But are these remakes meant to improve these studios and set them for new games or just a cash grab?
Increasingly, I'm thinking the latter.
At one point, not even that long ago, I thought it made enough sense. While the next mainline game in a big franchise or a major AAA new IP is in pre-production, get the employees to keep themselves sharp with a remake or remaster with not much investment. Heck, perhaps new hires disproportionately benefit from getting a granular look at these older titles and working to make minor improvements.
Hopefully, it's a launchpad to new heights when they're on deck for the new game.
But the sheer number of re-releases, the fact that the new games are keeping a hold of flawed design/gameplay systems, and not doing enough to improve in ways that don't seem like "more of the same with slight improvements" or straight up rehashes, have reduced the plausibility of that to me.
Not all studios doing this are equally bad: I think Naughty Dog have been particularly egregious this gen. Sony in general has been doing way too much in fucking re-releases. They lost the plot with their dev pipeline, this is one reason why.
