Why did Square screw its loyal FF7 fans?

The new episode DLC is $20 so that means if you bought the game when it came out for $60 you are paying $80 for the complete game, but if you didn't buy the game you now can get the complete PS5 game for $70. And if your smart Amazon has the PS4 version for $30 so you can get that upgrade it to PS5 version buy the DLC and get the complete game for $50. Is it just me or do you feel like your being punished cause you supported the game from day one, why not make the DLC $10 for owners of the PS4 version. I hope the DLC is 10-15 hours long for that price (nope its 4-5). Also giving the PS4 game for free on PS+ and then not letting people upgrade it to PS5 is another dick move LBH.

There's a conversation to be had about video games and upgrade paths and DLC and all that and the way pricing works, but by game standards Square was pretty good here. They released a game and then a year later they released an upgraded version of the game and some DLC. If you bought the game at launch you get the upgrade to PS5 for free, but you have to buy the DLC. Then there's a new package that includes the DLC for new buyers.

How many games have released GOTY packages where you can get the game and all DLC for a reduced price? How many games have charged for upgraded versions (like Tony Hawk Remastered) or put out editions with new content that make you buy the whole game over with no upgrade path (like Persona 5 Royal?)

It is always cheaper to wait to buy a game, especially now with digital games where there's no risk of them running out of stock. DLC always gets bundled in for later adopters. Prices get cut. There are huge sales.

Back in my day people bought Street Fighter II and then they bought Street Fighter II Championship Edition and then they bought Super Street Fighter II and they were all brand new purchases.

Square is generally very exploitative, especially around Final Fantasy, so I was shocked at how reasonable this was by their standards.

You want to see companies milking and abusing their audiences? Look to fighting games. Multiple season passes, $40 expansions with minimal content (Mortal Kombat XI), microtransactions etc... And if you wait long enough they'll sell you an Ultimate Edition with everything included...right before they release yet ANOTHER season pass.

What Square is doing here is very reasonable by industry standards.

As for the no free upgrade for PS+ members...that does kind of suck but it's understandable. More understandable than all the PS5 only games on PS+ that have PS4 versions but don't offer them. That's much worse IMO. At least you can play the PS4 version on your PS5!

The worst part about that free PS+ version is that if you claim it you will longer be able to get the upgrade even if you have a disk version. It’s bullshit

@colourful_hippie: That sucks but it is probably a Sony thing instead of a Square thing. Their system is bad at handling plus versions of games along with normal versions. It is not a huge deal though because if you have the game already you don’t need the Plus version and once you have the Plus version you don’t need to buy it (and can still buy the PS5 disc or digital) also you can have Sony remove plus games from your account so if you want to buy the PS4 version later for some reason you can still get the upgrade. Or, of course, because it is a disc you can just play it on an account with no Plus version. So there are lots of workarounds.

I got 70 hours out of the PS4 version (disc) and get a free PS5 update whenever I can get ahold of a console. Can't say I'm feeling particularly screwed, honestly.

@bigsocrates: Alright I didn't think about it that way it makes sense, the real issue I have is $20 for 4-5 hours of content seams crazy to me.

@colourful_hippie: I am so glad I read about that before the PS+ version came out cause I always just click add to library If I have the game on disc.

FF fans are some of the most exploited fans in gaming (imo ofc) but this is actually a sign of progress. They didn't provide Japanese audio for the longest time and the first time was Lightning Returns but they charged $10 for it if you didn't buy it the first week. I heard you can squeeze 10+hours out of the Yuffie content so $20 seems, while not cheap, better than I would've hoped.

@djredbat: Seems more like 5-10 based on HowLongToBeat, but that's honestly a different conversation than the upgrade logistics in your OP. I think the messy upgrade complaints are totally valid, but I've personally never been the biggest fan of that dollars/hour argument some people try to get into.

@djredbat: Does it? That doesn’t strike me as an unusual length for that price point either.

