Game developers, stop releasing the same game more than once

Re-Releases are a carcinogen of the gaming industry

Max Schomber, Staff Reporter
Originally Published June 8, 2018

I’m sure that most everyone who’s not a politician or parent enjoys a good video game on occasion. With the gaming market larger than ever, the variety and scale of games has only increased and continues to do so. Sometimes it can even be hard to choose what game to play. Thankfully, some developers have taken the liberty of making things easier for us gamers by releasing a game more than once just to soak in the cash instead of working on a new project for their fans.

Yes, re-releases are a fun way to maximize profit with limited effort. Just slap a “special edition” sticker on a title and sales will go through the roof. No one needs to bother putting in a single change to their content when they can do nothing at all and still find success. Consumers are about as intelligent as goldfish, who cares if they want actually improvements to a game.

Little to no Improvement

As you can probably tell, I am quite opposed to the frightening new trend of releasing games over and over again. Bethesda’s “Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” is a prominent example of this, as it has been released four times again since its initial launch on Nov. 11, 2011. If these were all simple movements to new consoles then that would be okay, the last of these being its launch on the Nintendo Switch. However most of these are just new and ‘improved’ versions of the same game.

Yet these ‘improvements’ to “Skyrim” were pretty meaningless, like how they improved what the water looks like instead of removing many of the game breaking bugs and glitches. It’s as though they think we don’t care about a game’s quality as long as it looks good!

Maybe I’m overreacting though. Maybe “Skyrim” is a bad egg amongst a sea of perfection. It’s still an amazing game at heart after all. Then Nintendo and Koei Tecmo’s “Hyrule Warriors” wouldn’t have been released three times in four years. After releasing once on April 14, 2014, it has seen a ‘legends’ version and a ‘definitive’ edition released for the Nintendo 3DS and Switch. While the Legends release did incorporate new content, all the definitive edition included was new character skins based on “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”.

Some game developers may argue that including all the older DLC (downloadable content) in an easy-to-access way justifies the new release of many of the aforementioned titles have. To that, I say that the content was all available before for download, and thanks to the quicky declining price of games after launch, it usually becomes cheaper to pick up the game and just buy all the DLC instead of blowing your wallet on a fully-priced triple-A release.

Console Ports

To those who think that ports to a new console are justified without new content after years of time to develop it are acceptable, look what some titles can do in a mere console re-release. “Mario Kart 8 Deluxe” was released on April 28, 2017 for the Nintendo Switch, almost 3 years after the original version was released for the Nintendo Wii U. Oddly enough, this game actually improved upon its predecessor, by correcting the formerly horrid battle mode in the game and adding new characters and car parts. This game has shown that it isn’t that difficult to meet fan outcries for improvement, and why we should expect more from these companies.

Conclusion

To those who thought I would close on a happy note with a good release, I just want to call attention to what I consider the most predatory form of re-releasing games to this very day, one that is targeted at children no less. This, of course, would be with the “Pokemon” series. Since the very origin of the franchise, all main series games have been separated into two or even three to four copies with the differences usually only being which of the pocket monsters one can capture. This is a blatant attempt to outright steal from customers, and should be considered unacceptable from a perspective of business and morality.

Could we just get actual content now, game developers? We have seen how easy it is to add these improvements and how much revenue they generate. Consumers are people, and they deserve to be treated as such.