Nostalgia. A concept that captures the hearts, attention and wallets of society easier than just about anything else. Nostalgia is no foreign concept to businesses and content creators. In fact it’s been an extremely prevalent tool for them in the recent years.

Rebooting, reimagining, republishing, remastering and other forms of re-releasing content has been occurring overwhelmingly over the last few years. Content ranging from movies, TV series, video games and more have been filling the shelves in increasingly higher quantity.

Movies such as “Tarzan,” “The Jungle Book” and “Beauty and the Beast” saw rereleases or reimagined releases in 2016 and 2017. All three of these were live-action adaptations from their original, animated counterparts.

It almost seems that more remasters of video games have come out these past couple years than new, original content.

The “Crash Bandicoot” series, which began release in 1996, saw a remaster in 2017. “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,” which originally released in 2007, saw a remaster in 2016. The “Spyro” series from 1998 is said to see a remaster later this year.

The massively popular game “Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” originally released in 2011, has seen itself rereleased in 2013, 2016, 2017 and 2018. These are just a few examples of game series being remastered for a rerelease.

A big factor or reasoning behind remastering games is the fact that the new-generation consoles often don’t have the capability to play the older games. Developers remaster the games, giving the audience the ability to play the older games with new and improved graphics and on their new console systems.

The issue with this trend is that it’s keeping the creators from developing fresh, new and original content. Overall, it is somewhat risky in these markets to go forward with a new, original project as video games and films can be extremely costly.

It is much safer for a developer to take a series that they know the audience will love and buy and remaster that for redistribution.

Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing content from my childhood being available in better quality and with the capability of new technology, but there is a line that must be made that stops this from happening constantly. Without new content being released, content is becoming creatively stale.

I do respect the level of creativity that the creators possess in regard to some of the reimagined content, but the endless stream of remasters is just lazy and is taking advantage of consumers. All of this type of content has its place here and there but it is definitely saturating the industries, which should be less tolerated in hopes to deter creators from continuing the trend of regurgitating content to fans.