Wouldn't a better way to do that be not offering any free upgrades at all?
Control will only support free next-gen upgrades with purchase of upcoming $40 Ultimate Edition
- Thread starter Nightengale
- Start date
It used to be that certain things were marked down as "cost of doing business" and building/retaining an audience.
These days a lot of companies don't care about that at all and will try to get every penny they can from you, chasing after new, bigger audiences, instead of working to build a following.
Going after a new audience is not necessarily a bad thing—look at how diverse games are now—but trying to milk their audience for all they can is.
Who would buy this game without upgrade with next gen just 2 months away?
But you can sell this copy to those who played it year ago... maybe at least some of them.
Win-win (for 505, not us).
I honestly don't know why people come into threads where people are mad about a company doing something egregious or stupid and go "why are you all surprised they're trying to make money lol."
Like...way to miss the point.
Well except for the negative word of mouth.
I think if I didn't own the game and was thinking of buying it, and someone told me what they did I'd feel really icky about it and not really want to support them.
It's especially shitty because they are responding to people about other things on twitter, it's not like they're just never replying to things they're just refusing to respond to anyone about this in particular despite the backlash.
It'll go away eventually, so staying silent will probably work but it definitely shows how little of a shit Remedy care about their fans.
To be fair, as others mentioned, 505 is the publisher. I doubt Remedy has the final say on a business decision like this.
I've emailed 505 corporate directly to let them know my grievances with a handy list of all the gaming outlets covering the decision, which is almost universally negative. Even if it "goes away", it has long-term ramifications for how I'll ever look at or buy a game from 505 ever again. Goodwill can take generations to build up, and only one terrible decision to undo. I'm in good company for holding off purchases from companies that were once Day 0 pre-orders due to problematic decisions or bad business choices.
It's a shame. It's much easier to make money when you have customers who are eager and happy to pre-order or buy your game at launch, as opposed to hundreds of thousands of players who got the short-end of the stick who won't be anywhere near as interested in buying whatever you put out next because they remember getting screwed over the last time.
It's such a weird decision.
It almost makes me think there must be some weird technical or platform holder policy regarding DLC across gens that's tripping them up.
When I try to work through the logic I just end up confusing myself.
Here's my nonsense thought process, I wrote while very tired:
505 - Every PS5 version of Control Ultimate Edition includes the DLC, so we can't give the upgrade to PS4 owner who might not own the DLC.
Solution: Make a version of Control for PS5 that doesn't include the DLC.
505 - That requires more testing of the next gen versions as we have to test with and without each DLC pack to match the PS4 version. That's too expensive so we wont do it.
Solution: How about including the free upgrade as part of the season pass? We've seen other devs add more content to existing season pass owners in the past. This means you know everyone who is playing on PS5 is entitled to the DLC.
505 - That's a good idea and it's what we should do. However, this leaves out players who bought the DLC individually instead of buying the season pass.
Solution: That's got to be a tiny percentage of people who bought the DLC, better to disappoint them than to anger your early adopters and season pass loyal customers, right?
505 - No, we'd rather put all the current owners in the same boat. Cleaner this way. Existing fans will pay again to get the next gen improvements, or they'll happily play the PS4 version PS5 via backwards compatibility where it'll run at a stable framerate with quick loading. We're doing people who buy the Ultimate Edition a favour by giving them the next gen upgrade for free.
I can't make it work without coming to the conclusion that greed is at the heart of this.
Which it always is. But I love Control and Remedy, I want to find a reason that doesn't boil down the greed of their publisher being willing to anger their fans.
It almost makes me think there must be some weird technical or platform holder policy regarding DLC across gens that's tripping them up.
When I try to work through the logic I just end up confusing myself.
Here's my nonsense thought process, I wrote while very tired:
505 - Every PS5 version of Control Ultimate Edition includes the DLC, so we can't give the upgrade to PS4 owner who might not own the DLC.
Solution: Make a version of Control for PS5 that doesn't include the DLC.
505 - That requires more testing of the next gen versions as we have to test with and without each DLC pack to match the PS4 version. That's too expensive so we wont do it.
Solution: How about including the free upgrade as part of the season pass? We've seen other devs add more content to existing season pass owners in the past. This means you know everyone who is playing on PS5 is entitled to the DLC.
505 - That's a good idea and it's what we should do. However, this leaves out players who bought the DLC individually instead of buying the season pass.
Solution: That's got to be a tiny percentage of people who bought the DLC, better to disappoint them than to anger your early adopters and season pass loyal customers, right?
505 - No, we'd rather put all the current owners in the same boat. Cleaner this way. Existing fans will pay again to get the next gen improvements, or they'll happily play the PS4 version PS5 via backwards compatibility where it'll run at a stable framerate with quick loading. We're doing people who buy the Ultimate Edition a favour by giving them the next gen upgrade for free.
I can't make it work without coming to the conclusion that greed is at the heart of this.
Which it always is. But I love Control and Remedy, I want to find a reason that doesn't boil down the greed of their publisher being willing to anger their fans.
Basically.
They pooping in the face of people that have already bought the game in the range of 30-40-50 + dlcs saying no upgrade to them, meanwhile, i will get this edition when its 20-30 with the upgraded graphics. The important takeaway here is, dont support publisers until they release their last edition.
Every owner of The Witcher 3 on PS4 or XB1 can upgrade to a next gen version of the game. Doesn't matter which version you own.
FOR FREE...
Oh, yeah, it's a painful comparison. I still have hope 505 will rethink that, for Control's sake.
Remedy or 505 Games? I don't think it's fair to compare their situations at all. Control seemed like it was a successful game, but it pales in comparison to the success of The Witcher 3. I have no problems paying for a next-gen upgrade; people put work into this stuff. It's just baffling that Remedy/505 didn't/couldn't give original game owners a path forward without paying for the Ultimate Edition.
Well, that shoots down almost every attempt at defending this shitshow decision from 505.
Witcher came out almost 5 years ago.
It's just a greedy fuck decision. I'm sorry but I wont cut remedy any slack in this matter either. They aren't some struggling indie dev that's new on the block. The silence on this matter makes it worse.