Do I detect a conflict of interests?
Hardly a week ago the Last of Us Part 1 Remake went gold which means that we can all sit back and enjoy the fruits of what so far looks to be one of the most pointless remakes of recent memory. A touch-up of a game that is hardly a decade old looking only slightly more worked on than the Dishonoured Remaster, and sporting a shiny spanking new price tag in order to suck some fresh schmeckles out of an audience of fans who really don't need to be nickle and dimed right now, of all times. Oh but hark! Old lady Naughty Dog has crawled off her porch to shout obscenities our way for the crime of looking upon the fresh cane mark on our cheeks and questioning whether or not it's fair. "Don't call this a cash grab, I'll take no such insolence from you" she spits, chewing on her gums and something sticky and black between them. "You'll open up and swallow your Remast-, I mean Remake, and you'll like it! After you've handed over your credit card details, of course. These expensive projects that no one asked us to embark on won't pay off themselves, you know? Oh and don't forget the digits on the back, I might need to fleece you for the next Remake our the boys are cooking up."
Now yadda yadda, you're going to want to defend something you're working on, yadda. But have some humility while you're at it, eh? A developer, not the lead but a mind from the process, declared how this game couldn't be a cash grab because of the care they're putting into the project. Which, in all fairness, is a definite boon. As much as I poke, I'll bet there's some increadibly impressive work being done on the Remake in order to make it accurately represents the original in new shiny glory; but good lord if that doesn't totally miss the point of why people are incensed I don't know what does. I wasn't concerned it was going to be a low effort port, and if this is some kind of strange attempt to equate this situation to the GTA Definitive Edition then let's put the kibosh on that right now. You'll earn no merits by comparing yourself next to an absolute horror-show disaster. Just because that crap is crappier than your crap, it doesn't mean your crap is any less crappy. Savvy?
This game is going to be realised in "The way the developer intended", we are being told. Which means that ol' Neil Druckmann, in between sessions of concentrated fart sniffing, dreamt of the exact game they were currently making only with higher resolution models and ray tracing! Get out of here with that 'George Lucas' bull, will you? The Last of Us Part 1 came out in 2013 and was the belle of the ball in that year and for many years following; there hasn't been so much of a seismic shift in technology that a total remake is going to utterly change the face of the product and shoot it into the vastly improved future. This isn't as much of a revolution as the Demon Souls Remake, honestly. And don't even get me started with Final Fantasy 7 Remake comparisons! That whole "The way they intended" garbage is such 'empty marketing drivel', sheesh...
Oh, but here's a good actual point I've seen bought up in defence of the Remake. And it's a doozy, listen here: "No one's forcing you to buy this." Ah yes, we're taught to call this one the 'EA defence', in sleazy video game scheme school. But in the context there could be half of a warped point to be made here, because he is right; Neil Druckmann has yet to lose his last grip on reality and go door-to-door forcing his products on people at gunpoint. That is accurate. And in fact it's so liberating to know that I can, at any point, abstain from this Remake and hop along to the original version of Last of Us on Steam and buy it at a reasonable price po- oh wait, I can't? The only way for a PC player to play this game is through this upcoming Remake? No exceptions? So if that's the case... then I guess... if we really put this together... I'm kinda, sorta, maybe, actually, being forced to buy this grossly expensive remake if I want to play the Last of Us... aren't I?
Ah but I already know the next argument and it's another doozy. (We're doozing it up today!) This is when the grey matter starts leaking out their ears as defenders rush up to regurgitate the half-digested faeces fed to them buy their marketing heads. "Oh the game is £70 at retail? Um, that's actually to take into account the expenses of game development and catch up with inflation, which the games industry is immune to." Okay so number one; that isn't how finance works you absolute Neanderthal. Secondly, yeah games were £60 since the 90's and before; that's because they were all egregiously overpriced! We've coexisted with the sixty pound price tag so long because it's slowly grown into being equitable, but that by no means implies that games have only been £60 for the past two decades. Or are we to just ignore the rise of DLC, seasons passes, microtransactions and all the other ways that companies have carved off small pieces of their game to sell them for extra's on the side? Like Horizon Forbidden West is doing despite having sold at a £70 premium price point. Are we going to willfully ignore the $15,000 average price to complete a single character in Diablo Immortal within a normal human's lifespan? Because I ain't ready to just ignore all that.
And then there's the real kicker. Games have decided that despite being one of the most profitable industries in entertainment, that they deserve this random price hike right on the cusp of a cost of living crisis. Yeah, this hits hard over here in England and in the United States right now, but the current state of the world means hardly anyone out there isn't struggling to meet their daily living standards without shelling out something extra. And games want to take advantage of people who are having difficulties trying to meet their essentials, and then they turn around and wonder why people are buying less games on average than they were last year. That kind of sounds like scum-sucking self sabotage, or at the least a 'money grab', wouldn't you concur?
So by all means, go ahead and publish your Last of Us Remake and dazzle the world with it's impressive graphics and the like but stay off your soap box to start moralising to the rest of the world how far away from a cash grab this game is. As long as it's price gouging it's customers it's going to be a cash grab in some shape, it just so happens that with the fact this is literally a 10 year old game remade faithfully on a slightly prettier engine, this whole project reeks of being particularly schemey. But I shouldn't worry, people will still flock to pick this up and another big game is going to loose out on a potential purchase as the trend of people buying less games with the rising costs starts to dig into the gaming industries bottom line as they continue to callously believe that the general public have an infinite pool of money for luxury expenses.
What surprises me is this defensive nature of treating discourse like this as an 'us versus them' situation, and it does spur from both sides. But at it's core all we really want is an equitable and fair industry that is beneficial to both sides, because once the pendulum starts to swing one way more than it should, it starts to form cracks which, when untreated, break apart the very fabric of the industry. If you're too immature to recognise that, on either side, then perhaps this is a debate you should really sit out just in case you end up doing more harm than good; because this, and the precedent it will set, is a very hotbutton and consequential issue. I just hope that all the companies around Sony and Square Enix are levelheaded enough to be able to see that. (Although knowing EA; I'm betting their next game will launch at a £75 retail mark-up.)
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