During the latest State of Play, Sony announced a remaster of Days Gone, a game that’s not even six years old yet.
While remastering a modern title may seem unusual—especially if the result barely looks any different—moves like these are becoming a bit of a pattern for PlayStation Studios.
PlayStation remakes and remasters are everywhere
The Days Gone Remastered announcement arrived just a few months after Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered and the Until Dawn remake hit the market, and a year following The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered.
Throughout 2024, Sony also released seven original PS5 titles: Helldivers 2, Rise of the Ronin, Stellar Blade, Concord, Astro Bot, Lego Horizon Adventures, and MLB The Show 25.
So, we got roughly one remake or remaster for every other PlayStation-published game last year. And looking a bit further back, up to the start of this console generation, it seems like Sony’s refreshes of older titles are becoming more and more common.
| Title | Remaster Release Date | Original Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| Demon’s Souls | November 12, 2020 | October 6, 2009 |
| Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered | November 12, 2020 | September 7, 2018 |
| Death Stranding Director’s Cut | September 24, 2021 | November 8, 2019 |
| Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection | January 28, 2022 | May 10, 2016 (A Thief’s End), August 22, 2017 (The Lost Legacy) |
| The Last of Us Part 1 | September 2, 2022 | June 14, 2013 |
| The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered | January 19, 2024 | June 19, 2020 |
| Until Dawn | October 4, 2024 | August 25, 2015 |
| Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered | October 31, 2024 | February 28, 2017 |
| Days Gone Remastered | April 25, 2025 | April 26, 2019 |
An industry-wide trend
It’s worth noting that Sony’s hardly unique in its growing focus on revisiting older games. Many major publishers—including EA (Dead Space), Capcom (Resident Evil 1–4), Konami (Silent Hill 2), and Sega (The Yakuza Remastered Collection, Persona 3 Reload)—have been modernizing their games as of late.
Nintendo’s currently even more invested in such projects than Sony, releasing 11 remakes and remasters in the last two years alone. While Xbox isn’t as keen on similar initiatives, it’s still been averaging roughly one game refresh per year since the start of the 2020s.
Why Sony remaster so many modern games
Sony’s obsession with remakes and remasters results from several factors, most of which can be summed up with one word: resources.
Game development costs are getting out of control
The average game development budget in 2010 was in the ballpark of $28 million. In contrast, Sony spent $200 million on the 2022 God of War Ragnarok. The budget for Marvel’s Spider Man 2 was reportedly around $315 million, and its sequel is expected to cost even more.
Meanwhile, the average price of new games has only risen by about 16%, from $59.99 to $69.99, during this period. In a world of skyrocketing AAA game budgets, publishers like to play it safe.
Sticking to established IPs is an obvious choice to minimize risk, and remakes and remasters fit this strategy perfectly.
Remasters, in particular, also come with the added benefit of being fairly cheap. The 2023 Insomniac leak revealed that Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales had a budget of $156 million, but Marvel’s Spider Man Remastered that released alongside it only set the company back $39 million.
Granted, it also made much less money ($50m as opposed to $260m), but that’s a unique case of a remaster being just a few years behind the original and its leaked revenue figure predating the game’s PC version, which is estimated to have sold in the millions.
Failed live-service bets left PS5 lacking first-party games
In May 2022, then-SIE CEO Jim Ryan announced Sony would release 12 live-service games by 2025 because one of them is bound to become the next Fortnite, or something.
Three years and one Jim Ryan retirement party later, Sony delivered just two such titles—Helldivers 2 and the historic flop Concord—while canceling at least 10 others.
Ryan’s live-service bet clearly didn’t pay off. Yet it cost a pretty penny, both in terms of money and opportunity cost.
As of today, a bunch of first-party PlayStation devs like Naughty Dog, Bluepoint, Media Molecule, and Bend Studio have all gone many years without releasing anything original—or anything at all. Most of them have canceled live-service games to thank for that.
With dev cycles getting longer and so many Sony studios wasting years on failed live-service projects, the PS5 found itself starved for first-party games. This novel situation gave rise to remasters as a reliable way to fill out the PlayStation release calendar without spending too much.
Which PlayStation games could be getting remastered next?
While Sony insists it now has a handle on first-party games and that it’ll avoid large gaps between releases moving forward, there’s no reason to assume it’ll pull the plug on remasters overnight.
Sony Interactive Entertainment chairman Hiroki Totoki: "We plan to continue releasing major single-player game titles every year, from next fiscal year onwards." (Next fiscal year begins April 1, 2025. SIE has previously announced Death Stranding 2 + Ghost of Yotei for 2025.) pic.twitter.com/vWRDtUY5Fx
— Gematsu (@gematsu) November 8, 2024
After all, even its latest and most unnecessary of the remasters, Days Gone, is currently among the best-selling PS Store games—and it’s not even out yet.
As for what PlayStation titles could be next in line to get remastered, Sony’s track record points to PS4 exclusives being the likeliest re-release candidates, not least because they’d be the easiest to do.
Looks like Days Gone Remastered is in the top 10 on Best Selling pre-orders right now on the PS Store! ❤️ pic.twitter.com/CzzNxVfYWL
— Kevin McAllister (@vikingdad278) February 18, 2025
This pool of possibilities includes the likes of Killzone Shadow Fall, Infamous Second Son and First Light, The Order: 1886, The Last Guardian, and Detroit: Become Human.
Bloodborne also fits the bill and is the one remaster that everyone’s been begging for throughout the PS5 era because the original’s performance leaves something to be desired.
Given how fan pleas have so far fallen on deaf ears and Sony re-released half a dozen newer games in the meantime, it’s safe to say that if a Bloodborne refresh is indeed on the cards, it’s either being saved for a rainy day or the PS6.
Although Sony didn’t make Bloodborne, the choice of whether to revisit the game rests entirely with the PlayStation maker. “We simply don’t own the IP,” says FromSoftware President Hidetaka Miyazaki.
Some vocal fans have long insisted they’d be happy with just a remaster, but with Bloodborne turning 10, there’s an argument to be made that a remake makes more sense.
After all, Demon’s Souls was 11 years old by the time its remake debuted as a PS5 launch title, so there’s still hope that Bloodborne could follow a similar trajectory one generation later.
Since game development cycles can only get longer by the time the PS6 arrives around late 2027 or 2028, all bets will be off when it comes to next-gen remasters.
For instance, while the 2024 Astro Bot clearly isn’t next in line for a re-release, Sony’s track record suggests it may very well end up receiving a paid PS6 upgrade—whether that makes sense or not.
