[Free] [Ubisoft] Anno 1404 History Edition (06.12 - 14.12)

(+1)
Generally speaking, anything that's usually coverable (and typically covered!) by very basic mods, should not warrant a huge price increase. While stability fixes are theoretically [but in practice, rarely] also included, the overall pricing relative to effort is in the +$5-10 range (depending on scope of changes), not the +$20-30.

While over-priced micro DLCs have become the norm in the industry in more recent years, we're still talking about content increases that're usually far more in line with a smaller DLC than a larger DLC, nevermind a full expansion or especially a full game release. Meaning that with present pricing associations, even an inflated price valuation'd put the content at +$15 at most; Pricing above that is really solely the domain of these remasters (and the most scummy and bizarre of microtransaction games).

This ends up raising two major points of issue: First, that the price is equivalent to a newly released game (while that makes sense for a remake, it's ludicrous for a remaster even before you consider effort involved, given that you're by definition doing less work than for the initial release, as most of the work has already been done for you), and second, that existing owners are rarely given reasonable discounts, and when they are given a discount at all (reasonable or otherwise), they're typically just a release discount, meaning you only get it if you're willing to pay full price for a patch DLC.

There's also the realization that, since companies are presumably making new base sales (at current retail pricing) on the original game to begin with, by modernizing it, strictly speaking you don't actually have to add ANY cost to a game, in some cases, to acquire reasonable profits relative to effort invested.
(This isn't a reasonable perspective to have towards a company, on its own [in the sense that we can't expect a large company to intentionally minimize profit], but serves to give us a reasonable baseline from which to consider their profit assessments. Though it's worth noting that MANY indie developers DO release their remasters for free, with a mentalty based either in the fact that <better game, fresh marketing = better sales> or simply out of being consumer-oriented enough to not want to charge money for relatively minor mechanical tweaks intended simply to make their game properly playable.)
Thus, when you consider them jacking up the price to that of a newly released game, that above consideration really emphasizes the greed and sloth involved in such heavy pricing. All the more so, whenever you see a remake released for fairly cheap [Though I can't think of any cheap+desirable remakes off-hand, just this moment- after all, Mafia: Definitive is $40, and Age of Empires definitive (based on my personal experience with 2 and general criticisms of 1 and 3 being abandoned and harddrive-wiping respectively [the latter of which the developers openly acknowledged but also rudely and dismissively brushed off] ) is a scammy, flaming pile of broken garbage].

But they usually don't. They take old classics, put minimal effort into them and bank on nostalgia generating the sales.

AKA, Disney. 2015 and onwards.

There's a good one occasionally, sure.

Okay, so not Disney, then. Neeevermind!

Tl;dr version:

most of the time they're really not that good and not worth the money.