It already seemed like Sony wasn’t interested in offering free upgrades to PS5 for their older PS4 games, after the next-gen release of theGhost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut involved only a paid upgrade option for current-gen owners. This new statement and announcement seem to solidify what appeared obvious: Sony will not let you upgrade first-party PS4 games for free anymore. console, as Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO John Kodera declared that the PS5 will live alongside with the current PS4 for a “long time”.
Now it appears that among those who don’t want to upgrade their next-gen system and retain their investment in the first PlayStation released so far, there might be no more option to play some of their favorite games on the upcoming console. Sony confirmed that they will not offer any upgrade path for those who own first-party PS4 titles like Spider-Man or God of War (both exclusively developed by their first party studio), as there is no more hardware architecture compatibility between both systems:
“ We would like to ensure that PS4 users can continue playing the titles they love for many years, by leveraging supercomputer-level processing, through deep learning and neural network technologies […]”
NAOKI SAKURAI (SIE Worldwide Studios President)
This will definitely be a surprise to most Playstation fans who bought both consoles.
Comments:
I’ve never understood why Sony and Nintendo are just so anti-consumer friendly, and seem to just make everything more difficult than it needs to be. Not that I think Microsoft, of all companies, is the paragon of consumer friendliness, but when they announced how Smart Direct would work I was a bit confused. I had no idea WHY they were touting it as a feature because like... to anyone with half a brain cell, that’s obviously how it should work. It felt a bit like Chevy advertising their new car as having wheels. But after seeing just how awful Nintendo has been about transferring games across generations, and experiencing how awful Sony is about next gen upgrades, meanwhile my Xbox just... works. PS5 might have some slightly better specs, and they might be selling more, but MS won this round in my book.
mattcannontm / 2021-11-01 10:21:36
Nintendo actually used to be better with this. GameCube games played on Wii, then Wii games on Wii U, you could transfer your eShop games for a small fee to Wii U as well.GBA played on DS, the DS on 3ds, and you could freely move your digital games from DSi to 3ds. It's only with the Switch were they decided to start over. Hopefully the Super Switch Extreme will be free upgrades/transfers of eShop in the future.
Jaguar41482 / 2021-11-24 12:09:43
I’ve never understood why Sony and Nintendo are just so anti-consumer
friendly, and seem to just make everything more difficult than it needs
to be.
This might be a hot take, but it could be a japanese culture thing? Like we look at it as anti consumer, but they don’t see it like that in Japan? Or they know that they have brand loyalty so they’re not too worried about it? Also, they’re used to the old ways of making money.Meanwhile, Microsoft is doing something different and thinking about long term. And it’s crazy how it’s paying off. Like seriously, Smart Delivery wasn’t a big deal when we first heard about it and now it’s like a godsend. Not trying to be a fangirl here, but it’s seriously impressive how they’ve turned around from how they were at the beginning of last gen to now.
aurorablaize / 2021-12-10 09:50:38
To be fair to Nintendo, though, given the Switch’s handheld nature and the fact its architecture is pretty different from that of the Wii U, it was never really going to be able to take Wii U discs (or even digital games) and play them without a hell of a lot of work. Considering about three people bought a Wii U they obviously decided it wasn’t worth the extra work. I don’t necessarily agree with the move, but you see how many copies the re-released Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World have sold and it’s clear it worked for them.
kinghippo / 2021-12-22 15:26:27
I also think it’s slightly ironic that a LOT of those policies that doomed the initial Xbox One, from the perspective of hindsight, were very clearly meant to smooth the way toward a GamePass-like subscription service, and GamePass is a large part of the reason Microsoft is considered the more ‘consumer friendly’ of the three options currently. They just made the absolutely bone-headed move of introducing the digital-first policies before introducing the digital-only service. (Imagine how different that initial rollout might have been if they’d introduced GamePass at the same time, and said ‘every Xbox One ships with a free year of the service’, as an example.)
