505 Games has finally explained why Control’s base game won’t be getting a free Next-Gen upgrade.
The news came to us via a blog post that explains 505’s “difficult” decision, that has had the gaming community up in arms.
The games Ultimate Edition was announced last week, which comes with the base game, its two expansions, and a free next-gen upgrade.
This news serves as an update to our previous article, in which the announcement was made that the publisher of Control had decided not to offer free next-gen upgrades for users who already owned the base game. This unusual move was not received well by the gaming community as a whole, and now we know why this decision was made.
The statement 505 made in the recent blogpost was as follows:
“The upgrade path we are offering is only possible when upgrading from the same version of the game. As we are only doing additional development on Control Ultimate Edition on the next-gen platforms, we are unfortunately unable to offer an upgrade path to all existing Control players.”
They mentioned that they understood how this upsets some players but that they “will still be able to play the 2019 edition of Control and each Expansion on the new platforms” (referring to the backwards compatibility features on both Xbox Series X and PS5).
“To bring Control to next-generation consoles in any form, we had to make some difficult decisions and those came in the form of creating the simplified Control Ultimate Edition product plan we have today. That we took a while responding does not mean we have not been listening. We are sorry we couldn’t meet everyone’s expectations and we hope you will continue to support Control.”
Apparently, the publisher had spent several months exploring all of their possible launch options for the Ultimate Edition and they have said that the decisions they made weren’t made lightly.
While this decision has made them quite unpopular with fans, the publishers are still hopeful that Control’s Ultimate Edition will gain the numbers they are aiming for.