thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Gold Member
I mean think about it; yes you are only paying $10 more for the PS5 version of Ghosts of Tsushima Director's Cut (if you already have the PS4 version, IIRC), but considering this is simply (mainly) for a resolution and framerate upgrade, it feels decidedly tacky compared to how this is handled on other platforms. You are paying a $10 tax for a game to run better on a system that you've already paid $400 - $500 (going by MSRP, of course) to run PS4-centric content better with its more advanced hardware.
The closest equivalent would be buying a 3080 for who-knows-how-much, then buying a copy of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, only to then need to pay an extra $10 to run it above 60 FPS and High Quality texture settings, even though the 3080 could more than easily do that through sheer benefit of the extra hardware horsepower it has. Obviously, if that kind of business model existed on PC, PC gamers would destroy any game pushing it, but I've not seen too much kickback against what feels like Sony essentially gatekeeping natural performance upgrades behind a paywall outside of the console cost itself.
Ghosts of Tsushima Director's Cut offers the same main content between PS4 and PS5*; I understand paying extra for extra content, but the $10 tax for PS5 versions of these games really seems like it'll start to add up over time for Day 1 players, when you consider that seems to generally only cover resolution and framerate increases. Platforms like PC and even other consoles like Xbox bake those performance upgrades into a generalized SKU pricing structure (for the latter, at least for first-party content), and this feels like a superior solution because a Day 1 player on a PS5 could end up spending an extra $200 over the course of 20 such games in its lifetime simply for a performance upgrade to utilize extra hardware power which should be natural, so another way to argue it is a Day 1 PS5 player spending $700 for that console (supposing they were able to buy it Day 1 at MSRP).
*Aside from lip-sync animations in PS5 version being exclusive there because they can run cutscenes in real-time
It also feels like a redundant business strategy when, looking at the trends, cross-gen 1P Sony games are selling vastly more on PS5 anyway, so it makes the MSRP difference between PS4 and PS5 versions feel artificial. Why not simply increase the MSRP across both platforms to $70? At least that way it would appear on the surface you aren't paying a $10 tax for a performance upgrade, and if anything it could shift even more of the sales ratio to the PS5 version of those 1P games, in turn benefiting Sony even more to move away from cross-gen faster and focus their internal software developments solely on the PS5.
But maybe that's just my opinion. Anyone else feel like stuff with the Ghosts Director's Cut's pricing increase on PS5 highlights a flaw in Sony's pricing strategy for games this gen? Is it maybe indicative to a band-aid solution (at least it could be described as that in hindsight) for handling backwards compatibility ad-hoc style to make up for lack of a system-level scaling solution? Or do you feel such a system-level solution exists, but is simply not being exercised by Sony unless the extra $10 can be added on top? Let's talk about it.
