Horizon Forbidden West – The Next Gen Upgrade Debate

Sony recently announced that if you want to buy Horizon Forbidden West on PS4 and PS5, you’ll have to pay a £10 premium. I’ve seen many people complaining and the typical MSM (mainstream media) response, which consists simply of comments like THIS IS EVIL AND ANTI-CONSUMER, THEY HAVE TO REVERSE, all quoting Microsoft’s way of handling next-gen. I find this extremely short-sighted. I see this situation from multiple sides: there’s the consumer side, the business side, and then the actual end product delivered side.

Let me start off by saying, and this is one of the angles, that it is not always justified. Ghost of Tsushima on PS5 adds borderline nothing, no native 4k, just an upped checkerboard resolution, no graphics improvements outside of upped particle numbers, some 3D audio tweaks and haptics, no actual major work done, and it is not worth the £10 premium. This is one of the arguments that are justifiable, and I will touch and build on this point later.

The first side is the “pro-consumer” side. Why should the user have to pay that extra £10, especially with Game Pass and free upgrades on Xbox? On the surface, sure this makes Sony look like the bad guy and anti-consumer, but the reality is much more nuanced. For starters, everyone complained that Horizon was cross-gen, and how it will hold back the game. While there will without a doubt be limitations due to PS4 being a dev target, we already have confirmed a unique underwater system on PS5 that is leagues beyond anything in any other open-world game. So, what should Sony have done? Not bothered taking advantage of the PS5, just added a 60FPS mode for backwards compatibility and call it a day?

I can already hear people shouting “NO JUST GIVE IT AS A FREE UPGRADE!” Microsoft does, but here is the situation, and I am not for one minute saying Sony could not absorb the cost, however, no Microsoft game that is cross-gen has any systems that are unique to next-gen. It’s just resolution, some graphics upgrades, and frame rate. While giving those is great, Horizon has an underwater system unique to the PS5 that cost time and money to develop, much more than any resolution, FPS, and graphics upgrades would. We don’t know what else they have in store outside of haptics and 3D audio, but there’s a conscious effort to make the PS5 version more than just upping the numbers. Sony is making a game that needs to be optimized for PS4, PS4 PRO, and PS5, and they are actively going out of their way to use the PS5 as much as possible out of a cross-gen title.

To add to that, there’s also the case of budget. No one can deny Sony production values vs Microsoft are on two different levels entirely. Now, this doesn’t make one better than the other by default, but the fact is Sony games cost more. Microsoft is leaning more and more on Unreal Engine, a free engine for their games, while Sony is making bespoke engines and then spending a lot of time and money upgrading them, in addition to much bigger budgets for the games. Microsoft is making games that must fit a Game Pass budget, Sony doesn’t have to, and thus they pump more into it.

For Microsoft to upgrade an Unreal Engine game for Series X, it is incredibly easy, quick, and painless. There will be other games where it might be slightly more complex, but again, still nothing on the level of what Horizon is doing on the PS5. Not only that, all future Microsoft titles after this year are next-gen only. So, instantly the free upgrade proposition is gone and they’ve cut the cost of having to make sure the game runs on three different systems (XBox One, One S, and One X).

Meanwhile, Sony, for better or worse (depending on the game), is not abandoning their current user base and is instead, offering current-gen versions with next-gen upgrades, with games like Horizon offering tangible differences. For Guerrilla Games to make an entirely new underwater system for PS5, it would have taken a considerable amount of time upgrading their bespoke engine and thus, costs more money. This is not the 1:1 comparison the mainstream media is trying to portray. Sony is spending significantly more money making sure they don’t leave anyone out where possible, and in the case of Horizon, is offering tangible benefits.

I just want to put something else into perspective before I continue. The reason Microsoft is pretending to be pro-consumer is the typical reason all big companies do: they want to use their immense wealth to push everyone out of the market by taking an initial revenue hit in the expectation that in the long run they’ll have a monopoly and can bleed you dry. Microsoft’s revenue last year was $168 Billion and they have been making billions for years upon years and have an immense war chest.

Meanwhile, Sony has been taking losses in every other department bar PlayStation (which has only recently become profitable) for a significant number of years and do not have pockets as deep. Sony had a revenue of $81 Billion last year thanks to PlayStation, half of Microsoft’s. Now, I’m not saying Sony is poor, but it just doesn’t compare.

