My point is that there's no purpose beyond revealing a classic title when you introduce 10 year old games which have already lost their ability to make money for the publisher and developer long ago.
That's what was done with Bioshock and System Shock 2.
System Shock 2 was in no means a poor sale, it did very averagely, but people tend to laud such games so much and ask why there aren't more titles like it, but the fact is is that they didn't buy the game in the first place.
Everyone likes to hear about how GREAT Deus Ex is, but why do most people tend to speak out about good games that aren't exactly in the public eye when it's been out for several years? I hardly heard anyone talk about Deus Ex or System Shock 2 when it was first out, despite the fact that its quality was even more evident back then.
The industry is shallow, it's all marketing and PR, and so are the people who play games, everyone wants to look more sophisticated than everyone else, companies LOVE mentioning older games in order to put everyone into that "Oh, I remember that game! I was one of the few who played it! *Sticks out chest*" mentality.
So instead of actually delivering the same sort of depth these older games provided, companies adore waving them around to incite a fan's interest, or just to alert the general gaming public that their game is more "inspired, and sophisticated" just because they mentioned some obscure game that got good reviews but almost no one played.
I have this little theory about the majority of gamers who march around telling everyone how they should have played this or that game back then, and how originality in the industry is gone because no one plays those types of games.
The largest amount of those people have
-not played many or any of the games they tend to mention
-are the exact type of people that play an older title for ten minutes and become alienated and give up
-have no clue what they're talking about
-think that just because a game is unknown it's somehow more "hardcore"
I just feel it's wrong that the industry today has taken the games that we find so dear, not because we were one of them few that played them, but because we thought they're *dirty word* good, how many people actually appreciate that when they play System Shock 2 after they downloaded it from an Abandonware site? Not many, there's a big difference between someone who likes to know about gaming's past, and someone who still likes to play those older titles.
That whole blurb was kind of confusing, but in summary, my original point from that quote was that "spiritual successor" and "inspired by" are merely tags in order to snab an additional audience, or create credibility, both among gamers and developers.
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