The Games Industry Is Finally Accepting Reality

Kind: captions Language: en Something fairly new is happening more and more these days, and actually I think it's pretty damn good. Today, the main things we're talking about are new DLC for an 11-year-old game and a brand new game-changing patch for a 16-year-old [music] game. These are the main examples, but there is more than this going on in the industry. The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past and StarCraft II are both in the headlines, which is kind of absurd, right? And it's not for remakes or remasters. Quite simply, we're getting new updates for games that were already old at the turn of the decade. And I think it reveals something about the games industry right now. Big picture, the gaming audience isn't really playing new games. And of course, new games are taking longer and longer to produce, and they're getting more and more expensive. And for a long time, that's driven remakes and remasters, but today it's definitely going further. We're getting brand new content to games that we've already been playing and we already own. And if this trend catches on and is actually done right, it could be really good for the health of the industry and for the games that we play. The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past has been rumored for years by this stage. And it won't actually be out until 2027, but it is exactly what you think it is. It's a brand new Blood and Wine-sized narrative expansion for The Witcher 3. So, very much not like one of those tiny Netflix show update things that they did. Meanwhile, then for StarCraft, it's just getting a patch on its public test realm, which in itself isn't extremely unusual. They actually tend to do one of these like every one or two years. Like there was a 2024 patch that changed 14 units, 10 buildings, and added two new abilities, which was pretty good, but this current patch really is something else. It's changing units across all three factions. There are core economy changes for resources and workers, different worker starting amounts, and and loads more. As an example, there's a full rebuild of mechanics like how the gateway works, which basically changes one of the core gameplay pillars of the Protoss faction. That's absolutely huge. And along with it, there's some quality of life improvements and bug fixes. Pretty damn big. It's a fundamental reworking. It's a by a lot of feedback. Though obviously it's not out yet, it's on the test realm. Not every change is exactly perfect, but what's been undeniable is how staggered that game's audience has been by how much the game's actually been altered. And that's because within the community, we really saw Starcraft 2 as being a bit of a dead game to Blizzard and one that we would have to prop up and keep alive. Very much not the case, it would seem. And while these are two pretty neat examples, they're not even the first games to get updates and content like this in 2026. [music] Okay, let's see how this new wave of updates is going. We're not really talking about remakes or remasters here, those are a different thing. They're an endless tide. We're getting Star Fox, Gothic 1, and a few others in just this month. And of course, we know why that happens. And we've got some numbers. These come from surveys from MTM Consulting that were surfaced by gameindustry.biz. And they show that 90% of gamers play remakes or remasters. That's hardly a surprise. I count in that 90%. Chances are you do. But what's key is that off that 90%, 85% are playing games that they never played in their original form. So all that means is many of these game designs truly are timeless. And as long as people can play them in a vaguely modern fashion, they can actually do really well, and they can expand the reach of those games. Now, what we're seeing recently basically goes past that. It goes a little bit further. So it's not refreshed versions of old games, it is genuinely new content that is built for games that can be a decade old. Now this year alone, we got the likes of say a surprise reveal of the new Warlock class for Diablo 2 Resurrected. That's the first character that game's had in 25 years. Now Blizzard told Eurogamer they may do more in the future, though they were careful to add, quote, "We don't want to mess up the Mona Lisa." Fair enough. But there's another company that's also doing it, and that is Creative Assembly. They appointed a back catalog product owner. Quite the job role, but I actually think it's pretty cool. They're a person whose sole job is to support and update older games, and they're starting it off with Rome II. Of course, if you take a look at Steam, you can see that Rome II is still a very, very frequently played game. It makes sense to update it. It makes sense to maybe make content for it. Now, of course, there's a game that's gone further than most, and that's Age of Empires II. It's getting multiple new DLCs every year. There's brand new campaigns, new factions. It keeps expanding, and the way they do the campaigns, at least for some of them, is way more involved than what shipped with the base game. But when you look at all of these, there's something specific that you notice, and it's that they're all franchises. They're all franchises that, more often than not, have new games. But even though those new games exist, the companies are going back, and they're meeting the demands of people who are still playing the old games. That's a bit weird, because usually when a company moves on to its next thing, if you prefer the thing that you've currently got, you just feel dropped like a rock. That seems to be changing, and I think that might be a good thing. The big question, then, is how big is the demand for things like this? It's big enough that the lead producer of Diablo II said it rather plainly, quote, "We still have millions of people who play Diablo II. Millions of them." So, he pretty heavily emphasized saying millions again. Some audiences simply won't move on, not to D3, not to D4, and if you look at Total War on Steam, you really see the same thing. There's healthy player counts on Medieval II right now, in 2026. And for the longest time, that's actually been a fundamental issue for the games industry. And in trying to get around that issue for a very long time, Creative Assembly kind of uh ended up torching their reputation. Now, there's some stats to this that, honestly, are a bit spooky, right? This is the Steam Replay data for 2025. We see that 40% of all PC play time that year went to games that are older than eight years. And this industry, eight's a big number. It's not just one or two year out-of-date games. No, it's eight. And another 44% sat in the one through seven year range. That's not a small number, and in many cases, it's because the companies haven't convinced you to move on. And you know what? Yesterday, I was playing Shogun 2: Total