Remaking old games in HD seems to be the new trend in the video game industry. Sony does it, Ubisoft does it, but apparently Microsoft does not want to do it. God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Sly Cooper, and Ico are all very successful franchises that have seen or will be receiving re-releases from Sony. Ubisoft is putting a new coat of paint on the under looked Beyond Good and Evil for a release next year, and if the rumors prove to be true, we could be getting some high-res Prince of Persia as well… eventually. Unfortunately, even with the popularity of these remakes one thing we will probably not be seeing any time soon is a HD Halo or Halo 2.
During an interview with IGN, Microsoft Game Studios Corporate Vice President Phil Spencer was asked about his thoughts on remaking some old titles for the Xbox 360. Currently, Spencer doesn’t see the benefit of putting MGS resources to producing HD versions of Microsoft’s older titles:
Unless Microsoft is concerned about potentially running the series into the ground like Activision has done with Guitar Hero, I do not understand why this is not something they are considering. According to VGChartz.com, Sony’s God of War Collection for PS3 has sold over 1.5 million copies worldwide. If you add up the larger console install base of the Xbox 360, along with the popularity of the Halo series, it is not hard to see a ‘Halo 1/2 HD Collection’ selling similar or higher numbers.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea. I’m going to think about it from the customer’s perspective, and are we really delivering something of value to the customer at a price that they want? We obviously have a lot of new things going on, so the thought of re-doing a bunch of things is probably difficult to just weave into the overall portfolio. If you can provide real value to the customer, there could be possibilities for that, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it.”
Hopefully, with Microsoft not focusing attention on old games it means they are working on new games, which is probably the better option. I imagine most people reading this website would much rather get their hands on the latest and greatest new title instead of an HD version of a game they beat once or twice already. We can just only hope that this means they are too busy working on a sequel to Conker’s Bad Fur Day to worry about old Halo games.
So readers what are your thoughts on this? Would you still like to see old Microsoft games in HD or do you want new original content?
Source: IGN
