AAA Games & Remakes (Inspired by Halo:CE remake)
So I’ve been following the reaction to the recent (is a month recent??) release of Halo: CE, and when it comes to remakes I do enjoy staying informed to see if either the remake is well received (and possibly worth playing) or it’s a shit show so I can grab my popcorn to watch the train crash.
Based on this chart and overall 61% positive review on steam, it feels safe to conclude that the game is either a failure or at best a middling “meh”. People can only speculate how much this game cost to make (thus having better estimates) but then the metrics get weird regardless due to being on the game pass.
Game Pass
I’ve never looked into the financials of the game pass but it seems to offer a lot of value to those using it. Just like a stream subscription, it also allows users to “jump in” for a month and immediately cancel but get what they want out of it (so a certain game or watch a certain series).
I would venture that single player games on gamepass get their sales cannibalized since you can easily get your fill of almost (all?) single-player games within a month and definitely within the game pass contract (6-18 months+ but seems to be normally 1 year). I’m sure Microsoft makes it worth it, but is it worth it for themselves?
Although my initial research left me surprised that Xbox division has “recently” (July. Yeah screw it, I’m old enough to say anything within 3 months counts as recent - okay??) cut 3200 jobs. I’ve seen estimates of ~20% of Xbox being cut, but then I’ve also seen the new CEO Asha Sharma say she was cutting 20% by the end of 2027 (implying more than 3200 jobs will be lost and that Xbox head count was over ~16,000 employees).
The more interesting bit was Xbox projecting 77 million GamePass holders by the end of 2026 while they only have ~30 million. Now it’s hard to say if 30 million should be seen as a failure for a company the size of Microsoft for their Xbox division, but I’m sure internals (and investors?) see it as such.
I mean when you’re trying to double your record subscription numbers (~34 million) but instead lose over 10%, that’s just an abject loss for big corporations (This isn’t some middle school “Shoot for the moon because if you miss you’ll land among the stars” BS). Outside of Nintendo/Game Freak (who seem infamous for keeping production costs low for their Pokemon games), Corps will spend more of their budget trying to obtain their lofty goals of even more sales.
Remakes and Remasters
Remaster game plans are very straight forward, although not always easy (loss source code/assets, do you fix or keep in bugs and how hard are these bugs to fix?). Keep the original game experience in tact and “improve” everything around it. Asset/audio quality, better frame rates, quality of life features (such as 4x combat speed or turning off overworld encounters).
Remakes are made from the ground up and offer up a lot of liberty to change almost anything. For games without voice acting, even just the addition of voice actors alone can change how dialogue or story events can be interpreted. You can change a lot with sentences just with emphasis or silence/delayed responses.
I have no love for games that try to cater to the general “modern audience”. Changing too much from the story, especially for modern sensibilities reasons, informs me this is a different game. The further you stray from the source material the more I view this as a possible cash grab or springboarding some bad idea by using an IP with a built-in audience.
It can be done well, but its rare. I’ve heard that 10 Cloverfield Lane’s original script had nothing to do with Cloverfield but higher ups weren’t too confident with it, so they used the Cloverfield IP (which might have stagnated?) to help prop it up and become less risky.
Risk Adverse
What I didn’t realize until recently was AAA games got their namesake from investment naming. Triple A offered less yield (on average) for investment but it was the highest “guarantee” you could find in a financial market (outside of like Gov’t backed Bonds/CD but this isn’t a financial lesson).
But I find it quite funny with how many AAA games tend to miss the mark. Just how many live-service games are out their vying for attention; trying to reach the financial highs of Fornite. With anything short of windfalls of generation cash deemed as a failure. Yet failures can become a deep, dark pit of burning almost endless cash (Concord, Highguard, ect).
So many of these Execs do what they can to make their multi-hundred million dollar budgets less risky. They use IP’s for exisiting audiences or, far more relevant to this blog, remake a game in a series. “From the creators of…”, “From the hit studio…” even though there’s likely only a handful or people, if that, working on the current remake who worked on the original. And then you find out it was actually just the receptionist and janitor who stuck around this long from the og team.
Flying Out
Of course the next step to help “guarantee” success for your AAA game is to bring out the external forces. Journos, shills, influencers and fan boys. Now the fan boys will come out full force to defend their billion dollar corpos almost no matter what.
The journos practically do it for free since you offer them access media. They can’t function practically without early access to meet deadlines and publish articles when they are most relevant (day of release).