dylanoconorkinja / 2022-01-03 06:22:11
It’s about leverage, basically. Companies will do whatever they think they can get away with. When MS had the dominant market share with the X360, they were all about anti-consumer bullshit liked timed exclusivity. They paid Take-Two $50 million to keep GTA4's DLC off competing platforms for a year. They paid Square millions to make the Tomb Raider Underworld DLC permanently exclusive to X360. They even introduced the fee for basic multiplayer functionality, which the other platforms later adopted. Sony now has the dominant market share with the PS5 so they feel no need to be consumer-friendly. As for Nintendo, they’ve always had leverage because of their exclusives. You want to play a Mario or Zelda game, you have to buy a Nintendo console. They know that they have a built-in fanbase that will buy whatever they put out so, like Sony, they feel no need to be consumer-friendly. Conversely, MS has been on the backfoot since the XBO so that’s why they’ve been focused on endearing themselves to customers.Basically, the only company that doesn’t become anti-consumer when it has leverage is Valve. Steam has had the dominant PC market share for years yet they haven’t introduced any fees for users and have done nothing but improve the service for both developers/publishers and customers.
Jerykk / 2022-01-16 17:19:18
At the time, we were coming towards the end of a long period of “cloud feature functionality protocol normalization” (note: clearly not the real name, it’s probably less stupid sound but I don’t know what it is). For example, Xbox announced that, at least in theory, any Xbox Play Anywhere title ought to have compatible saves across PC and Xbox, which were automatically tied to online storage just like console-only saves were. Unless the developer said “No,” because there wasn’t really anything Microsoft could do about that.I think, pretty reasonably, you thought that features like this—a console title purchase working in terms of forwards-compatibility as well as backwards-compatibility, interchangeable saves across the same releases, etc., would become standard because, a decade-plus earlier, a bunch of things Microsoft did on Xbox 360, to the surprise of many, became industry standard. A unified online network with social network protocols and DLC delivery, for example (remember why Sony swore, up and down, they would never bow to the tyranny of unified online networks?). After that, “freely-available” (well, as part of the premium service package initially) cloud save storage to finally remedy disparate save storage across multiple consoles, etc. Stuff that Sony (and sometimes Nintendo) later adopted. “Smart Delivery” (which, to be fair, is more elaborate than “Your saves are copied online, they work on any console with your account on them”) seemed like the next obvious standards framework moving forward, especially after the Backwards Compatibility debate was finally resolved (after Sony being decidedly uncomfortable with the notion of all PS4 games working on the potential PS5, then promising to implement that feature, to the benefit of everyone, after Microsoft shouted about it enough and even pushed through B.C. on in the 8th generation consoles). It might not be the same across all platforms, which is understandable (remember when PSN has those various rules about cloud save storage?), but it was the overall direction things were moving.Apparently not. As I said, a PS5 being able to play every PS4 game (as far as I know; there’s probably a specific technical exception out there somewhere, but that has to be sub-1%) is excellent, but Sony really didn’t like being pressured into a shared title ownership across the generation gap (to be fair, neither did some developers; look at Control), which has an obvious sales downside to developers as well. Smart Delivery might just end up being an aspect of a particular ecosystem, the same way Microsoft and Sony have taken extremely different approaches to the shared goal of backwards compatibility for the 7th generation libraries (Xbox One B.C. versus Playstation 4 libraries). Who knows? Some of Microsoft’s decisions are mysterious; if anything, even more so with Sony.
chuang / 2022-01-25 06:50:46
When you think about, anti-consumer practices are the bedrock of console manufacturers. In an age when consoles are small PCs, you can plug a gamepad to a PC and your PC to your TV for the price of a gamepad and an HDMI cable, console gaming has no practical reason to exist. It exists because of historical reasons (consoles were a major player in the infancy of videogames), and because Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have every reason to not make you question the fact that consoles are in a strange place right now. This is why publisher-exclusive titles exist. This is how manufacturers make themselves artificially relevant, at the expanse of consumers. Every single argument in favour of consoles can be applied to “your PC plugged on the living room screen”. Even Nintendo knows this, and it is part of the reason why they expanded into handheld devices.
corentingachon / 2022-02-05 21:45:45
Really, the only spec that’s better on PS5 is the speed of the SSD. That’s fine, of course, but it’s not exactly a tit for tat vs having 20% more GPU power and more CPU power. Sony's biggest advantage this generation is brand good will from PS4. And they're doing a surprisingly large amount of work to erode that.
fragopotamus / 2022-02-21 04:45:43
Having some of the absolute best games of all time, as part of their first party roster is extremely helpful, and is something that simply cannot be understated. I utterly hate the PS controller. The left joystick is in the wrong spot, and ends up creating a painful pressure spot on my thumb from constantly holding it forward. I hate that I have to charge the controller every 4 hours. I hate their operating system. I hate their menus and user interface. I hate their store front. I hate the way their systems look, and I hate how loud they are. I’ve personally always preferred the Xbox offerings, but simply because of their incredible exclusive games, I’ve owned every single PS console, and will do so until they stop having amazing exclusives. Those exclusive games are what will make everyone overlook their significant shortcomings.
mattcannontm / 2022-03-06 01:03:17
It’s not a culture thing because Playstation officially moved their HQ to California in 2016, and around 2014-2015 there was the transition phase. Since the move, Playstation is more western than eastern. One of the biggest controversial change and the censorship policy. Then there is also the whole pushing away more niche dev and studios like Japan Studio shutting down. There is also a lot of Japanese devs who decided to stop working with Playstation due to this decision. So any anti-consumer policies and design since ~2015 is coming from people running the show in Cali not Japan.
misterenigma / 2022-03-17 01:17:41
The truth is that generally, those who lead by a fair margin always start seeing customer service and any consumer-friendly initiative as an expense in their books, because they don’t have a lot to win in it (as they’re already market leaders). Meanwhile, the underdogs will invest a lot more in customer service and friendly pro-consumer strategies to try to win back customers, as they have a lot more to gain from doing so.It’s been like that since forever. In whatever industry. Top dogs rarely invest in pro-consumer measures because they have nothing (or not enough) to gain from them because they’re already the top dog. They’re not going to make more money by investing on the customers they already won over.At some point, the balance may shift again and Sony will eventually lose its market-leader crown. And they’ll start being pro-consumer again when they’ll have something to gain from it. All it takes is one wrong try at guessing what the consumers will put up with. Ask Microsoft about about how this went for them with the Xbox One... ;)
Realnoize42 / 2022-03-27 10:51:00
Yep. And like I mentioned in another post, this is typical behavior in any industry. when you have something to gain, you’re willing to invest in consumer-friendly policies, because ultimately, it’ll bring you more customers and thus more money. But once you’ve become the leader in a definite market, these policies are becoming a budget-eating factor in your quest to make more money, because they’re not brining in as much customers as they used to (because you’re the market-leader already!).The leader position in any industry is rarely the one giving the most value to their customers. Simply because, logically, they don’t have anything to gain by giving more.
Realnoize42 / 2022-04-10 12:29:18
Honestly, I don’t get this. I have very superficial knowledge of IT, and my proudest achievements to date are locating the AppData file to alter a few lines of code to my liking and installing extra RAM bars on my own without breaking anything. Over time, PCs became increasingly easier to use (that is a least one nice thing to say about Microsoft’s tendency to take control of your machine away from you), and consoles became increasingly painful to operate. There was a time where simply installing a game on your PC would result in unexpected side effects that required solving with good IT knowledge. At that same time, playing on console just meant putting the CD into the player, and a minute later you were in the middle of a dreary castle killing skeletons.But this is not true anymore. There was this cross-phenomenon of PCs becoming a lot more streamlined in use, both in hardware and software (hi Steam), and consoles doing their best to mimick PCs, with social spaces and unnecessary, convoluted features nobody asked for. Starting with the PS3/360, setting up a console is arguably more of a pain than just booting your brand-new PC and letting yourself be hand-held through the automated installation. Consoles require constant hardware updates, they have awfully long Day 1 patches, require setting up Internet settings to do anything at all...
corentingachon / 2022-04-21 12:43:24
Imo, promising a $10 dollar universal upgrade option for future cross platform titles is a very reasonable compromise.The issue before was this:1) Tom wants a PS5 but can’t buy one because of market shortages2) Tom will eventually buy a PS5 when he is able, but still wants to play games coming out3) Tom buys Horizon: Forbidden West on PS4 because he wants to play it now4) Tom eventually gets a PS55) Now Tom has to pay full-price ($70) to get the PS5 upgrade, or have paid an extra 20 dollars when he bought the game on PS4Allowing the Toms of the world to buy the games, then upgrade *if they feel the upgrade is worth it - spoiler alert, for many games, it isn’t*, I think that’s reasonable.Do I love that we have an arbitrary 10 dollar surcharge for PS5 games that literally have the same development life cycle, and all that changes is the PS5 games have a settings XML file with slightly better graphics? No.Is this better than the alternative (looking at you, Control) and ultimately a reasonable compromise? Yes.
