Sony reneges on promise of Horizon Forbidden West free PS5 upgrade

[Rdmetz]

100% agree.

The answer is largely momentum, brand awareness/perception (aka "Consumer Mindshare").

Xbox made massive strides with the 360 in this area and then Mattrick's crew pissed it all away with the debut of the One. It took Phil's crew 8 years to regain that lost consumer trust & point the ship in the right direction again.

The PS5 is thus far arguably riding on the coattails of the global phenomenon that was the PS4 & benefitting from their competitor losing their way. Simply put, more people immediately think of "Playstation" than "Xbox" when it comes to gaming.

But, every generation is different. And riding on the massive success of the prior gen will only take them so far. Sooner or later that anticipation of great exclusives needs to give rise to actual releases. Miles Morales, Demons Souls remake, Ratchet & Clank, and Returnal are great but simply not enough to carry the momentum much longer. They need to get other big releases out the door.

Meanwhile, Xbox has really turned it around on the back of Game Pass and that coupled with a stronger hardware design & anticipation of a strong exclusive lineup is finally picking up where the 360 left off. And as you noted, the Xbox ecosystem is arguably stronger with a better QoL feature design.

Personally, I've owned every Playstation & still think they arguably have had the best exclusives over the past two generations...but I find myself far more invested in the Xbox ecosystem at this point & that is where I do most of my gaming. I look at Playstation as my "Exclusives Box" and only sporadically pay for PS+ while I consider Xbox Live Gold to be an automatic monthly expense like Netflix. I'm even starting to think this way about Game Pass despite my massive backlog. It's just too good of a value to deny and I find myself discovering and playing games several times per week I would never try if I had to buy them separately.

Your post I only read after my above post but I'm right there with ya!

I love both platforms for different reasons but find xbox being the only one deserving of my recurring revenue.

Sony does have games I consider "must plays" and for that I still partake in their eco system but only just enough to get what I feel is justified out of them.

They will never see me "invest" in their eco system until they start making better. Consumer focused decisions like Microsoft.

If it takes them starting to lose ground to Xbox for that to happen then I'm all for it.

Xbox got a reality check in 2013 and I think it's definitely time for Sony to get one as well.

 

[nagynorbert97]

Now lets see if this news of Sony's change will make it into another article, or just the negative press sell here in techspot...

Personally I would not call good press when tey announce "10USD/game upgrade package will be available" after they promised to match microsoft's free upgrade for everything system.
Jus imagine any other company telling you to pay 10 bucks for Ray tracing or "High" settings when you get the hardware to run the game better.

 

[Kosmoz]

Personally I would not call good press when tey announce "10USD/game upgrade package will be available" after they promised to match microsoft's free upgrade for everything system.
Jus imagine any other company telling you to pay 10 bucks for Ray tracing or "High" settings when you get the hardware to run the game better.

If that is good or not is relative and subjective, but the point I was making was that negative news and click bait titles sell and are promoted everywhere, but when a company backtracks a bad decision and repairs the damage done, it's not good for news anymore...

It's about the hypocrisy of news and all that ****.

And as everyone can see TechSpot did not report that Sony changed their mind and are not doing what the 1st negative news said. So I was right about the hypocrisy.

 

[DZillaXx]

I don't quite understand why the PS5 is so darn popular, I really don't. As the other fella here said, they DO make MS look good. On the Xbox, you get cloud saves FOR FREE, and the Game Pass is just too good, especially with that Gold -> Game Pass semi-conversion trick for 3 years. The games you get with PS Plus are mediocre at best, there's maybe one notable title a year. Cloud backup is the only reason I'm still a subscriber, there's just no other value.

Honestly I don't get it either. I know the XSX is really competitive with the PS5 in the USA it terms of total sales so far, but globally especially in the EU PS5 is hands down a winner so far. Not sure why folks in the EU are so heavily Sony focused, even sales on the Switch in that market are not what they are elsewhere. But I do know that Microsoft Services are not as well flushed out in the EU as they are state side.

The 360 was such a great success for MS, with a strong lineup early on. So many Exclusives and timed exclusives on the system and game performance was nearly always better than the PS3. Don Mattrick really screwed the system out of a good last few years, as the PS3 really shined in the last couple years. But the PS3 was horrible for multiplat games with bad stuttery performance in many games. The Xbox One was underpowered, large, overpriced, with poor message from the start regarding physical media and ownership. While the system didn't have the stutter issue the PS3 frequently faced, later in life games could see some pretty nasty framerates.

Xbox One was a bad choice for MS and honestly they deserved what happened for allowing management to make *****ic choices. But They've really turned things around, and in the coming years expect to see a lot of MS exclusives. Xbox Console only exclusives from first party is dead, MS's Xbox Ecosystem includes the PC now too.

It’s ugly as ****. The worst console I’ve seen, it’s MASSIVE.

The XSX is tiny compared to the PS5....