Next we have the advertisement section(which the shills fall under). So all the standard adverts (billboards, TV/YT adds, idk flyers, ect) make sense and will vary based on product and target audience. But then we have content creators who get paid to push your game. These have a huge variance due to what the deal behind the scenes may be. Creators may have a script or very specific things they must do/show, all the way to “just play my game for 2 hours”.
I don’t fault creators for trying to make some money, and these deals can be very lucrative I understand. But I’m sure it must be obvious to most people that I can’t trust their reaction to how the game is. I’m sure most of these deals most prohibit/limit criticism of the game, but even if they don’t, creators still have an incentive to limit criticism (or criticize things that don’t matter to “seem fair”) so other games are more likely to purchase their service. Shill is a strong word for creators just playing games with minimum forced obligations to praise a game, regardless of quality, but I can’t take their word/enjoyment at face value.
(Yes even if they utter “I know I’m being paid to play this game, but I’m having a great time!!!” I still don’t trust them).
Lastly, I’m unsure if this falls under the advertisement budget, but instead of paying influences directly you offer things instead.
- Early game access
- Free copy of the game
- Free merch
- Pay for their flight to your studio with paid lodging and meals
What does this mean? Well you can’t guarantee the influencer will say anything good about your product since they don’t have a contract to do so, but these influencers have great reasons to view your game favorably.
Because of the length of this post, and god bless anyone making it this far, I will keep the incentives short. How they react to these incentives vary greatly; softening opinions to full-blown become your greatest defender.
They now know people behind this game, not just an ambiguous faceless corp.
They might feel really special to be giving free things, esp. when flown out.
Possibly making content about their merch/trip.
Not “playing ball” could lead to less/no more free things.
Which also means possibly other companies not offering them free things as well.
Along with free things we can include possible sponsorship.
So if you want to get really cynical/skeptical. It’s entirely possibly for a company to pay an influencers double their rate to review a product knowing the following product they will give a good review regardless but now people think its organic and not paid.
John Wolfe
I’m willing to admit I could have some aspect of the story here wrong, but I also don’t feverishly follow all creators. Now I do like John Wolfe and have been following him for a long time now (HarshlyCritical - think critically), and I actually enjoy his none game endeavors.
I’m pretty sure he has criticized games from the creator “Supermassive Games” previously, “House of Ashes” and I think “The Casting of Frank Stone”, but my GF and I were so surprised how little he seemed to criticize the newest game of “Directive 8020”.
Now of course its not like everyone disliked this game, but my GF and I along with the 2 other creators we watched (Insym and ItsWill) this game just felt like a stinker.
I didn’t care for a single character.
The stealth sections looked so annoying and all I could think was how annoying it would be to do additional playthroughs (normal for story based games to experience different endings).
The story just didn’t make any sense and the ending(s) didn’t answer some basic questions we had (I wont elaborate for spoilers and its been a while since I thought about this PoS game).
Some of the ‘shocking’ revelations just fall flat or lessened tensions.
Regardless, I don’t think its a coincidence that John Wolfe was not only paid for the first part of his Lets Play series, he was also flown out and made content about his experience at their studio.
I can never know his true opinion of this game and now I also have to question his opinion of not just any supermassive game, but possibly any game that has the financial capability to sweeten the deal for him “playing ball”.
Good Remakes
I enjoy tank control games but its hard to argue the RE2 Remake didn’t do a superb job. But it’s also just a different game. You can’t experience the original game the way we all did by playing the remake, no more than you can experience the remake through the original.
REmake “A remaster of a remake” which is probably my favorite survival horror game. I have vague memories of watching the first and second RE games at my uncles house (being scared shitless) but it really feels like the remake from 2002 really not only stayed faithful but made the experience just strictly better.
Then we have discussions of being “faithful” to the original. I haven’t played the Dead Space Remake, but from what I’ve seen and read, it seems to stay faithful.
I didn’t enjoy the first (and only part I played) of the FF7 Remake, but seems like it was a commercial hit and the last part will more than likely also do very well.
I have no dog in the race as I never played any Silent Hill games (Maybe one day), but even though I did see some fan backlash, it seems like the Silent Hill 2 Remake was a success too.
Conclusion
To finally finish off my way too long post (by not talking about the endless # of remakes that have been made), I’m just not into the whole AAA gaming space. They seem to offer just way less bang for your buck but even with the option of sailing the seas many of them still aren’t worth my time.
I think the discourse can become toxic online when it comes to bigger games, but from both angles (yes toxic positivity is a thing). I’m very sympathetic to those who can’t wait for the AAA sphere to crash and cut out many of the ridiculous practices. I don’t want people to lose their jobs needlessly, but consumers also can’t be held hostage to support their companies that screw them over.
Alright lets end this rant,
Good night all!