As a publisher, why would you ignore potential profit on re-releasing your "Rarer" older titles you fully own and haven't lost?

[Sketchsanchez]

I hate the money cost argument. Most of these companies have more money than God. They're not families trying to scrape by on a meager budget.

It's a drop in the bucket for those companies and builds good will but no can't have that, shareholders might be mad.

 

[Foltzie]

The Wii/WiiU virtual console highlighted that even with a low barrier for entry, there isn't a enough market to jump through the hoops to republish individual older nice titles. Most of those VC titles failed to sell $50K based on sources I can't locate at the moment.

Maybe the GWG, PSN Plus, Game Pass, Nintendo Switch Online model might be a better venue for such titles.

 

[shintoki]

If they re-released Haunting Ground, I'd be surprised if that thing would sell 1k copies.

 

[LegendofLex]

Companies don't have infinite resources and most of them would probably prefer to allocate those resources to their big multi-million money-makers rather than nostalgia ports that'll sell a few thousand copies.

 

[bbg_g]

Because the "profit" if any, isn't going to be much in the grand scheme of things. These are niche things and the used pricing isn't reflective of the real demand at all.

Even Scott Pilgrim is niche and who knows if the re-release is going to even make any money. Even the original movie isn't considered a financial success.

 

[fiendcode]

Cause history shows that even if some game is a cult classic, the game is made to be that. They're a vocal minority. Porting isn't cheap an there's surely some license issues. Pretty sure the Earthbound games haven't been so high sellers on the Wii U and New 3DS VC. Same for a lot of re-released games.

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Earthbound sold big on Wii U VC. That's why they brought Beginnings later on.

 

[werezompire]

There's an interview where a SE employee says: "if you love Chrono Trigger that much, why didn't you buy it?" meaning that even though it's heralded as a masterpiece it just doesn't sell well. If that's true for Chrono Trigger I assume it's also true for Chrono Cross

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This has always bothered me because from what we know, Chrono Trigger sold well and IIRC, the quote was in reference to the DS port which was incredibly overpriced ($40 for an old SNES port). From what I'm seeing, CT was one of the Top 20 Best-Selling SNES games of all-time and sold about 2 million on the SNES and about 2 million since then via various ports.

 

[Shining Star]

I think in most cases the profits are not really as high as you would think.

 

[RomanticHeroX]

Doing barebones ports when emulation is available is an enormous waste of resources. Frank Cifaldi's GDC presentations do a far better job than I could to approach this issue, but devs and platform holders should embrace emulation as a cheap, easy way to keep games in circulation. The PS2 games on PS4 could've been great but they're a complete wasted opportunity since they mandate trophy support. That increases the cost, which increases the amount they charge. People don't want to pay an inflated cost for tacked on trophies when emulation is already so easy and free, so they don't sell enough to justify the cost of the program. Either barebones emulation or more lavish presentation would do, but they went with the worst of both. I think Nintendo's efforts on Switch are great, but more games would be even better.

 

[Seiez]

We live in a world in which Moon got a second chance and all signs point towards the game being a big success.

There are a bunch of games that should be considered rather low risks.

Breath of Fire 3+4 (5 even got a ps2 classic release in Japan)
Final Fantasy Tactics
Skies of Arcadia
Older tales of games (Europe missed most of them)

To be honest I hoped that the switch would bring a bunch of them back. In part because the games wouldn't feel so out of place like with ps4 and Xbox and because Nintendo maybe would see value in getting games, that they missed during the ps1 and ps2 generation.

I think the biggest issue is that Japan isn't that interested in older games. Most re releases perform better in the west.

 

[Alpheus]

Yes cuz money can be made by stimulating demand for older beloved series. Even it's remade into like a B level modern title it can still be a proof of concept on how viable it's marketability and viral quality of it. Of course that's because from jump I'd probably look at these older games as something worth sharing with the newest generation of gamers. Like how people said "Oh my god Simon's whip is just like Sheik's side B and you can dangle it!" got a "Is Castlevania IV just a joke to all of you?" Reaction from me.

 

[Foltzie]

Earthbound sold big on Wii U VC. That's why they brought Beginnings later on.