For what it's worth, Control has the same PS+ upgrade problem, so it's definitely a Sony thing. Except that wasn't communicated ahead of time with Control. Basically, when it was free, if you redeemed the PS4 version you got the base game plus the DLC, while the PS5 version was the "ultimate edition", which is the version you can upgrade. So unless you also redeemed the PS5 (which as someone who didn't have a PS5 at the time, I didn't), you're stuck with the non-upgradeable version.

Also having just beaten INTERmission, I found it totally worth the price (though it does end a little abruptly). Psyched to keep going in hard mode and stuff.

It doesn't matter to me. I hardly, if ever, buy story based DLC at full price. I always wait until the price drops before I consider it. I didn't get the "Return to New York" DLC for Division 2 until it was well under $10 dollars months later, and I think the original price was $30, because you needed the update to start the live service feature the game now has after finishing the story, as its the introduction to it. I got Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition, which means the DLC chapter is included, at $20. And that's just a few examples. I'm a patient person, I can wait. And judging by how lacking this DLC chapter is in terms of story content and extras, I'm not in any rush to play it.

As a dog I theorize that Square will try and screw anyone willingly bending over.

I think it is pretty definitively a Sony issue

But I do wonder how much is malice versus incompetence. Prior to the revelations about Sony demanding a cut of all RMTs from any "playstation gamer" I can kind of lean malice. But having dealt with the stupidity of Sony's backend breaking the ability to freely migrate between SKUs I also kind of wonder if their infrastructure is just that bad. The PS4/PS5 bundles are such a mess that they might straight up be very special cases in the backend for all we know.

Although, I probably lean more malice for ff7r since full purchases get the "free" upgrade but PS+ doesn't. But also... maybe PS+ is already a decade (?) long kludge that is broken in different ways.

@av_gamer: That was a very helpful comment

I distinctly remember 505 alluding to this being a PS/PSN issue but then Sony accidentally made the Ultimate version of Control available to Season Pass holders proving that it was 505 trying to nickel and dime ppl. I don't think this is a Sony issue. Square didn't want to give a free upgrade to PS+ members and that's understandable.

It's like this with every consumer product. If you want a discount, wait and buy it later but don't' expect something to be the same price a year or more later. You paid to get it when it was new, so you pay more.

@liquiddragon: That's a different issue. Sony absolutely does have the infrastructure to offer upgrades to people if they want to. The problem here is that you can't have a PS Plus version of a game and a digital owned version of a game simultaneously. That's why you can't buy games that you have via PS Plus, while in Xbox you can buy games you have via Games With Gold (Not 360 games because those are permanent 'purchases' anyway, but XBONE games.) This is a longstanding issue with Sony. It's distinct from 505 not offering upgrades, which is something they also did on Xbox, a platform that doesn't have the same issues.

@gundato: The PS Plus PS4 only thing is definitely a choice that Square and/or Sony made. They easily could have made the plus version a PS4/5 version as they did with a lot of other games. The problem on Sony's backend, which I don't fully understand but have seen before, is that they don't have the ability for you to digitally 'own' a game and also have a plus version. That's why you can't have a plus version of the PS4 game and also 'own' a PS4 version that would be upgrade eligible. Their database just doesn't seem to separate the two statuses. My guess is that it was built in such a way that rather than "Own a plus copy/own a purchased copy" being two different values there's just one value where "not owned/plus version/purchased version" are options. And for some reason once a game is flagged as "plus version" you can't convert it to "purchased version." Obviously I don't understand the actual underlying database mechanics, but it's something like this.

Thus because someone cannot simultaneously have a plus version of FF7R for PS4 and a purchased version, once the plus version is in the system there's no way to get an eligible upgrade version in without removing the plus version.

Why haven't they fixed this database issue over the many many years when it's caused various kinds of problems? Their e-shop team sucks in a lot of ways. Even now if you go to a game you can't see the DLC that's available for it on the store page because they're separate entries, and if you buy a bundle you have to rely on the text description to tell you what's in it, which doesn't always work right.

It takes a seriously high level of incompetence to build an electronic store for a company with Sony's resources that lacks those very basic features in 2020 (when the PS5 store got built.) How long has Steam had that stuff plus a lot more? Even Nintendo doesn't have these problems. And they're NINTENDO!

