The Max Payne Remakes Will Have An Alan Wake 2-Sized Budget

Remedy has made a surprising, and very cool, disclosure to investors in their latest financial report.

This is what Remedy told investors, as reported by PSU:

“Max Payne 1&2 Remake also continued in the production readiness stage. The team made considerable progress throughout the year. Max Payne 1&2 remake is going to be a major new game with great potential, enabled by a similar development budget as Alan Wake 2.”

Remedy also stated that Max Payne 1&2 Remake is expected to move on to the next phase of development in the first half of this year.

Max Payne 1&2 Remake’s budget being as big as Alan Wake 2 is just great news. It suggests that Remedy is working on a significant upgrade for the two games, possibly pushing the title for current generation consoles only.

Now, it’s been a while since we learned that Remedy was planning these remakes, but given that they referred to the title being on the ‘production readiness stage’, it sounds like they are still starting proper game development.

It certainly seems like it will take a while before we see these remakes, and yet they couldn’t come any sooner. For reasons that can still be perplexing, Remedy chose to delist the two games on Steam, presumably because the remake is expected to be much better.

When one considers how other companies handle remakes and remasters of classic games, Remedy looks like they want to push the envelope harder than most. NightDive Studios may have set the gold standard for how to bring back classic games, and their thing has mainly been to recreate those old shooters by building them from the ground up on their bespoke game engine.

So what could Remedy be planning here? They could be pushing the game on Unreal Engine 5, a significant upgrade. That would necessitate building characters, lighting systems, and other granular details from the ground up.

They may also be planning to revise everything, which would honestly be a mistake. Given that they pulled the original titles, most gamers don’t have the opportunity to play through the original experience right now.  Getting completely different titles and being told that they were those originals would harm the supposed game preservation objective of these remakes.

But maybe we can trust on Remedy to do better than that. It’s clear that they achieved amazing things with Alan Wake 2  and they can similarly astound us with Max Payne 1&2 Remake.