ManaByte
Member
The confusion may also seem foreign to anyone who’s traditionally played video games only on consoles. But the PC and mobile spaces have trained millions of users on how software works in the modern world. People who buy “Stardew Valley” for their iPhone X don’t have to repurchase another “iPhone 12” version of the game when upgrading to an iPhone 12. You just get the same game on a different device. That’s the kind of cross-gen capability Xbox is shooting for — something Sony hasn’t been able to maintain.
Nintendo, meanwhile, operates on its own, indecipherable logic and doesn’t offer its consumers any choice in how to play old games besides either playing them on old devices or repurchasing them on the Nintendo Switch.
This is something I've been saying since Spencer took over. He was looking at how PC and mobile games work, where you only have to buy the game once; it travels with you to new devices and you don't have to pay to upgrade.
And the makes a great point that many here have been asking since the Horizon debacle:
These various upgrades raise the question: Just how valuable are the lines of codes that distinguish a PS4 or PS5 version of otherwise the exact same content? It’s not a question customers should be expected to answer, especially this early in the console generation. For now, Sony has an answer: That’ll be $10. The remaining questions include how developers will now address that $10 value attached to upgrading to a PS5 version, and whether that consistency and price is reasonable enough to keep players of both PS4 and PS5 happy.
He also brought up Cyperpunk on Twitter, pointing out how CDPR would be murdered if they tried to charge $10 to upgrade to the next-gen version when that version already exists on PC: