Mario, GTA, and the most expensive video game ports ever

Ports are supposed to be the budget option — slap a game on new hardware, clean up the framerate, call it a day. But a growing list of publishers have charged full price, or close to it, for releases that offer very little beyond basic compatibility. Here are ten of the worst offenders.

At $40, Sonic Colors Ultimate kicked things off with a rough launch — save file corruption, broken level elements, and visual glitches that took months to patch. Call of Duty: Black Ops and its sequel are also hitting PS4 and PS5 at $40 each when they arrive in July 2026. Tales of Symphonia Remastered landed at the same price in February 2023 for a game originally from 2003. Red Dead Redemption's port costs $50 — only $10 less than the far larger and newer Red Dead Redemption 2. Burnout Paradise Remastered launched on Switch at $50 while the same game sold for as little as $5 digitally on other platforms; EA eventually dropped the Switch price to $30, which is still $10 more than the PS4 version. Luigi's Mansion 2 HD and Super Mario 3D All-Stars both hit $60 on Switch, the latter bundling three older Mario titles with minimal enhancements. Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition also launched at $60 in November 2021 across PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, and Xbox, and arrived in notoriously rough shape.

The pattern here is consistent: ports of older games priced at $40–$60 when the originals are still available for a fraction of that, sometimes on the same platform. Nintendo is a repeat offender on this list, but Rockstar and EA make appearances too. The argument publishers usually make — that remastering takes real work — holds more water when the result is polished. Several entries here launched with significant technical problems, which makes the premium harder to justify.

Community frustration around overpriced ports has been building for years, and this list captures why. Whether publishers will recalibrate pricing expectations remains to be seen, but with Call of Duty: Black Ops ports still months away from release, the conversation is not going away anytime soon.