When PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of Remedy Entertainment’s critically-acclaimed Control were announced, publisher 505 Games came under fire for the game’s upgrade path. At a time when publishers were announcing free next-gen upgrades, 505 warned players that only those who purchase Control‘s new Ultimate Edition were entitled to an upgrade, leaving out a significant group of people who had purchased other editions.
Now, 505 admits that it could have handled things better, and has said that it has learned lessons from the controversy.
In an interview with Games Industry, president Neil Ralley said that 505’s intention wasn’t to create “blockers” for a group of players. He chalked the mishandling up to the company being new to cross-gen upgrades.
Every transition from one generation to another creates challenges for both development and publishing. The Smart Delivery option, if I can use that term to generalize, was something we hadn’t faced before as an industry. For Control, we made certain decisions restricted how we could perform Smart Delivery for the next-gen version of Control. They were the correct decisions at the time, but they created those blockers. We were unable to backtrack and reorganize how we were developing the Ultimate Edition for there to be a sensible and fair way to do Smart Delivery.
We learnt a lot from that. Did we as a publisher handle it in the best way and communicate it in the best way to the audience? Maybe not. But we did our best to satisfy consumers… Moving forwards, we will be able to do this in a much better way and you’ll see that in the next examples that we’ve got with Ghostrunner at the end of September and Assetto Corsa in early 2022.
A new Control game is currently in development.
[Source: Games Industry]
