marurun wrote:To elaborate on this, there's kind of a finite amount of money in the games market. Releasing large back catalogs might cause consumers to spend a little more, but if the older games have a negative impact on newer game sales, that hurts the companies a lot more than the lost revenue on older games not sold.
I think they're less at odds with new releases than being credited for. It's not all that uncommon to see older games thrown in as bonus material, or used to promote new releases.
Even assuming that they were serious competition, however, how many publishers consistently have new releases targeting the same user bases week in and week out? Catalog releases increase the chance of the publisher getting at least some of your gaming dollar every month.
I think it comes down mostly to finite resources in general. Setting aside possibly expired licenses for IP, source code, all that...it'd be a massive undertaking, one that would always be increasing in size. PS4 comes out, time to port every game EA has ever published to it. Then do it again when the PS5 launched, only with all the PS4-native games too!