War. It's one of my favorite games. There hasn't really been one that hits the way that it does since. And to be honest with you, if they made another expansion for it, I'd absolutely buy the damn thing. This stuff doesn't mean that new games are worse. It just means that for some people, going back to say D2 or Witcher 3 is kind of like queuing up with friends for the umpteenth time, right? You kind of already know what you want out of the experience, so you just go to that experience and get it, rather than risking a new thing. So, for the companies involved, this is a way to reach players who are more than a decade in the past, of their own volition and choice, as I am, with say Total War: Shogun 2. But it lets the companies keep us as monthly active users on their own metrics, and maybe make some more money out of us, rather than just letting us drift away as audience members. And of course, from our perspective, them having no incentive to invest in the games that we do actually love. Now, obviously, this is not a foolproof process. I mean, think about the StarCraft 2 changes. You could almost call it a StarCraft 2.5, or you know, something like that. It's very different from base Legacy of the Void. And if Blizzard's execution of all this stuff doesn't work in practice, especially once the meta develops with the best players, that could be kind of chaotic. For some other games, what if an update breaks mods from a creator who's no longer maintaining them? I mean, we've just seen CD Projekt Red deal with their own version of this, where they raised Witcher 3's minimum specs to require Windows 11, uh um or SSDs. You can still run it on older hardware, but basically, in moving those requirements, they're officially no longer promising that the game will work on those older machines. So, there is real potential for this to go wrong, but there's also an obvious financial incentive. I mean, the weekend after Songs of the Past's announcement, Witcher 3 Steam player count spiked to the highest it's been since February. New content means hype. Some of that will translate to sales, and when the expansion actually does launch, there'll be a whole new audience hearing about the franchise for the first time. And honestly, I think CD Projekt Red are going to make a shitload of money in that. And in a roundabout way, that'll be good for you. And I say that because there are secondary effects to all of this. And a good few of them will pay off for everyone who hasn't been playing the same game for a decade. Witcher 3 getting an expansion means that Witcher 4 and Witcher 1 remake are going to be better games. And I think that's a very easy claim to make. And here's how it works. The team building songs of the past are called Fools Theory. They're a next CD Projekt Red dev-led studio, and they're also building the remake under CD Projekt Red's guidance. So what that basically means is Fools Theory ships a product at CDPR's expected quality level. They, in doing that, get to learn, they get to test their skills. CD Projekt Red gets a healthy influx of cash, but most importantly, they get to do the single most important thing before a new game launches, building up hype. CD Projekt Red are planning to release The Witcher 4 at some point from 2027 onwards. It's more than a decade after Witcher 3, and it'll be the first of three Witcher games that'll be coming in 6 years. So they really need people to care about that franchise again. They need some reason for you to come along, and let's be real, The Witcher TV show very much has abandoned doing that. So it's pretty good for them. And this applies to StarCraft as well. You see, Star 2 never stopped getting updates. They did slow down like humongously, but there's an obvious reason why these changes are happening now, and why they're so large. And that's that all evidence is pointing towards something happening with StarCraft at this year's BlizzCon. And to summarize the key bits, there's been a bidding process that ended up seeing Nexon win the rights to a new StarCraft game. And then there's the StarCraft shooter project within Blizzard that Jason Schreier flagged while promoting his book on Blizzard. And from everything that we know, that game is still very much in development. But at the risk of stating the obvious, a big shooter project maybe won't appeal to StarCraft II's core fans who love RTS's, right? So, what'll happen when those games get revealed and they don't appeal to those players? Well, the answer now would be that the people at Blizzard have clearly thought about that problem. And because of patches like this one, the RTS players still get to feel seen. They still get to feel like their game matters enough. They're less likely to be angry, they're less likely to generate bad press for something that's new. And hell, they might even consider the new thing because even if it's not completely up their alley, the company just treated them reasonably. So, they'll be more ready to do the same. But if they don't, that's actually going to be okay as well. And that's where the real industry change here becomes clear. With this, the games industry is finally embracing a group of players that's massive and has been underappreciated. And that's those of us who don't buy new games. The new business model then is to treat them as a market in their own right. Not trying to convince them to move on, just trying to convince them to, you know, maybe buy that new Witcher expansion, which will still add to the company's bottom line. It's not quite live service for old games. It's not quite games designed to run forever with constant monetization, but I think it's learning lessons from that model in a way that actually feels like it's good for us as consumers. And all of it in service of one simple acknowledgement. People who like video games love the experiences they've had with video games, which will almost all of us be ones that have happened in the past, right? As much as I could get hyped for a new game, there are so many games where I just know I'm going to get what I want from it, like with Shogun II. And now, thanks to convergence of so many different factors in games production, how the economy's changed, even distribution, it can now happen. We can now be offered more product for things that we already like. Not something new, but rather something more. Please, Creative Assembly, give me another Shogun 2 expansion. And I'd love to hear what your equivalent would be for the games that you love. So, a rare bit of good news, and maybe just the type of news that we needed in industry that is struggling more and more and more. And that's why you should watch this video next because the Romeros have been warning that as people who saw the games crash of the '80s, the legendary one, right now they feel what's currently happening within games funding actually feels worse. You can learn about it in this video next.