In the midst of gaming, like with the realm of Hollywood film, many of the games we see come out in this day and age are games that have been made available more than once, on multiple platforms or other such demonstrations of release repetition. To this day, we see many people refer to these releases as "ports," "rereleases" and "remakes." I'm sure there are more terms for it that I have missed, but these are the three I would like to focus on.
For a while, it seems the way people use these terms are categorically mixed, so I thought I would try to assess how these terms should be used.
"Port."
A port is a bare bones experience, moved over exactly as it was with few or no tweaks with little to no extra content. An example of this would be Call of Duty Black Ops 2 for the Wii U, or perhaps Marvel vs. Capcom 3 for the Vita.
"Rerelease."
A rerelease is like a port but with more of an emphasis on it being released anew. These often are essentially the same game but have updated visuals, tweaks, some extra content, bug fixes, achievements, and other such upgrades to make the experience feel more modern. A Playstation 2 HD collection for the PS3 would probably fall into this category. The upcoming Director's Cut for Deus Ex: Human Revolution would probably also be considered a rerelease under this description.
Finally, the "remake."
Remakes are an overhaul, particularly in the graphics department, completely made anew to look completely different (though often maintaining the feel and style of the original). These will often have some gameplay upgrades and are often released with the concept of nostaliga as part of its value. Games like Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Halo: Anniversary, the upcoming Ducktales remake and Double Dragon Neon would be examples of this.
Of course this is just my view on the matter, not THE view. Do you agree? Disagree? Why? What are your thoughts?
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
I would make some changes to the categories you have. For instance, by your logic, Resident Evil 4 and OOT3Ds would both be "Rereleases" since they only had "updated visuals, tweaks, and some extra content."
Edit: Thank you for helping to clearly define words that are most certainly overly used incorrectly.
PS2 HD collection are a bit of a grey area... They aren't strictly being remade, but they do recieve quite a substantial boost in the resolution department.
If i was you, i'd add a "Remaster" category to cover that void, the gap between remake and re-release is to big by your 3 definitions.
God Of War HD and MGS HD would be good examples of an HD collections that are neither subtantially changed enough to count as a remake, but have enough extra polish to considered better than a re-release.
RE4 "HD" was pretty much the same while the above MGS and GOW looked quite a bit better than their original launch, especially if you take Vita's MGS HD touch controls into account or how Resi 4 was pretty much a straight up Gamecube port.