DeathBySmiley / 2022-05-06 05:03:05
The issue in this case was Sony saying that First Party games would be free, then releasing information that Horizon: Forbidden West was going to require buying a special version to get both PS4 and PS5 versions with no option to upgrade otherwise. Then, when called out on this not matching what they said in the past they said “Well, I guess we’ll honor what we said in the past, but now we’re just gonna charge you all in the future.” Like it’s a punishment for holding them to their word.
edmundhunsicker / 2022-05-19 01:19:35
It absolutely is a fair compromise if you consider those your only options. The problem is that their direct competition across the street is doing the same thing for free. So naturally any PS4 owner looking to get a PS5 would want their console manufacturer of choice to match. That’s why competition is good for the industry.
staindgrey / 2022-05-31 06:56:02
If you’re paying money for something, it is not ‘definitionally’ free stuff. I mean by your logic any other component we’re not still getting nickeled and dimed for is ‘free stuff’. Should we be paying extra for every level after the first one? Should we be paying extra to equip weapons? Connect online? You’re going out of your way to defend charging for stuff that has long been part of the complete package for any games before.
uruzu-2 / 2022-06-11 07:10:08
The problem is that it’s only in the f-ing console gaming world that fans are actually ok with this, and even defending this. I’ve actually never understood that.People would be pissed off if the app they bought on their iPhone 11 would require a payment to be used on their brand new iPhone 12 that would run it better. PC gamers would be pissed to no end if they’d have to pay a premium to be able to move the graphic quality setting to “ultra” because they bought a new GPU. The apps I bought on my old tablet aren’t asking me to pay to have them run better on my new tablet. And all the PC games I have now will magically look 10 times better when I’ll upgrade to a new GPU with ray-tracing in the future. No one will ask me a dime to make my games use those features.Now, to be fair, in the days when platforms where VASTLY different from generation to generation, like, using a completely different architecture, and even different storage mediums, this was “a bit” more excusable. But now, both new consoles are built on the same architecture as the previous ones. The reason people will pay more is simply because Sony said so (and because otherwise it would make no sense for them to try and charge more for PS5 versions because they’re Ps5).
Realnoize42 / 2022-06-20 11:22:11
The difference is that an app for the iPhone 12 doesn’t cost 16% more than the same app for the iPhone 11 or 4 for that matter and games don’t cost more for the PC because they have an ultra graphics mode. Games for the new generation cost $70 while the previous versions still cost $60, so anyone could buy the previous generation game and then get the free upgrade when they load it on their PS5. There are a couple of solutions besides charging the extra $10: make the PS4 version $70 or make the PS4 version not work on the PS5. If you have another solution that doesn’t involve the company coughing up all their margin, feel free to share.
nathan1616 / 2022-07-03 22:19:41
PS4 games retail at a lower price than their PS5 counterpart.By paying a small upgrade fee, you’re essentially paying the same as you would have if you bought the game on PS5 to begin with.If you don’t like that, then you’ve still got a PS4 game that will run better on the PS5 than it did on the PS4.However, if Sony didn’t charge this fee, then what would be the point in anyone ever buying the PS5 version of a game? They could simply get the PS4 version. Upgrade for free to the PS5 version. And if everyone did that. Well, guess what would happen to the retail price of PS4 games? Yup. They’d go up. Affecting everyone regardless of of they have a PS5 or not.
someone_else / 2022-07-14 22:34:35
However, if Sony didn’t charge this fee, then what would be the point in anyone ever buying the PS5 version of a game?What the hell is the point of having a PS5 version in the first place? Unless I’m missing something, it’s the same game in either case, but will run better on the PS5 since it has better hardware.I mean if I’m playing Doom Eternal on my PC and decide to upgrade my machine, when I replay Eternal on my new hardware it’s still the same game. The capability to run better on faster hardware was always there. Why should a game be priced differently depending on the level of hardware that the user has?Now if and when a game adds new content, features, etc then THAT I can see charging extra for, but again that has nothing to do with what hardware the user is running games on.
