This month, we got yet another reminder that games take longer than ever to make.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which officially launched on February 2, isRocksteady’s first game since Batman: Arkham VR in 2016, and it’s first full-length game since Arkham Knight in 2015. That’s nine years between releases.
Similarly, 2023’s most acclaimed games,Baldur’s Gate 3andThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, were each their studio’s first new game in six years. If we look ahead, the most anticipated game in years,Grand Theft Auto 6, is the first game fromRockstarin seven years and the sequel to a game that came out in 2013. This is the reality of game development now. Console generations could come and go before your favourite studio releases something new.
Well, this is the reality of game development nowfor new games. The same can’t be said for remasters. As development cycles have swelled, remasters have become an increasingly load-bearing pillar of the games industry. Because big studios often take anywhere from four to nine years to release new games, remasters become a necessary stream of income. They can be produced by a smaller team within the developer or outsourced to another studio, so the bulk of the company’s employees can stay focused on the next big thing.
On the one hand, this is great for younger gamers who want to explore the medium’s history. Lists of the best games of all time have often, by necessity, had to resort to basically saying “just trust us,” because often the games included were difficult for modern players to track down on current-gen consoles. Really popular titles would be preserved, like the four NES games that got a SNES upgrade with Super Mario All-Stars, which was basically the early ‘90s equivalent of a remaster collection. But plenty of less significant games got left behind. Even games from big developers. I would love to do a deep dive on Naughty Dog’s history but, alas, there’s no official way to play Rings of Power, its isometric RPG for the Sega Genesis.
That may not be true for long, as the modern rush to fill the gaps between major releases has led to unexpected games getting brought to new generations of players. I didn’t expect the Mega Man Battle Network games to have a life after Game Boy Advance, but thanks to the recent Legacy Collection, all six are available on Switch, PS4, and PC.
On the other hand, that’s what makes it feel so overwhelming to be a player in the current environment. Until recently, I could handwave certain games and series away because they were less accessible. There still are plenty of games that have no life outside the console they originally released on, it’s true. But, if I want to get intoYakuza, I can play all the mainline games and several spin-offs on my PS5. Or, if I want to save money, I can just grab most of them off Game Pass.
It feels a little bit like the scary story Timmy Turner tells his dad when he travels back in time on The Fairly Oddparents. “In the future, there will be 500 TV channels… But nothing to watch.” Not because thereactuallyisn’t anything worth playing, but because there’s so much worth playing that making decisions about what to devote time to can be paralyzing. Through services like Game Pass or PlayStation Plus, you can gain access to much more than 500 games spanning a huge swath of the medium’s history. That’s great. But, that sometimes means I end up playing nothing at all.
