$20 for an expansion is fine. I'd like to get it if it reviews well.
$10 extra for some rumble and fixing the lip syncing is just weird. It's literally the newest and most recent PS4 exclusive, so I find it surprising that stuff isn't grandfathered in a bit. I think inFamous SS added PS4 Pro texture updates for free and were among the first of the Sony studios to do it.
This. I see Doom Eternal's free PS5 patch everywhere on my youtube feed nowadays with people boasting about ray tracing and 120 fps, and then I see Sony charge $$ to do the same for Death Stranding and Ghost of Tsushima, the first such Sony first party titles to get upgrades.
That's right, before GoT, no legacy Sony first party title got a PS5 SKU. Meanwhile every third party developer went out of their way to add support for PS5 features for free. The list is huge:
- Borderlands 3
- Metro Exodus (Ray tracing)
- Control (Ray tracing)
- Doom Eternal (Ray tracing)
- Mortal Shell
- Final Fantasy 7
- Avengers
- No Man's Sky
- Rainbow Six Seige
- Star Wars Fallen Order ( A fucking EA game)
- Cyberpunk is also getting a free upgrade later this year
- CoD Warzone is getting one later this year
- Witcher 3 Wild Hunt as well
These are all games that came out before the launch of new consoles. Some of them had DLC they wanted to sell, some didnt. But even if they had DLC to sell, they didnt tie upgrades to the DLC like Sony is doing with DS and Days Gone.
It just feels cheap. Like Sony is some indie developer who is trying to get by and cant afford these upgrades for free. It feels like they are leaching their consumer base for every dollar they can get. I didnt like the $10 price hike but their games feel expensive and bigger than most other games so ok, fine premium games for a premium price. But this is just wrong on so many levels.
It's wrong because it bucks the industry precedent of offering these upgrades for free. It's wrong because they arent even adding ray tracing or 120 fps support like third parties have. It's wrong because they have gone out of their way to port Horizon and Days gone to PC while ignoring the PS4 owners. At least Days Gone got a 60 fps patch, but even that is locked behind 1800p checkerboard even the PS5 should easily be able to handle native 1800p 60 fps if not a full 4k 60 fps seeing as how a 1.8 tflops GCN 1.0 GPU can easily do 1080p 30 fps.
It feels icky because it is. Because their competition MS has released 120 fps modes for Gears 5 and Ori. Doom is a fucking first party MS game now and they felt that PS5 owners deserved an upgrade.I highly doubt Sony paid them for it since Sony doesnt even want to pay first party devs to do these for free. This Doom upgrade is on MS. Think about that for a second.
I think this is the new direction of Sony under Jim Ryan. Expect more of this penny pinching. Every move he's made from making games cross gen to porting games to PC, closing revered studios despite posting record profits, increasing price of games to $70 despite them selling more and better than ever, and now charging for haptic feedback and native SKUs reeks of penny pinching.
To be fair, this is how big companies thrive. Amazon made billions while forcing employees to wear trackers that monitored their every move, while forcing warehouse employees to pee in bottles, while pitting office employees against each other in a dog eat dog office culture. MS killed all their competition by buying them out if not straight up cheating them. See Dos and Apple. They now charge $70 a year for MS Office when it used to be $100 to own it lifetime. Apple forces a $200 profit per iPhone no matter what cost which results in steadily increasing prices for phones that started as $500 premium products to now $1,100-1,300 products and near slave conditions in China. Sony is no different. They are passing the costs to consumers just like most big companies nowadays.