How Developers and Gamers are Reviving Old Games

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Anyone else remember Minecraft? It seemed like it was the biggest and best game around for a long time. Then as I got older it seemed to fade into irrelevance as the game changed and the generation of gamers who played it grew up. The game didn’t suddenly become boring, but I was no longer in middle school, and I no longer had the time to play it as much.

But this was not the end for Minecraft and its elderly contemporaries. Recently veteran gamers are returning to their old favorites with a generation of new gamers exploring older games. With all Halo games coming to PC, Minecraft being cool again, and Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition coming in November. All of this resurgence and revival has inspired me to find the reasons why gamers are coming back to these games, why developers are cooperating and remastering, and what it all really means for the community (and industry).

Age of Empires II: Age of Kings

Age of Empires II is the smallest and least well known game I will talk about, but it is important to me and plays an important role in the revival movement. Originally released in 1999, Age of Empires II (AOE2) is a complex and nuanced RTS (Real Time Strategy) game based on the history of many civilizations of the world and their advance into an imperial age. Fascinatingly, the game never had a true “death.” The player count has slowly been growing for 20 years thanks to the occasional updates released by the game’s publisher, Microsoft. In 2000 we got the Age of Conquerors update adding civilizations like the Aztecs, Huns, and Spanish to the game. The game matured for 13 more years with no new content, and it became clear that soon the game would not meet modern standards. However, in 2013 Age of Empires II: HD Edition was released to revive the game, and 20 years after its first release, Age Of Empires II: Definitive Edition marks a complete overhaul of the AOE2 experience.

I am a member of the closed beta of the Definitive Edition, so I am able to investigate what changes they are making. Also, I can better understand why players are still so enthusiastic and passionate about the game after 20 years. Among the many changes, the most impactful are the modernization updates. Since the original release, new approaches for controls and features were invented. Some of the changes were inspired by dialogue with the community on their forums, and I believe that this dialogue was an important part of AOE2’s success. When developers do not communicate with their community it usually backfires, and the advice from the community is critical to the success of any game. The moral of this story is listen to your community.

Minecraft

2019 has been a tremendous year for Minecraft. Sales are up and the community is growing. Since 2018, the /r/minecraft subreddit quadrupled in size from 500k to 2 million subscribers. This surge of players came from a social movement that happened earlier this year.

Anecdotally, people talk about a emigration of Minecraft players to other games (mostly Fortnite). The community believes that some of the older gamers, becoming upset with the increasing number of children playing Minecraft, left the game. Additionally, many of the younger players decided to leave Minecraft for games like Fortnite. People thought that Minecraft was cool again because the kids left.

Another theory states that after the Minecraft Exodus, people returned and enjoyed Minecraft again simply because they had some time away. On the /r/Minecraft subreddit, Reddit user ArtisanVirgil states

There was sort of an edgy backlash to the game a while back. Irritating youtubers, immature kids, etc that wanted to turn being bored of minecraft into a criticism. So instead of admitting that after a decade with any game you might get bored, they decided the game was dying, that it had gotten worse, that Micro$oft was ruining it, that Mojang was developing in stupid ways, etc, etc. That trend coupled with Fortnite’s fad, made a lot of folks susceptible. Then a year or whatever passed, Fortnite’s shine faded a tiny bit, and like the other user said, people remembered it was still a good game. People got bored of being edgy about the game.

However, since there’s no official narrative to Minecraft’s revival it’s hard to know what exactly happened. What we know is the culture seemed to change, and the people who had been slowly leaving the game all returned at the same time.

Unlike the rising popularity of Age Of Empires II, Mojang the developers of Minecraft, had no influence. So in this case, the revival of a game is due to an uncontrolled social force.

Halo: The Master Chief Collection

The Master Chief Collection is the re-release of six titles in the Halo franchise on the PC and Xbox One. It’s a bold move by Microsoft to rescue these titles from previous generation console irrelevance. These titles will be available to play again after years of absence.

Microsoft realizes that there is still a market for their old Halo titles. Gamers will be motivated by nostalgia, and they will buy these games (for a second time). In a way, The Master Chief Collection acts as a combination of the AOE2 and Minecraft scenarios; a social movement driven by nostalgia causes a developer of an old game to bring an updated version to a new platform.

To me these three examples show

1. That veteran gamers have many compelling reasons to return to old games.
2. Some of these reasons are social forces that neither individuals nor the industry control.
3. But a game developer can create and incentivize a market for their old intellectual property by updating outdated games and re-releasing them.
4. An important constraint of this process is that a developer must listen to their community. Otherwise it won’t work.
5. And finally, the future of the games of the past is bright.