Old Games, New Content: Spider-Man, GTAV, Destiny 2, Now This Is The Way

Over the last week we've become very aware of the fact that game developers are trying for a sea change. It might instead be that gamers are the ones that've made this change happen – maybe developers are only doing what the market demands they do in order to survive. In any case, we've seen three major games announced as new, their developers revealing that instead of making new games, they'll be putting more time and effort into the games that people already love.

With Spider-Man Mile Morales for PlayStation 5, we've got an "expansion and enhancement to the original." That means we've got a very successful first Spider-Man game and, per Sony and the developers of the game, we're going to get a bigger, better release to capitalize on the greatness of that original. Read all about it – it's very strange.

With Grand Theft Auto 5: Enhanced Edition (announced for PlayStation 5 this week), we've got a very, very similar situation to what's going on with Spider-Man. Here we've got a franchise of games, with Grand Theft Auto, that's been successful and has found massive amounts of users in Grand Theft Auto online. So why go and try to make a new game when the old game is still popular?

The same goes for Destiny 2. Bungie revealed that they would not be making a game called Destiny 3. Instead, they're dedicating their time to expansions and enhancements for Destiny 2. They're avoiding what they straight up called a "mistake" in releasing Destiny 2 when they still had the Destiny 1 universe running online. Instead of releasing a whole new universe online every few years, they'll keep on adding to the universe that's already established.

This is the model with which we'll see game developers work if their games are largely multiplayer and online. It was strange to see the Spider-Man game appearing as "new" when it's actually just an enhanced edition – that'll still be a rarity, since it's not primarily an MMO.

The subscription membership fee associated with World of Warcraft was ahead of its time. It would not be a shock to see more monthly costs in place of one-time costs for AAA online games in the near future. This is the way!