Can we stop delisting original games to force remasters?

The practice of removing an original game so its remake or remaster, usually the latter, can then be sold as the sole edition of the game has always really irked me. For years now, publishers have been participating in doing this, and it seems that it’s essentially become an unfortunate norm in the industry.

The most recent example is that of Toy Story 3. As IGN writes, the Xbox 360 version of the game will be pulled from stores come Sept. 29, all because a remaster is on the way and so the $9.99 version simply does not cut it anymore. Is there something inherently wrong with the original? No. Is it in any crucial way unplayable or hard to go through? Not really.

So why is it going away? The remaster is likely going to be pricier and thus require you to dish out additional cash to play it. Purchasing the original would also mean that you’d have something to fall back to if the remaster turns out to be bad and would then draw comparisons between the two, causing unnecessary bad PR.

This has happened many times before. Remember Warcraft 3: Reforged? Back when it launched, Blizzard decided it would remove the original Reign of Chaos and Frozen Throne from all storefronts, also actively replacing them by forcing players to update their original games, moving players from the old, standalones to a “unified” client between Reforged and them.

The result of that was a massive fallout with players, who decided to literally pirate Warcraft 3 so they could continue playing on the most popular versions like 1.27, as Blizzard’s forced updates removed entire features from the original games that were missing from the remaster.

To this day, the forcibly updated Warcraft 3 games lack all the features they had before Reforged‘s launch, making it one of the most egregious cases of remasters replacing their originals.

I feel like pure greed drives these choices. I mean, you’re just taking away something that was entirely playable and functional and depriving the market of a whole game simply because this new “version” has 4K resolution and widescreen scaling. Remakes at least tend to try and recreate the game and make it better in any way they can, but remasters simply brush off the dust and charge you $30 for it.

The case of Reforged happened way back in 2019, but the practice itself has been running for many, many years and shows no signs of stopping. With the likes of Sony moving into an all-digital future, we can only expect this trend to continue.

Once the original is gone from the store, that’s it. It’s gone forever. With physical media, no amount of corporate delisting can stop the discs from spinning, with players able to copy them however they see fit to continue preserving those original experiences. And if you think that act of copying is illegal, then please explain to me how it’s fair and legal to just come in and pull the plug on an entire game.

The post Can we stop delisting original games to force remasters? appeared first on Destructoid.