Older games return to modern platforms constantly, and the overwhelming majority arrive as remasters rather than remakes. The split is decided by cost predictability more than by ambition.
The two words describe different amounts of work
A remaster keeps the original game and improves its presentation: higher resolution, better frame rates, upscaled textures, modern controller support and platform features.
A remake rebuilds the game in a current engine. Assets are recreated, systems are rewritten, and design decisions from the original are reopened because the old ones often depended on old hardware limits.
One is a technical project with a known shape. The other is a full production with all the uncertainty that implies.
Cost sits at opposite ends of a scale
Remaster budgets are small enough that a modest sales figure clears them. The team can be a handful of engineers and artists working from finished material.
Remake budgets approach those of new games, because in production terms they are new games with a fixed script. Recreating a world at modern fidelity costs what building one costs.
Having the story already written saves less than it appears to. Writing is a small share of a large game's budget, and the expensive parts are art, animation, audio and engineering, none of which carry over.
Risk is where the decision is actually made
A remaster's audience is knowable. It is the people who liked the original plus those who missed it, and the product they receive is close to what they remember.
A remake has to satisfy the same audience while changing things, and every change is contested. Combat rebalanced for modern expectations reads as improvement to some players and vandalism to others.
Publishers weigh a modest, reliable return against a large, disputed one. The remaster wins on that comparison most of the time.
Source material decides what is possible
Remasters depend on having the original project files, source art and buildable code. Studios that lost or never archived those materials cannot remaster at all, which is one reason some catalogues sit unavailable.
Where the source has decayed, a remake becomes the only route back, and the choice is made by archival luck rather than by strategy.
Middleware complicates this further. A game built on licensed tools may be unbuildable once those licences lapse or the tools stop running on current machines, even with every file intact.
What this does to a back catalogue
Well-documented titles from studios with careful archives keep returning, while contemporaries with lost source material stay in the past. Availability follows preservation practice, not popularity.
The visible result is a catalogue that looks selectively curated when it is really shaped by which project folders survived.