I’d argue that video games need remakes and remasters far more than movies do. Video game technologies change a lot in 10-15 years, so a remake/remaster is an opportunity to improve controls and fix issues with running the game on hardware that hadn’t been concieved at the time of the game’s release. Plenty of old games have severe bugs, outdated controls or general issues with newer hardware (can’t handle widescreen monitors, buttons don’t scale for high resolutions, etc.) which can make replaying them a pain.
You sit down to watch a 25 year old movie and it’s pretty easy to watch, but you sit down to play a 25 year old game and it’s going to vary wildly if you can even get it to run in the first place, let alone if it’ll run well
But in the context of consumer product pricing it’s wildly anti-consumer to bill a software running largely on your own hardware consuming your own electricity based on how long you run said software. It’s expecting consumers to accurately project and plan their usage which consumers are pretty famously bad at. It’s also expecting consumers software running on consumer hardware on consumer home networks to function as expected, and all of the three are famously unreliable and janky
The AWS model works so well because of intense automation in horizontal and vertical scaling plus technologies like Kubernetes, Ansible and the entire automated build pipeline. But most importantly it relies on a full team carefully designing the automatic deployment and scaling to maximize benefits and minimize costs
I’ve had a couple of games I’ve encountered that are literally unplayable at 21:9. You’re either stuck with textures stretched to oblivion or it cuts off a significant chunk of the screen. Admittedly this is mostly with older games that predate 21:9 displays but holy crap is it annoying when I can’t play a game because it can’t handle my display and stretches instead of displaying at the configured resolution
Any kind of pause or completion of loading should have a brief moment where you can see the action and get your bearings before it hands control to you. Like how Forza or Euro/American Truck Sim handle loading saves, its paused for a second or so with the player getting full view of the screen then continues so you have a moment to figure out what you need to do
The sad thing is enterable buildings is pretty achievable. They could have an algorithm to generate a generic interior based on a seed at the time that the player enters the building. It’s not exciting, and it would add complexity but it at least would make enterable buildings without massively impacting install size nor save size.
You can play with procedural generated cities and structures here for example to see the potential. Just imagine that instead of a top down map it generates an interior with generic furniture, clutter and possibly loot. Add in different sets of assets it fills in with based on building type and location and verify it generates the same interior every time it gets the same seed and you have a very efficient system for at least being able to enter every random boring building
Alternatively there is a gameplay argument to be made for only being able to enter buildings that actually do something gameplay-wise so you know what buildings you need to enter
One of the big reasons many companies go public is it’s naturally a really nice retirement package for the owners of the company. The owners of the company may have put so much time and money into building the company that they don’t have sufficient retirement savings, so by going public they turn a portion of their ownership into a boatload of cash as well as a boatload of wealth that can be leveraged, then simply elect a new CEO, retain their significant voting power on the board so they aren’t entirely abandoning their baby and then peace out
Remember, Skyrim was released closer to the first year you listed than the second one and the sequel is still quite a ways out. There are entire release day players of Elder Scrolls 6 who were not yet born when 5 came out.
I stole a book for a quest with a shitton of witnesses, ran away, got out of town because of the guards having patching issues, stopped at my home and dumped my mostly-stolen inventory and returned and turned myself into the guards paying 40 gold to redeem myself for stealing a priceless book. Skyrim is a masterpiece of realism I tell you!