It’s making me cross.
This was generally welcomed as a positive move.
The most significant aspect of that upgrade programme was its ease of use.
The current cross-gen period has been anything but easy.
Let’s return to 2013, but this time looking at Activision’s release of Call of Duty Ghosts.
Xbox One owners were completely out of luck, with no mechanism to upgrade their physical copies.
No sweat, right?
Except the different editions are different in small but significant ways.
On Xbox, both an Xbox One edition and a general Xbox edition of the game exists.
The general Xbox version contains both the Xbox One version and Xbox Series versions of the game.
If you weren’t paying close attention, you may have thought this was simply the same image twice.
Except third-party publishers had other plans.
I should note that these problems were simply not teething issues from 2020 that have now been resolved.
2021 Call of Duty Vanguard had theexact same issues.
Of course, it isn’t just third-party publishers which have made things complicated.
Is Sony hoping PS5 owners won’t notice?
It’s this circumstance where Xbox’s single edition approach makes more sense.
It is due for launch at some point in 2022, though Sony has not said exactly when.
Ghost of Tsushima, for example, received a free PS5 patch which boosted frame rates to 60 FPS.
Not all publishers have been so puzzling with their upgrade paths.
To its credit, Ubisoft has been offering free next-gen upgrades since the start of the new generation.
Microsoft’s Smart Delivery system has been praised for making upgrades painless, meanwhile.
Better yet, Microsoft has now updated its game packaging for added clarity!
This cross-gen period has been unnecessarily messy.
And, most of the time, those upgrade versions automatically appear in their Steam library.
Part of the reason is, of course, games are getting more expensive to make.
Sure, there are plenty of fantastic indie games developed with a small budget.
But triple-A publishers claim to differentiate themselves with ambitious and large-scale games.
Microsoft, EA and Activision declined to comment when approached for this article, while Sony did not respond.
