Have you ever been screwed over? I'm being facetious, of course you have been. Everybody has, at some point, tasted what it feels like to have one straight trick fly under the radar and catch you unawares. It's hardly a pleasant feeling, but once it happens to you enough one reaches the point where they can begin sensing the very next grift from a mile away, either that or they become so jaded and mistrusting that they push away everyone and become something of a modern day hermit. Maybe both, I can see both. And when it comes to the entertainment industry, specifically in gaming, customers have become very well acquainted with what it feels like to have a PR team mug you in broad daylight whilst telling you that they're in the middle of cutting the finest deal imaginable with you. We've seen it all, which is why it's so baffling that the critical darling of last year, 'Control', seems to be in the middle of a blatant money grubbing scheme whilst everyone involved is acting like we're the crazy ones.
Control, if you don't remember, is a title that basically adapted the premise of the SCP Containment Breech game and turned it into a narrative adventure title. Helmed by Remedy, the team behind many a 'love it or hate it' style game like Quantum Break and the Alan Wake games, (Does 3 count as 'many'?) Control completely swept up with the critics and even was in the running for Ultimate Game of the Year. (Which, as I recall, ended up going to Sekiro.) However, these guys are cursed to make the sorts of games that never really translate over to crazy commercial success, so whilst I don't believe Control was a flop by any means, it wasn't a resounding hit either. That's a fact that fans lament as many have argued that it's easily Remedy's best title yet. Which of course paints the picture as to why the publisher would be in the market for shoring up profits with a little recycle job, now wouldn't it?
But enough beating around the bush, what exactly is the problem with Control and 505 that everyone is going on about? Well it has to do with the next gen. With the jump to a new generation of consoles there's a big conversation to be had about backwards compatibility as well as up-scaling from one generation to the next. The games which can nail this post haste are going to be essential for those first few months of the next gen's launch as a good chunk of exciting next gen titles aren't due out for a long while. This spurred Xbox's free upgrade program which allows for many next gen versions of current gen games to be automatically redeemed by their owners, and for companies like EA to wantonly spit in the face of that ideal and charge a ludicrous amount of money for an upgrade to an inferior package deal. (It's a long stupid story, I don't wanna get into it.) But perhaps the most befuddling is what's happening with Control right now.
Control has pretty much run the majority of it's life cycle right now, with the game having been released and post-launch DLC having filled the months since. There was even a 'deluxe edition' re-release of the title which bundled everything together neatly. Basically, there's not really much more life in this development cycle. Thus it makes the perfect title to port over to the next generation for people to play in it's entirety, and that's exactly what's happening; provided you're willing to buy the game again. Dubbed 'Control Ultimate Edition', the next gen upgrade will not be provided to anyone who purchased a previous version of the game, nor will they be able to buy it as an upgrade for a discounted price. Previous owners are subject to the full price alongside new comers. What's more, the price for Ultimate edition is actually 2/3rds of the full price which the deluxe edition of the game is still being charged for; thus punishing early adopters of the title and rewarding those that came to it later. Needless to say, this ruffled a few feathers.
If you want to really upset a fanbase all you have to do is mess with their money, ask them to pay too much or mess with their perceived value of something and you're practically spitting sparks into a tinder box. Whatsmore, folk don't like the idea of having loyalty and fandom punished by being asked to buy the game again for the benefit of some upscaled visuals and a frame-rate that's probably not that much better than you can already get on the Pro or One X. That's right, this new release offers absolutely no new content beyond the upgrades, which makes the 40$ asking price ridiculous for current owners. The really sad part about all of this, is that it erodes the trust between the consumers and the developers, even though it's highly likely that Remedy weren't involved with any of this nonsense beyond maybe working on the upgrades. (though they could have just as easily been outsourced) No, this is 505's web of confusion that they're spinning, and what makes things even more headscratching is the excuses that they have.
Up on the official Control website there's a little blog on the matter entitled 'Control Ultimate Edition- An explanation' which just sounds like the most ominous title in the world, doesn't it? It sounds like you've been caught cheating and decided to pen an entire power point presentation to pseudo-apologise whilst really trying to subconsciously suggest that your partner is the bad one for being upset in the first place. In this blog they confused the hell out of me, at least, by revealing that whilst Control would be backwards compatible on both new consoles, 'Control Ultimate Edition' would apparently be an entirely separate product and the only purchasable version on those console's stores. Apparently the intention was to provide an 'easy' and 'convenient' way for the entire game and all of it's content to be bought. (Okay, I'll give you 'easy' but I don't really know what's 'convenient' about this from the perspective of current fans)
And then they launch into victimising themselves. Yes, I'm being serious. These guys straight-up try to argue that they are the one's who tried to be the good-guys here and offer upgrades but they just couldn't, no matter how hard they tried! "We spent several months exploring all of our launch options for Control Ultimate Edition and no decision was taken lightly. While it is challenging bringing any game to next gen platforms, we quickly realised it was even more difficult to upgrade our current user base to next gen with full parity across platforms with our year-old game." Yes, apparently that thing which every other high profile AAA game is doing? It's really hard to do with Control because it's one whole year old. (Wow, this new tech must be space-age if resolution updates and optimisation is a noticeable headache.)
As someone who has never tried to code a game on the scale of Control, I'd have to defer to their better knowledge of the subject matter here. Let's assume everything they say is trustworthy, then here's the kicker. "Every avenue we pursued, there was some form of blocker and those blockers meant that at least one group of players ended up being left out of the upgrade for various reasons. As of today, we can’t offer an upgrade to everyone, and leaving any one group out feels unfair." So with the merit of going into as few specifics as humanely possible, the Control team are claiming that there was no one-way to upgrade all 3 versions of the game (for both consoles and for PC) which should have been obvious. For months we've been hearing how distinctly different these new generation consoles are, so it makes sense that working on games for them will be different, but somehow this hasn't stopped other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, from offering free upgrades.
You see, the problem here (and forgive me for accusing this blog of strawmanning a bit) is that the angle taken here seems to arguing that the tech isn't there, but this isn't an argument about tech, it's about policy. When Skyrim Special Edition was released it was using a very updated version of the engine which the original game ran on, making it a new SKU. But that didn't suddenly mean that Bethesda's hands were tied and they automatically had to charge owners of the old game full price to play this new one, the upgrade was free on PC. That wasn't the case for consoles, however, and I think that is what 505 is driving at, claiming that said quirk of the console marketplaces makes it difficult for them to provide an upgrades path for games with a different SKU. Kinda understandable, I guess, if warped beyond feasible comprehension. But then the other shoe drops.
505 screwed up with the launch of Ultimate Edition, they put out pre-orders but owners of the Deluxe edition of Control ended up automatically receiving the new version out of nowhere. What's more, they could launch this new version and it would open up the Deluxe version of the game. The SKU was the same, 505's excuses are starting to grow a little thin, huh? And so it seems that Control Ultimate Edition very much could have been offered to owners of the base title but actively was not in order for a quick buck. And just quick: even if that wasn't a possibility, they still could have pulled a Bethesda and made the update free on PC. This argument that "It's unfair, thus we must punish everybody equally" is so unfathomably dumb that it's hardly worth a retort. So that, if you were wondering, is what it feels like to be screwed over by a publisher. Hope you all enjoyed, as 505 are very unlikely to be the last who try something like this.
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