I'm honestly shocked how game companies can refuse free money by remastering old popular titles. And when they do actually do it, they do it so cheaply that the resulting product is just godawful.

Case in point: Warcraft 3 [1]. This remaster was not only awful technically but Blizzrad changed the ToS on third-party maps so they owned all the IP because they didn't want a repeat of the Dota fiasco where Dota 2 sprange from a WC3 map and Blizzard basically lost the MOBA war.

Rock Star not so long ago released an awful remaster of the GTA3 trilogy [2]. These games are beloved. It's hard to believe they could screw up such an easy lay up but they did.

There seems to be an all too common thread of outsourcing to third-party contractors on the cheap, little oversight, no internal accountability, limited oversight and honestly not really caring.

But as we see people write emulators to play dead games on dead platforms. People remaster existing games largely for free. It's crazy to drop the ball so hard on something with such a huge inbuilt market.

[1]: https://www.resetera.com/threads/i-still-feel-absolutely-awf...

[2]: https://screenrant.com/gta-trilogy-definitive-edition-remast...