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But not enough to figure out a way to port Mother 3 and I don't mean that flippantly, but rather whatever issues prevented VC porting of Mother 3 Nintendo decided it wasn't worth spending the money to address. Earthbound Beginnings was "done"

 

[fiendcode]

The Wii/WiiU virtual console highlighted that even with a low barrier for entry, there isn't a enough market to jump through the hoops to republish individual older nice titles. Most of those VC titles failed to sell $50K based on sources I can't locate at the moment.

Maybe the GWG, PSN Plus, Game Pass, Nintendo Switch Online model might be a better venue for such titles.

Click to shrink...

The only hard digital VC numbers we have are it sold over 4m games it's full year on Wii. That's for around 170-190 released games depending on region at the time, giving us an average of very roughly 20-25k units sold per game. Even at NES pricing ($5) we're looking at over $100k per title revenue then. SNES pricing and it jumps well over $150k then, N64 and we clear $200k.

Now obviously a lot of those sales went to the usual brand names (Mario, Zelda, Sonic, etc) and weren't distributed evenly but we also know "hidden gems" like Gunstar Heroes or imports like Sin & Punishment also sold extraordinarly well from publisher comments and further franchise support. VC, at least on Wii, was a pretty lucrative business overall.

But not enough to figure out a way to port Mother 3 and I don't mean that flippantly, but rather whatever issues prevented VC porting of Mother 3 Nintendo decided it wasn't worth spending the money to address. Earthbound Beginnings was "done"

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Mother 3 was worked on and it wasn't canceled because Earthbound didn't sell enough. It was likely a combo of loc issues (it needed more than just a script change) plus Wii U itself kinda dying off. Who knows, maybe we'll see it again some day.

 

[Deleted member 21709]

I want to ask Humble Sony this question all the time.

 

[Yarbskoo]

"if you love Chrono Trigger that much, why didn't you buy it?"

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Chrono Trigger:

 

[CRIMSON-XIII]

Socom is an experience they can make a lot of money from for the online. Skins, microtransactions, etc. I am actually surprised that they have not gone back to Socom yet.

It is a matter of time though until they reveal a huge graphic intensive shooter.

 

[Kthulhu]

Losing the source code.
Limited dev team. (Aka waste of time)
Contract hell to outsource.

3 examples Ive heard in my time.

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Source code is unfortunately super common.

There's a GDC talk from one of the devs who made the SNK arcade collection and he talked about how they had to rely on ROM dumping techniques from the MAME project because SNK lost a lot of the source code.

After he told the story he asked for a show of hands from the audience of who thought their source code would be available in as little as 20 years. No one raised their hand. Even in the age of GitHub and cheap data storage it seems preserving source code isn't a priority for devs or publishers.

 

[kirby_fox]

Aside from the resource and money stuff, the games probably need polish to play today. I just was trying to play an older game this weekend from the same era. It was obviously the old pc port. It had widescreen but it was terribly stretched. No controller support. And still in SD made it look really bad.

I imagine that the effort needed to make the game worth buying isn't worth it for how much it'll sell.

 

[t26]

I think best example was Dragon Ball GT on PS1, a bad game that used to go for a lot. Once there is a reprint no one really cares.

 

[Goddo Hando]

Just because rare physical copies like your example are highly sought by collectors does not mean there is a big enough market to invest in a re-release.

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this is it

just because stadium events is worth like $10,000 doesn't mean it should be re-released.

 

[martincrimson87]

And this is why every game first party or not should have a pc port

 

[Platy]

I hate the money cost argument. Most of these companies have more money than God. They're not families trying to scrape by on a meager budget.

It's a drop in the bucket for those companies and builds good will but no can't have that, shareholders might be mad.

Click to shrink...

Companies are not your friend

If the porting costs X and only give them 2X of profits, they will think "this porting team could have been working on something more profitable"

 

[Devilgunman]

Because there is no substantial profit of releasing old rare games. Porting old games to a modern console isn't flipping a switch. There has to be development, testing, recertification etc. It costs time and money, which in most cases won't be worthwhile for a title that only some hardcore gamers care about.

 

[knightmawk]

Effort probably isn't outweighed but what people will actually pay. Lots of people who say they'd be a remaster of this or that won't, or they'll wait until it's on sale because "I'm not gonna pay full price for a 20 year old game", and re-releasing isn't trivial, even if you have the rights and the code some work still has to be done.

