Killer8
Gold Member
It’s much more work to do this stuff in video games, and in the case of something like Horizon, it already runs on the newest Sony hardware. It’s like releasing another DVD of a movie you already released on DVD. If you want to talk about something like I don’t know Killzone 3 that’s a different story.
It depends. It's usually more work to re-release games but some remasters barely take up any resources. God of War III was ported to PS4 by just two programmers at Wholesale Algorithms. I always laugh hearing people moan about how it's taking people away from making Big Sequel 3. Most of the time it gets outsourced cheaply, or it's done by people who have some downtime between big projects.
There are boutique Blu-ray brands like the Criterion Collection who do a monumental amount of work which I don't think is necessarily easier just because it's a movie. They need people to scan the film, people to do color correction and repairs, audio experts to clean up the audio tracks, people to create and collate all the extras, packaging artists, etc etc, and they also have to liaise with the original director and crew (*if they're still alive) to make sure everything aligns with their vision. Some movie remasters can also remain in development hell for years because autists like James Cameron want to ruin every frame with AI and a teal color grade (but that's a rant for another thread). The sore spot for gaming is more QA related, making sure it all works on the new hardware. Again though, that can be outsourced cheaply to another company.
The thing about games is that even if it can be a more involved process, the sales potential and returns is much, much higher than movie releases these days. That God of War III remaster for PS4? Sold over 4 million copies. People needn't wonder why we see so many remasters already in gaming - it's money for old rope. Some of these boutique Blu-ray brands are putting in a ton of work for limited runs of just a few thousand copies and are still profitable despite it all.