uruzu-2 / 2022-07-27 18:50:45
I’m not sure what you consider “features”, but on my Series X there are substantial visual upgrades and better performance tailored to the Series X upgrade version. It’s not simply running on better hardware. It’s a game tailored to the hardware capable of ray tracing, native 4K/HDR, 60-120FPS, etc. When I was on vacation, I played Gears 5 on an XB1S again for the first time since getting my Series X and oh my God did it feel like a downgrade.
staindgrey / 2022-08-09 00:27:09
He’s saying that the game is the same for all platforms and it’s only the settings that change. On the PS5/Series X the graphics options are turned up and the framerate limit is increased and some visual features like ray tracing might be enabled. The game looks better and plays more fluid but this is the same as going into the graphics options on a PC version and cranking everything to max to play on a high end system. When he’s talking about features being added he means things actually added to the game that can’t be accessed by simply turning up the graphics settings.
tlewis1701 / 2022-08-21 06:03:07
Or maybe its an understanding that game prices have been static for a very long time now and that development costs keep on going up.That’s not how game budgeting works. Development costs are one-time, budgeted based on projected sales. Per-unit profits have been increasing in the game industry for decades, which is why there’s downward pressure on game prices, not upward. Adjusted for inflation, NES and SNES games were about $120 in today’s money.Donkey Kong Country, the third best selling SNES game of all time, sold 7.5 million units in its first five months. Today it stands at around 9 million units sold and about a billion today-dollars in profit.GTA5, the second best selling game of all time, sold 11.2 million copies in its first day. By 2018 it had made $6 billion in revenue, 150 million units sold and about $5.7 billion in profit.Game prices being static when they should have gone down is how profits have spiked so much for successful titles in the industry. Take it from a former developer: there’s no cost-based or market-based justification for increasing the standard unit price. Any developer or publisher telling you stories about development costs is deliberately giving you an incomplete picture.
prime-directive / 2022-09-04 22:22:05
This. This. x1000 this.I’m quite tired of the age-old argument about game prices having been static for a long time. People only talk about the prices, but never mention that best-sellers back then managed less than 10 million units sold, compared to best sellers now who sell about ten times that. No sane company will deliberately raise development costs for games if they don’t think they can recoup that money in sales. It’s part of the planning. Games are developed according to an allotted budget set depending on predicted sales. It’s NOT the other way around. Games aren’t priced on how much they cost to make. No company is willingly developing a game that they think wouldn’t make money sold at the standard price.Now, one could argue that raising the retail price COULD influence budget decisions for future titles, unless that raise in price is mostly absorbed by Sony itself and not passed on to the developer. which may very well be the case.
Realnoize42 / 2022-09-17 03:57:47
Modern-day capitalism is trying to figure out just how far you can go with prices JUST before it starts angering most consumers, and then set for that.Apparently, people aren’t angry enough about it (some are even defending this! Which is a godsend for those companies - and never seen anywhere else in any industry! People defending that fact they’ll have to pay MORE!)Same thing with mobile phone plans in Canada. Why are we the place in the world where is costs more than anywhere else? Because we put up with it and pay... simple as that. So now game prices (on Ps5) will be f-ing $90... (+tax so over $100 per game... wow).