Also they may not want to complicate their slate too much. You don't want to release 20 games all at once because then they'll compete with eachother, especially if it's of a genre or type where a ton of sales tend to happen near launch because of hype or if the fanbases overlap a lot. Space them out and you'll make more money as each game can shine, or at least compete only with competitors, not your own stuff. It may be that they've just got a lot of new games on the schedule and can't fit a remaster or remake in a spot that makes sense for it.

 

[zoodoo]

They want people buying new, full priced games. They make more money from an audience that's looking forward than one that's looking back.

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Nintendo makes a shit ton of money looking back

 

[Nemesis_]

I think Capcom thought they would try this with Onimusha and look what happened there

:(

 

[TripleBee]

Still costs money to rerelease, and most likely it's a very small market interested.

Rather put that money towards something with a high potential, than a low certainty.

 

[Timeaisis]

Losing the source code.
Limited dev team. (Aka waste of time)
Contract hell to outsource.

3 examples Ive heard in my time.

Click to shrink...

All of this. Also, even if it makes financial sense, I feel like some publishers sit on their old games as like an emergency lever they can pull when they need cash. If it's an easy win, why waste it on a year you are making good profits?

 

[Man Called Aerodynamics]

I wish companies were motivated to do this.

This week I bought the Fallout 3 DLCs on Xbox Live for $2 each. $10 total. Sure that's only a $10 sale, but it's $10 of revenue for a game that released 12 years ago. Put in the work now to port Haunting Ground and you might not sell a ton the first month, but that game is now in a position to bring in money for years, even decades into the future. That's how I think of it. But the numbers are what they are and if Capcom's not doing it, it must not be worth it. I buy and play old games all the time so my perspective is probably skewed.

 

[Sketchsanchez]

Companies are not your friend

If the porting costs X and only give them 2X of profits, they will think "this porting team could have been working on something more profitable"

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Yeah and I'm saying that's shit when you have all the money in the world.

We regular ass people shouldn't be caping for them and using their own bs arbitrary reasons for them as if they matter to us at all.

Companies should be doing stuff like this.

It's shit they don't.

I don't care why they're pinching those pennies.

 

[Adulfzen]

doesn't mother 3 contain some questionable content which wouldn't fly nowadays ?
seems like people always ignore that

 

[ghostcrew]

I hate the money cost argument. Most of these companies have more money than God. They're not families trying to scrape by on a meager budget.

It's a drop in the bucket for those companies and builds good will but no can't have that, shareholders might be mad.

Click to shrink...

I think the money argument is more 'this will cost more than they'll possibly make back'. Yes, these companies might be able to swallow the loss of doing ports that nobody buys. But they have more money than God because they don't make decisions like this. Every project has a budget. You don't just greenlight every passion project and say *shrug* we can afford to lose on it.

And I think the 'hours in the day' argument is probably a more realistic one than budgets anyway. Devs have a limited amount of manpower/hours to work on things. Porting a lot of lost-to-time ports of games that nobody really bought/liked that much in the first place is probably looooow down the list of things they're actually passionate about spending their careers working on.

 

[werezompire]

I would definitely pay good money for straight ported collections of classic RPG series to Steam/Switch including:
Breath of Fire 1-5
Wild Arms 1-5 + XF
Shadow Hearts + Koudelka
Lunar
Quintet Action/RPG trilogy
Digital Devil Saga 1 & 2

And a bunch I'm forgetting.

 

[TsuWave]

I'm assuming there's costs involved in setting up and re-releasing a game. Costs they might not believe are worth it, if they don't think the money they'll make from the re-releases is enough to justify them.

 

[Castform]

I would definitely pay good money for straight ported collections of classic RPG series to Steam/Switch including:
Breath of Fire 1-5
Wild Arms 1-5 + XF
Shadow Hearts + Koudelka
Lunar
Quintet Action/RPG trilogy
Digital Devil Saga 1 & 2

And a bunch I'm forgetting.

Click to shrink...

I'm of the same mind. But there's likely too few of us to justify the investments (both cash and time) into porting these games.

 

[Dragonyeuw]

At most they probably could have released it as one of those Ps2 on Ps4 classics. It's not mainstream popularity driving those crazy ebay prices and a remaster would mainly sell to the subset of people willing to pay $200. If that game was some RE4 level hit Capcom would have ported it 100 times by now.

