Media often gets remade and remastered, but this strategy of mining the past has seemingly hit a fever pitch in the video game industry over the last few years. 2025 alone has had dozens upon dozens of remasters and remakes. It’s obvious why these are so popular — people will spend money on things they recognize — but now there is now more research that puts numbers behind that claim, yielding more insight on this nostalgia-driven practice.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, England-based market researching firm Ampere Analysis looked at 2024 and 2025 and tracked players across Xbox, Steam, and PlayStation. From January 2024 to September 2025, remasters and remakes garnered 72.4 million players and earned $1.4 billion (which counts full games and associated microtransactions).
Out of the 42 titles it looked at, average global spending on the average remake was 2.2 times that of the average remaster. Ampere provided a graph that showed peak monthly active users on the y-axis and peak consumer spending on the x-axis. This graph specifically highlights Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Silent Hill 2 as remakes that raked in money and also had decently sized player bases, while Gears of War: Reloaded gained less money but received a comparable amount of peak monthly active users. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is a massive outlier on both axes since it had the highest amount of peak monthly users (around 7 million) and the most money spent on it (about $180 million).
Ampere noted that remakes usually take more money to make yet lead to more engagement, while remasters are cheaper to develop but don’t rile up players as much. Ampere senior analyst Katie Holt noted how publishers have to assess these risks when raiding their back catalogue.
The report isn’t publicly available, so it is unclear what all those small dots on the left side of the graph are. Also it’s unclear how the revenue stacks up to each game’s budget. Despite being at the higher end of both axes, Square Enix has repeatedly spoken about Rebirth‘s softer-than-expected sales. So even though it outsold most games on that list, its budget was likely significantly higher than the budgets of most of those games, too.
This trend will undoubtedly continue as publishers explore their back catalogues in order to make money during these pressing times where players are likely to be more cautious. As previously noted, 2025 has seen a ton of remakes and remasters. While not every game, this list includes:
This list may even be longer since the line between port and remaster can be blurry at times. It doesn’t even include Syberia Remastered, Fallout 4: Anniversary Edition, Surviving Mars: Relaunched, and Sacred 2 Remaster, which are all slated for 2025. 2025 even had one fake remaster in the form of Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 1: Re-Raptored, a parody remaster of a game that never existed.
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