Photo credits, left to right: CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images, Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images
This story is part of our new Future of Gaming series, a three-site look at gaming’s most pioneering technologies, players, and makers.
As we come to the end of both 2024, and our Future Of Gaming subseries, it’s impossible not to let the urge to prognosticate take over for a bit. Gaming, as a hobby, remain joyfully unpredictable, creating moments that shock and delight us specifically because we can’t see them coming. Gaming companies, though? not so much. And so, we’ve taken a shot at trying to figure out where gaming is going in 2024. How will the industry address its widespread labor issues? What’s the next big gaming adaptation in film and TV? And, most importantly: Which game will Sony announce first: The Last Of Us Part III, or The Last Of Us Part III – Remastered?
The remake/remaster train will continue
The Last of Us Part II Remastered - Announce Trailer | PS5 Games
In case you were wondering whether 2024 will continue game studios’ favorite trend—marketing old, successful games they know will move units once they’ve been treated with a glossy coat of paint for new consoles/markets—then look no further than January 19th, when The Last Of Us Part II Remastered inexplicably makes its way to stores as the year’s first big release. Even for Sony, a company that never met a Remastered it didn’t like, this one is pretty egregious: is all of three years old at this point, still runs great on modern hardware, and looks good to boot. It’s hard to imagine a really good reason to re-release the game—except to get a bit more blood from a very lucrative stone.Not all Remastereds are created equal, of course; 2024 will also see the release of Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, which will at least repackage games that have gotten a bit harder for players to get their hands on over the decades, sending players through the first three of Lara Croft’s very blocky adventures. The early Tomb Raider games are odd enough that it’s much harder to fault publishers for going back to the much-less-traveled well to bring them back as an act of interest and curation—a decent reminder that there’s nothing inherently wrong with re-releasing old games for modern audiences. (Bandai Namco is doing a of cult gaming classics Retro Game Challenge for the Switch that we’re dying to have get an American release.) As long as, y’know, you’re not “remastering” a game that’s still sitting on Gamestop shelves this very second.