 

[Foltzie]

The only hard digital VC numbers we have are it sold over 4m games it's full year on Wii. That's for around 170-190 released games depending on region at the time, giving us an average of very roughly 20-25k units sold per game. Even at NES pricing ($5) we're looking at over $100k per title revenue then. SNES pricing and it jumps well over $150k then, N64 and we clear $200k.

Now obviously a lot of those sales went to the usual brand names (Mario, Zelda, Sonic, etc) and weren't distributed evenly but we also know "hidden gems" like Gunstar Heroes or imports like Sin & Punishment also sold extraordinarly well from publisher comments and further franchise support. VC, at least on Wii, was a pretty lucrative business overall.

Click to shrink...

I cannot locate a citable source at the moment, but I recall that many games didn't make the $50K threshold that Nintendo wanted for a payout. Given that Nintendo titles dominates the charts it's not crazy to think most non Nintendo VC titles moved less than 10K units. Also, publishers were limited to Nintendo's emulator implementation.

If that's true, it's not crazy to see why Nintendo went with the Netflix model for the Switch. If they were taking in most of the profit why Nintendo use the software for the new Switch Online service.

It's a shame I loved the VC. I have no idea how something like Pokémon RBY gets re-released on Switch.

 

[tmarg]

Nintendo makes a shit ton of money looking back

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Nintendo's nostalgic IPs are stronger than just about everyone else's, and even they limit the availability of that content in ways that people are upset by.

 

[oni-link]

Part of me thinks it might be because the people at the top of a lot of these companies don't really care that much about games as games, and just see them as business

Music labels and artists will release obscure B-sides and demos from artists, but huge game companies won't even dump a 1mb SNES ROM of an all time classic to a digital storefront

I get the SNES ROM won't make millions, but I feel like if the people at the top had the passion and enthusiasm of fans, they'd still want to keep the classics alive

You also still see obscure films getting rereleased, even though they obviously won't make Marvel money, but the people pushing these important and older films are doing it out of passion and love for the medium

Digital Devil Saga 1 & 2

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I need to check if these are worth getting on PS3 before the store goes down

 

[AuthenticM]

Jawmuncher
Be honest with me Jaw, is this a stealth "why Capcom hasn't done a Dino Crisis collection" thread?

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Of course it is. And I approve.

 

[defaltoption]

I'm with you, makes no sense, especially if it's games from Sony, MS, and Nintendo themselves like yo you freaking own the whole thing, let me play it.

I wanted to start collecting for PS2 so damn badly but the cost of the games I actually want to play is just too high. I want to play stuff I missed out on since I was younger and didn't have a lot of money but that doesn't mean I want to use a rent payment to do it.

 

[Deleted member 17184]

I hate the money cost argument. Most of these companies have more money than God. They're not families trying to scrape by on a meager budget.

It's a drop in the bucket for those companies and builds good will but no can't have that, shareholders might be mad.

Click to shrink...

These companies have a lot of money, yes, but they also spend a lot. There's a reason why only a few of them can experiment however they want. Valve is one of them. Epic's Fortnite money allowed them to make the Unreal Engine free to use, pay for exclusivity deals, and fund/publish new games. However, Capcom isn't one of them.

 

[werezompire]

I need to check if these are worth getting on PS3 before the store goes down

Click to shrink...

Given the SMT:N remaster on Switch, I wouldn't be surprised if the DDS & Raidou games were next.

 

[oni-link]

Given the SMT:N remaster on Switch, I wouldn't be surprised if the DDS & Raidou games were next.

Click to shrink...

Maybe, but I would have also expected to see Persona 4 on Switch/PS4 etc after the PC release, and that hasn't happened yet, so you never know with Altus

 

[krae_man]

I had a dev tell me once that they could self publish the PSP version of one of their games onto PSN if they wanted to, but they would have to make minor edits to the credits/splash screens at the beginning(such as removing the UMD version's publisher logo from the opening splash screens). Unfortunately by doing so, the game would have to be resubmitted to the ESRB even though nothing they changed would impact the games rating and that extra cost made doing it no longer financially viable.

That was a while ago, I don't know if the ESRB/platform holders have changed their rules since.

 

[Platy]

Yeah and I'm saying that's shit when you have all the money in the world.

Click to shrink...

most devs don't have anywhere near "all the money in the world" =P

i mean, the only ones you could say that have this are the main platform holders like Sony, Google, Microsoft and Nintendo