Risen - Available again

PC Gamer reports that Risen will be available on Steam Deck, PS4, Switch and XBox on January 24:

After 14 years, Risen is back - I decided to find out why

The re-release adds Steam Deck and gamepad support—and it's surprisingly revealing about how THQ Nordic sees its older games.

Risen comes out next week, on January 24. It's a rough-around-the-edges and unforgiving, yet deeply immersive and interesting RPG, that also happens to have already come out 14 years ago.

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So why re-release it pretty much unchanged in 2023? Obviously, on some level publisher THQ Nordic is hoping to make a bit of money off some new sales—I'm not completely naïve—but it hardly seems like an obvious cash grab. Was there a social media campaign by fans? Or a spike in interest kicked off by an influencer? Is it laying the groundwork for a sequel? I felt like there had to be a bigger reason behind this seemingly innocuous release.

Not exactly a high-stakes mystery, but I thought it couldn't hurt to investigate. After formulating a more diplomatic version of the question "Why are you doing this?", I sent an email off to a THQ Nordic spokesperson. The answer was a pleasant surprise.

"[For] many years, THQ Nordic [has been] following the so-called “Asset Care” strategy. We’re often porting older games to new platforms or [e.g.] bringing a patch to the then 17-years old Desperados in 2018 to make it run properly with Win10.

"We think it’s important to care for older IPs, especially when they still have an enthusiastic fanbase. The first Risen was a great RPG following the design path taken by the Gothic series, and deserves another shot, especially since its console version back in 2009 was a very bad port. This new version will make Risen for the first time perfectly playable on all popular console systems."

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Thanks Henriquejr!