Quoted from teekee:Agree... too many just concentrate on prices going up or down but more importantly the crash would kill any future new stuff. I hope to see another 5 good years of cool new stuff and that's why I hate the remakes and reruns... just money and space eaters that I would rather see go to the new stuff.
Teekee, shockingly I agree with you. I'd also rather see new stuff. However that concept completely ignores human nature. Humans almost always take the easiest way with very few exceptions. In the case of remakes and reruns, they are just cheaper to make than a new idea. And people will pay more than it costs to make, so of course they will make them. MMr and IMVE are perfect examples of this. Making MMr is MUCH easier than inventing the next MM and it is much less expensive. Making IMVE is so cheap that it is almost free for Stern. All they had to do was pull out the old stuff, tweak it, and build them. That is easy and cheap when you have the manufacturing capability already there.
There was a vacuum in the industry. The price of some games had risen to the point where there almost had to be a remake. You saw it yourself. Don't you rebuild games? You had to chuckle to yourself when someone would walk up and pay 12k for a routed MM you shined up. Sure, you put more value into the game, but at that price it will almost always be cheaper to just remake the game. How many original MM games did you sell where you replaced almost everything but the wood in the cabinet? They were remakes, but they were happening at such a slow pace that it didn't really hurt the market. It wasn't until someone said they could do the exact same thing for 1000 units that the slide really got moving.
Reruns are exactly the same thing. If I was a manufacturer and something I had build that was essentially unlimited was selling for a lot more than my costs, I'd jump in an make money on it. It is what business does. It is exactly what you do. If you had seen a sad MM for 2k on CL, you would have bought it and polished it, and made money on it. It is what we all do, including PPS and Stern. Because that is exactly what they did. They both took a cheap game to build, and made them valuable.