Will Remakes Trend in the current Industry?

I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking that I'm going to talk about two of the biggest recent "things" in gaming right now; Square Enix's money problems or the statement by Irrational Game's Ken Levine that having female characters on the front of a game's boxart doesn't sell after a female central character in Bioshock Infinite was relegated back of the box.  Jim Sterling's weekly video show The Jimquisition covered the latter more eloquently than I could hope to, and  just did a bit on the instability of the game industry as it is, so what I'm going to talk about this week is Ducktales.

Ducktales was an early example of how to license an existing property and make it into a great game.  Capcom was the go-to company for adapting Disney licenses into games, and pretty much all of them are bang-up jobs.  In particular, Goof Troop for the SNES was the first game designed by Shinji Mikami, the big brain behind Resident Evil; one can even see the parallels between the game's single-item inventory slot and the limited carrying capacity in RE.

Speaking of Resident Evil, the Gamecube Remake of Resident Evil is - in my opinion - the golden standard for game remakes.  Released in 2002, it was the start of an exclusivity agreement between Capcom and Nintendo to give the Gamecube a line of games to appeal to mature gamers.  Given Nintendo's traditional "family friendly" background, Capcom pulled out all the stops, giving the games tons of new content, like new areas, new mechanics that change how the game is played, redone music and sound effects, an attempt to make the storyline more coherent, and gave it graphics that for their time were incredible.  Nintendo had a modest hit that secured future releases like Resident Evil 4 and other games that weren't Resident Evil 4.

It's generally agreed that RE4 is the magnum opus of the series.

Since then, Capcom has rereleased several of their older titles, and long-running series like Mega Man were compiled onto one game disc and sold as collections.  While it's cool that they're releasing all of these classics for future generations to enjoy, I'm concerned that not enough of these future remakes will have new content.  The Ducktales remake promises to have voices provided by Disney's cast (I found a particularly heartwarming article about how the 94-year old voice actor for Scrooge McDuck breezed through the recording session), a more-fleshed out story and updated graphics.  However, arcade games like Final Fight see ports onto newer consoles with little to no new content.

Here's the kicker; this is a safe trend for the industry.  Capcom has seen botched launches of  big-name titles such as DmC and Street Fighter X Tekken; the former was a reboot of a franchise that had run low on ideas and the latter a team up from two well-known names in fighting games.  Both of these games failed to live up to sale expectations, so I feel that Capcom is "retreating" into safe territory with remakes of older titles after being scared away by trying something new with their reliable franchises. What this means is that it will be difficult to see fresh new content from Capcom in the near future.

I understand the need to play it safe after lackluster sales, but Capcom has made this a running trend.  If Ducktales Remastered sells well (which I really don't doubt) then it will encourage more HD remasters of other titles.  I'm fine with that, but the industry has had one fiasco after the other, and I want something that will give me confidence that the industry is headed in a bright new direction rather than wallowing its past successes.

Too obvious of a joke?

 Images Source:
Wikipedia.org

Further Reading:
Original voice cast returns for Ducktales HD Remastered
Street Fighter X Tekken sales fall short
DmC projected sales almost halved
More remastered Disney titles are a possibility