “cascading” effect, where young adults rated the music of their parents’ teenage years unusually highly. That’s a useful clue for anyone who has watched a 20-year-old fall for a PlayStation 2 game they never owned. The internet even has a word for longing for a time you never lived through, anemoiaA term coined by writer John Koenig for nostalgia for a time or place you never experienced. Science has barely tested it., although a more solid explanation comes from philosopher Felipe De Brigard, who argues that memory reconstructs events rather than recording them, so nostalgia can be built from imagination just as easily as from experience.

Why doesn’t a remake feel the same as the original?

Because we don’t just remember the game. We remember the person we were back then, the screen we played on, and that pleasant ignorance of what was waiting around the next corner, and while a remake can rebuild the first of these, the rest stays in the past. When Shadow of the Colossus was remade in 2018, a GamesBeat reviewer admitted that the game didn’t look worse than he remembered; it looked better, and along with that the dreamlike haze of the PlayStation 2 original had quietly disappeared.

As we wrote in our piece on post-game depression, there is no second first playthrough. A remake seems to promise one, but you walk in already knowing who betrays whom and which door hides the monster (and, let’s be honest, where that one health pack is).

What do “lost futures” have to do with remakes?

It seems that in old games we’re looking for more than our younger selves. In the late ’90s and the 2000s, every new console generation looked as if games would become something unimaginable in another five years, and the future itself felt like a promise that was about to come true. Cultural critics call the disappearance of that feeling lost futuresAn idea from critics Franco Berardi and Mark Fisher: the sense that the future no longer feels like a space of real change, so culture keeps recycling the past., and while this is our interpretation rather than a measured fact, going back to an old game may in large part be a way of going back to that open horizon.

Francis Fukuyama came close to this idea without meaning to. In his 1989 essay “The End of History?”, he warned of “centuries of boredom” and a world left with only “the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.” He wasn’t talking about games, of course (in 1989 he clearly had more pressing matters than Prince of Persia), but it’s hard to read those lines while scrolling through this year’s remake announcements and not picture a museum gift shop. Here’s how the idea developed from there:

You can see a lost future most clearly in Frutiger Aero, the glossy style of roughly 2005 to 2013 with its bubbles, glassy buttons and macro shots of wet grass, which everyone remembers from Windows Vista and the menus of the Wii era and which is now having a genuine revival. What makes it interesting is that it was already a picture of the future, so missing it means missing not how things actually were, but how the future used to be advertised to us.

Do remakes help preserve old games?

Yes and no. According to the Video Game History Foundation, only 13% of classic games released in the U.S. before 2010 can still be bought officially, so a remake is often the only legal way to play a classic at all.

Archivists, however, don’t count a remake as preservation: they listed the original 2005 Yakuza as unavailable even though the full remake Yakuza Kiwami came out in 2016, because to them a remake is a new work rather than a copy. Sometimes it’s players themselves who pay to bring a classic back. When Nightdive Studios set out to remake 1994’s System Shock, 21,625 backers on Kickstarter pledged $1.35 million, and after several restarts the game finally shipped in 2023.

The past hasn’t crowded out the new, either. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a brand-new IP from a team of around thirty people, sold 3.3 million copies in 33 days, even though it launched just two days after Oblivion Remastered.

What happens to voices and text in a remake?

For players, the old voice often is the character, so every language version of a remake has to decide what to keep from the past. Atlus gave Persona 3 Reload an entirely new English cast, while most of the Japanese actors returned, so the same game became two very different homecomings for two audiences. And some versions of the original Carmageddon swapped pedestrians for zombies or robots to get past regional censorship, which means players in different countries literally remember different games. Carmageddon: Rogue Shift, which the Allcorrect team localized into 11 languages, is built around zombie hordes from the start.

That’s why a remake for an international audience is also a re-localization, with questions the original never had to answer:

• Which names, terms and lines do fans still quote, and should they stay even if the old translation was imperfect?
• Should the game be re-voiced in every language, only in some, or not at all?
• Which regional changes from the original release should come back, and which are better left in the past?
• How do new menus, tutorials and hints fit next to a script written for very different screens?

There’s no universal right answer, but the people making these calls need to know which version of the game each audience actually remembers. It’s the same work it takes to make an ending land with equal force in every language, something we thought about a lot while working on Atomic Heart.

So, are video game remakes ruining gaming or saving it?

Probably neither, at least not in a pure form. Remakes are a response to very real pressure, from $300 million budgets to cautious publishers, and to a very real problem, since most of gaming’s history would otherwise be out of reach. But they also say something about the time we live in: when the future looks less and less like a promise, the past starts to feel like the place where promises were kept.