A new article from GamesIndustry sits down with Neil Ralley, president of 505 Games where he gets candid about last year’s Control: Ultimate Edition upgrade fiasco.
To catch you up, if you had purchased Control and its season pass, you would think this would entitle you to a free next-gen upgrade. Except that the publisher decided to charge $50 for the Ultimate Edition and if you had purchased the game previously, weren’t eligible to upgrade for free. At the time, Remedy had said the “the free upgrade path to Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 version of Control is only available for Control Ultimate Edition,” leaving fans scratching their heads.
It’s something that I spoke about several times and given the situation where owners of vanilla Control began receiving a free upgrade to the Ultimate Edition before being downgraded — it was a clearly greedy move from the publisher.
“Every transition from one generation to another creates challenges for both development and publishing,” Ralley tells GamesIndustry.biz “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.”
Ralley iterates that 505 Games is going to try to do better with messaging in the future: “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. I’m very confident that we’ll handle that in a much better way.”
After everything landed on the table, 505 delivered a statement and apologized for how limited the upgrade path was for owners of Control.
