Horizon: Forbidden West has two collectors editions announced, which got me rather excited, but reading the details led to a huge “wtf….” moment.
Horizon: Forbidden West has two impressive looking collectors editions: a “standard” Collector’s Edition and a more expensive Regalla Edition. At first glance both of these are exciting as they come with cool statues, in-game content, and a beautiful steelbook case. There are several other versions of the game up for pre-order now as well, like the special edition which offers a choice of a PS4 or PS5 physical disc in the steelbook.
And yet, the two collector’s editions (which retail for $200 and $259) don’t include a physical copy of the game. Both editions come with the steel book “display case,” but these only have a code to download the game for PS4 or PS5…. A friggin display case? Really? We get handed a big box which includes a case for a physical disc, but instead of a disc we get a piece of paper with a code….
Part of the decision could be the simple fact that Sony also messed up by providing absolutely no way to upgrade the game to PS5 from a PS4 version of the game. You read that right. Currently Sony is not offering any type of upgrade for PS4 users, for reasons they don’t seem able to adequately explain.
I mean let’s look at the wider picture here. I paid an extra $100 dollars to have a disc version PS5, then I paid another $260 to get a game I wanted to support, and Sony in return says I can’t have a disc because they want me to go buy yet another copy of the game due to their poor decision of banning PS4 players from PS5 copies.
In what world does this make sense? Already we have to pay $70 for Sony exclusive games on PS5, now we are getting squeezed here too. Even older games like Death Stranding and Ghost of Tsushima are seeing paid upgrades, which seem to be working perfectly fine. On the other side of the fence we have Xbox blatantly making all their games easily up-gradable and available to all players.
Sony used to be a “for the players” company. They thrived on it the past two generations. Yet ever since I bought my PS5 I’ve been appalled at their new leadership being so out of touch and doing the total opposite. Xbox is not my thing, yet they’ve been making a lot of decisions lately that have me excited about gaming.
Sony has yet even appear to talk about anything not involving Deathloop. Horizon is Sony’s baby right now and they are screwing it up before we even get our hands on it…. There was hardly any hype for Ratchet and Clank, and while Xbox is announcing cool new special edition consoles and controllers, we got a Black and Red controller and some promises of more to come.
Anyway, back to the Horizon problem… Is it really too costly to include a standard wrapped edition this with a nearly $300 dollar special edition? Microsoft already went down this road with Halo, we as a gaming community wrecked them for it and basically forced Microsoft to hand out two copies of the game to special edition orders because it is a dumb idea. Period. If it isn’t okay for Microsoft to pull this crap, it isn’t okay for Sony.
And for those that want digital options, that should be available too. If you want a collectors edition with a digital code, fine, this is great news for you, but why is it not an option for either? Currently they have a “Digital Deluxe” version for $80 that offers BOTH versions of the game, but it’s a bit ridiculous to have to pay for two games.
Personally I want to put money down for the Regalla Edition, but if this decision isn’t remedied in some way I won’t be picking it up. Not being able to upgrade from PS4 to PS5 was already a mistake, but it was avoidable as I buy on PS5 any way. This….this just further shows how out of touch Sony has been lately.