Microsoft is simply absorbing large losses with Game Pass and free upgrades because of two reasons: one, the upgrades are cheap, with how they do them, and two, they have their large war chest and revenue to rely on. This is their calculation, absorb the loss, make the competitor look anti-consumer, try to push them out, then jack the prices up. If you don’t think this is the case well let me, give you a quick story.

Everyone has heard of Windows 11 and its compatible CPU list. Now, while there are some justifications for this, there are multiple ways to get a TPM 2.0 chip, including a software-based version. Not only that, until yesterday there were a significant number of machines well under the CPU spec running the Windows 11 beta PERFECTLY FINE. They have now all been kicked off, so why did MS kick off machines that can work with Windows 11?

The answer is simple: MONEY. License costs potentially saved, a much smaller list of configurations they have to think about (albeit still large), and of course big money deals with Intel and AMD to push sales of new tech. New tech that, surprise-surprise, has all gone up in price due to a shortage. A shortage that somehow didn’t stop Microsoft from upgrading millions of servers for XCLOUD with SX hardware. Microsoft has never been pro-consumer, not even with the XBOX; everything is calculated. Yes, you can install it on unsupported devices when it releases, but you will not be getting a lot of security updates, which Microsoft says is the whole point of Windows 11. Why would you install an OS that is full of security holes? Of course, you wouldn’t. But at least Microsoft can pretend to not be shutting people out, when the reality is the opposite.

So, to start wrapping this up. There is the pro-consumer argument where you make comparisons to Microsoft who offers free upgrades but ignores the fact that companies like Nintendo are charging full price for Wii U ports (some with extra content, but not justifiable at the price). Additionally, Microsoft puts significantly less work in their next-gen versions of cross-gen titles, which again are ending soon. Leaving XBox One users out in the cold and removing three systems that would have to be developed for, saving significant time and cost.

While there are titles like Ghost of Tsushima that can not justify the extra cost, there are those like Spider-Man. Take a look at Miles Morales on PS4 vs PS5, the models, the rigging, everything is substantially upgraded. And while Tsushima is the worst PS5 upgrade by miles, Horizon is adding entirely new and unique systems to the PS5 version. Sony is putting more time and money into a cross-gen version than Microsoft has done and will likely ever do.

Sony is not abandoning its PS4 user-base unlike Microsoft with the previous-gen consoles and is thus spending significantly more on development. Could Sony afford to absorb the cost? Sure, they could. But that would be a losing strategy for them since there’s no way they could outspend Microsoft. That’s why they are offering significant benefits through a paid upgrade.

So where does this leave things? Is it justifiable to charge for a next-gen upgrade, given what Microsoft does and what the mainstream media says about it? Depending on the situation, IT ABSOLUTELY CAN BE! Horizon is being developed for three platforms and two generations of consoles, with a significant budget and extra time and money being put into engine upgrades, to offer things on PS5 that you will not experience at all on PS4.

That being said, Microsoft seems to have achieved manipulating the popular narrative in their favour and have completely skewed the value of things by using their significant wealth. No outlet will mention the fact that Microsoft is dumping last-gen after this year, or the fact that they’re in a much better place financially compared to Sony to justify spending significantly less money on their next-gen versions in comparison.

There is a lot more to this argument than what is being portrayed and it’s not as black and white as one company charges for upgrades and the other doesn’t. While Sony’s handling of things has not been flawless, it is far from anti-consumer, and depending on how you look at it, could even be argued to be pro-consumer, given that PS4 users are not being left behind while PS5 games still get exclusives.

At the end of the day, you have a choice: stick with the PS4 version or pay £10 more to get a genuine next-gen version that has more than resolution, FPS, and upping some simple numbers. And by doing this, Sony is not leaving their current user-base in a lurch, unlike Microsoft. What approach you prefer is entirely subjective, but both companies are setting out to achieve entirely different things. Sony is developing two versions of a product, with one version costing more to make, and thus they are charging a bit more. That is completely normal and acceptable.

Charging £10 for tangible, and in the case of Horizon and Spider-Man, significant upgrades as, in my opinion, ray tracing in an open world is a GAME CHANGER and by no means a cheap feat, while still supporting PS4 users is certainly not anti-consumer or greedy. Forcing people into having to buy a new system (even if there is a cheap entry point) arguably is. Where do you sit?

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