Realnoize42 / 2022-09-26 08:10:00
I’ll start this off by saying it seems like you agree with me that development costs are a fabricated justification to hike prices and the reality is games are more profitable today than they’ve ever been. Awesome, glad we agree! Almost all the rest of this is price and profit analysis since you called it out.At $60 a cart, around $5 went to manufacturing and distribution, and $15 to the retailer. Buybacks were rare for SNES games and even rarer for its best performers and it’d be an educated guess at best so I’m excluding them. Of the remaining $40, around $7 was Nintendo’s platform fee, leaving around $33 to the developer.The platform fee paid for the advertising but is otherwise profit. The SNES hardware cost was fully inclusive, not a loss leader, so Nintendo profited about $53 million from the first five months. Rare took about $248 million; minus Rare’s development cost and Nintendo’s advertising costs leaves the approximate total profit from the first five months sales at $284 million, just shy of $508 million in 2021 dollars.The game since sold about another 1.8 million copies on the SNES. Retailers have already paid the publisher so when they run discounts it’s out of their own pocket, not the publisher’s pocket, but even assuming a generous 50% discount from Nintendo on a game that was still selling strongly, we’re looking at about $36 million on top, or about $59 million if we assume 1998 dollars today. That brings us up to $567 million.I wasn’t very clear in my earlier comment and kinda mixed categories so that’s on me, but the 9 million sales was just for the SNES, and the ‘about a billion profit’ thing was speaking about the game across all its platforms. So...DKC was also released on the GBC, where it made about 2.2 million sales. I can’t find its launch price there but similarly popular titles seemed to launch around $45 so I’m going to go with $40 retail. Assuming the same percentages for the SNES breakdown, that makes about $26 a unit or about $57.2 million 2000 dollars, around $88 million today. That brings us to $655 million.Rinse and repeat for the Gameboy Advance. 1.8 million units, $30 games, using the same breakdown gives $36 million 2003 dollars, $52 million today, bumping us to $707 million.Donkey Kong Country was also released on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS, included built-in on the SNES Classic, and on the Switch via Switch Online. Unfortunately I can’t find any sales figures for any of those channels but a quick look at the points exchange seems to put the average VC game at $5, which for a digital distribution is almost entirely profit. I think it’s reasonable to add another $50 million for over a decade of digital sales at that price point, but I’m happy to be persuaded otherwise.Where does that finally land us? About $750 million today-dollars of profit. So you’re right, I was highballing it in saying it was near a billion, but it wasn’t as far off as you thought.Anyway, a game like DKC profiting even less than I allowed for kinda reinforces my argument that games today make vastly more profit in real dollars than they used to, putting downward pressure on price. It’s only stayed static - or I suppose now going up - because of greed, not development costs. The margins on successful games have been through the roof for ages, now they want even more.
prime-directive / 2022-10-12 05:51:05
No. Your understanding of inflation is wrong. Yesterday’s costs and revenues need to be adjusted for today’s real value to compare expenses or earnings across time; otherwise everything new would always be the biggest and best which isn’t true. Yesterday’s profits don’t get inflated to today’s value the same way because if the company held that money it would be worth less not more today. Second you’re shifting the goalposts. You made a patently false statement and I explained the reasons it was false. It turns out Nintendo is a publicly traded company that must disclose things like sales and profit. From their 2020 numbers we see they made record operating profit of $5.9 billion for the year. Parts of that are mobile, TCG, merchandise, and licensing. However, their core business is gaming, and we know how many units they moved to get $5.9 billion in profit. They sold 28.8 million consoles and 230.9 million games. All discussion of all the games you think made billions in profit is nonsense. A few games do make billions in profits that get paid out as bonuses (spent by people) or allow more investment in the next game (spent by the company).
nathan1616 / 2022-10-24 11:27:12
It seems assuming a cordial disposition from you was a mistake. I initially thought you were responding in good faith and simply mistaken, but now I see you’re bluffing.Real values are nominal values adjusted for inflation, which is exactly what I showed. The historical values I gave were normalised to present day values in order to remove the inflation effect that would otherwise distort the nominal values, so that the adjusted historical value can be directly compared with the modern value to illustrate a value change in real terms.The rest of your comment is noise:Nintendo’s FY20 financial statements have no bearing on the 27-year - or even FY95 - profits of a title they didn’t develop.Comparing a company’s single year across multiple titles and hardware against a single title’s lifetime profits is apples to oranges. You’re right that it’s nonsense, but that’s because it’s a strawman you manufactured yourself.How profits are spent or distributed after the fact is irrelevant to the discussion of how profitable games are.You were right that my estimate of DKC’s adjusted profits to date were off, but you’ve burned what credibility that bought you with this bizarrely aggressive display of refusing to accept you failed to take breadth of factors into account that I did.Looking at your other replies, you seem to compensate for the gaps in your capability with bluster. In that respect you’re remarkably similar to Spamfeller Loves Nazis, who tried bluffing about my actual field of expertise (game development) and then tried to raise a noisy ruckus when he was caught out. He didn’t fare well from that, and I doubt you’ll fare any better from this.If you want to have a rational conversation, you know how to act. If you’d rather smear yourself in your own shit and think your impeccable debating skills are why people don’t want to be near you, keep doing what you’re doing.
prime-directive / 2022-11-06 07:43:35