VR20X6

I tried it. It worked reasonably well when wired and pretty terribly wireless, which isn’t that surprising. The free starter kits they gave out came with a Chromecast Ultra for a reason: it had Ethernet on the power brick.

On the other hand, I hated it ideologically from the start. You bought games that were only available on their service and could only play with an active Internet connection. That’s also to be expected. Not ideal, but not a big deal in itself so long as you know what you’re getting into. What isn’t okay is that you could lose access to the service permanently and there was no guarantee you would be compensated in any way whatsoever. At most they gave vague “don’t worry about it wink wink” answers when asked in Reddit AMAs. Fortunately they did refund everyone when they shut it down, but they were under no legal obligation to do so. People who bought in were lucky. I wish I could say it was purely out of goodwill, but it’s more likely that a bean counter at Google decided it was cheaper to refund everyone than to shoulder the bad press from not doing so.

Thank goodness there were also no notable exclusives on the service. The idea of games just completely disappearing from history just because Google got bored with a product like they always do is nauseating. It’s bad enough that they bought out Typhoon Studios only to pretty much immediately shut them down. Again, thank goodness they were able to rise from the ashes and reform the studio under a new name.

That’s almost never a thing with remakes. Counter-Strike 2 replacing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the one that would be most recent and is probably why you’re saying this. If not, you’re probably thinking of similar such soft relaunches after large updates (which arguably applies here, though the change is so substantial that they really shouldn’t have outright replaced CS:GO).

That’s a completely separate issue and should realistically have no bearing on whether or not remakes should be made. You should focus your anger at the true problem, which is that Games as a Service is fraud. Don’t let them entangle your feelings on this such that you accept things like a remake replacing an original game as not only normal, but also an inevitability.

You thinking that something can’t be improved on is not a good reason for it to not happen.

I remember over a decade ago when people were whining about a rumored Silent Hill 2 remake (long before Bloober Team even existed). The argument was as presented here: They shouldn’t do a remake because it can’t possibly be as good as the original.

You know what I have to say to that? A Silent Hill 2 remake would not erase the original from existence. So who cares? If the remake ends up sucking, go play the original. Simple as.

Funny enough, it’s an even more effective thing to do today in regards to Steam games. For example, it’s really sending a message about the state of Payday 3 when Payday 2 has several times higher 24 hour concurrent player peaks. It really makes it clear that people wanted more from the franchise and were simply unhappy with the newest product.