Take-Two, the company that owns gaming giant Rockstar, recently had their CEO discuss the company's approach to remastering their games. CEO Strauss Zelnick talked about how the remaster strategy they employ differs from how some other gaming companies do it in the end.
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference earlier this week, Zelnick was asked about the way their company approaches remasters as part of a bigger part of the strategy moving forward. Zelnick, as transcribed by VGC, talked about how they've approached them "differently than the competition."
"I'm not sure there'll be a bigger part of the strategy. Remastering has always been a part of the strategy. We've done differently than the competition - we don't just port titles over, we actually take the time to do the very best job we can making the title different for the new release, for the technology that we're launching it on. So we improve the technology, we upgrade the visuals, and we make performance enhancements. And that's why I think our remastered titles typically do so well," Zelnick responded.
This mindset is shown in the recent remaster of the Mafia games by Rockstar, as well as the way the studio has approached both Grand Theft Auto V's console and PC ports. When GTA V was ported from its original Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions to the, at the time, next-gen console (Xbox One and PS4), they weren't simple re-dos of the same game. The graphics were updated, framerate was smoothed out, it was a different experience altogether for many players making the jump to the new platform. The same held true for its PC port, with even higher quality graphics and the boost to uncapped framerate.
Zelnick touched on the now third generation remaster the popular game will be getting in this same interview, stating that he is "confident Rockstar is going to feliver just a great experience, but you can't do that if you're just doing a simple port."