According to Insider, Sony is charging a $10 upgrade fee to bring cross-generational games from a PS4 to a PS5. From the report: When new game consoles launch nowadays, a variety of games on that new console are also available on the previous generation of consoles. The next major PlayStation 5 exclusive game, for instance, is also headed to the PlayStation 4: “Horizon Forbidden West” launches in early 2022, and millions of players will get it on the last generation console. [..] Unfortunately, when PlayStation 4 owners do finally find and purchase a PlayStation 5, those cross-generational games don’t automatically make the leap with them. Instead, Sony intends to charge $10 apiece for that upgrade — and that’s only after fans criticized Sony for an even stranger policy.
“Thursday was to be a celebration of ‘Horizon Forbidden West’ and the amazing team at Guerrilla working to deliver it on February 18, 2022,” PlayStation leader Jim Ryan said in an update on a Sony blog post earlier this month. “However, it’s abundantly clear that the offerings we confirmed in our pre-order kickoff missed the mark.” Ryan was referring to a previously announced pre-order announcement for “Horizon Forbidden West” that revealed the only way to get both the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game was to order an $80 “digital deluxe” edition — a $20 increase over the base level $60 price of a PS4 video game.
Sony had previously announced that any PlayStation 5 games in the “launch window” would only need to be purchased on one console to own both the PS4 and PS5 versions. “Horizon Forbidden West” has been delayed repeatedly, which pushed it out of the ambiguous “launch window” Sony set for the PlayStation 5 (which launched in November 2020). When PlayStation fans cited this, Sony caved. Moreover, Ryan laid out a clear upgrade path for the future — albeit one that’s still open to scrutiny. “Moving forward, PlayStation first-party exclusive cross-gen titles (newly releasing on PS4 & PS5) — both digital and physical — will offer a $10 USD digital upgrade option from PS4 to PS5,” Ryan said. “This will apply to the next ‘God of War’ and ‘Gran Turismo 7,’ and any other exclusive cross-gen PS4 & PS5 title published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.” Microsoft’s policy, on the other hand, states that if you owned a game on a previous Xbox console, you own it on the current consoles. If there’s a newer version of that game for your newer console, that’s the version you get when you buy and download the game.
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