Actually, they fixed this issue not too long ago (maybe about a year?) You can now "add to library" for free games or "add to cart" if you wanna buy said free game.

@bigsocrates: I guess my thought is that in the case of FF7R and (maybe?) Control, there was not a PS5 version when they did the giveaway. And I can totally see a case where doing a query on their busted ass database to give everyone with a PS4 plus edition the PS5 plus edition could break everything in horrible ways. Although, isn't Greedfall expected to be upgradeable to the PS5 sku even from the plus version?

As for why they haven't fixed anything: They don't need to. When they first were fucking everything up they were, if memory serves, way ahead of Live because they had the IGC. Then around the time MS basically reached parity again we had the disastrous XBONE generation. That basically leaves the PS5 where I can kind of appreciate Sony's mindset of "this isn't going to be a big deal after the first few months" before... you know, covid broke all the pipelines in every possible way.

Considering how much money Sony pulls in on the console side I think they can afford to do some QOL improvements. But I have a sneaking suspicion that unless MS dominates this generation they won't. And MS increasingly seem to be phasing out of the normal console wars in preparation for the service wars.

@liquiddragon: As far as I can tell you still can't BUY a game you already HAVE via PS Plus. You can buy it INSTEAD of redeeming it via PS Plus but once you have it via PS Plus there's no way I can see to digitally purchase. This is what I see for Remnant, a game I got via Plus. I can buy the Complete Edition with DLC but not the base version. For games with a PS5 only version on Plus I can buy the PS4/PS5 bundle but that's because I don't have the PS4 version.

@gundato: I understand why Sony doesn't think fixing its electronic store is going to be a big deal for the console wars, but I think that a better store would just sell more stuff because it's a better store. I'm pretty sure that even if a fairly low number of people would buy games they already have via Plus that revenue would make up for the cost of implementing it. And basic store features like showing what you get in a bundle and listing DLC under the main game encourage people to make purchases. That's why almost every e-shop has them. Because better stores sell more stuff.

It's not so much that it's a competitive disadvantage vs Microsoft or Nintendo, it's that good store experiences lead people to purchase stuff. Their current store doesn't even show screenshots or trailers. Surely the cost of implementing screenshots and trailers would be made up for by the additional sales!

For FF7R I don't think it's a technical issue. They can just create a dummy version of the game that you get when you make your purchase. And everyone who has FF7R PS4 got the PS5 upgrade except Plus people, so I don't think it would be an issue there either. I'm pretty sure this was a Square decision on the basis that they were about to release the PS5 version and didn't want to undercut sales of it by giving that away to everyone with Plus. Likewise with Control I'm positive that was a 505 decision because it worked the same way for Xbox, and Xbox doesn't have any of these issues as far as I can tell. 505 just didn't want to give free upgrades to people who bought the original version because...more money for them I guess.

@bigsocrates: that's strange. I have the option to add to cart games I've added to library but it's still funky for me. I see the option on a browser no problem but the option is sometimes not there on the PSN iOS app. Not sure about the store front on the system.

But here's a reddit thread claiming the exact opposite of what you're saying. "I own the game on PS4 disc and also claimed the PS Plus PS4 digital version. There was no issue with using the disc to do the PS5 upgrade whatsoever."

If you're talking about PS+ subscribers vs. Xbox Live, no, I'm quite sure PS+ was way behind Live because PS+ was not required for multiplayer. That changed with the release of PS4, which caused their subscriber numbers to increase a lot. Couldn't find a source to back that up though.

You already KNEW the price would eventually drop. But you bought it day one because you wanted to play it earlier, or because of FOMO or whatever. You got a benefit from paying more for it. There's no reason to make the DLC cheaper for people who bought it at a certain price. (And it would be a nightmare to figure out how much a physical disc owner paid for it) You can also wait for the DLC to go on sale if you don't think it's worth $20.

@peffy: Glad to hear then because the wording on the PS Store listing of the upgrade implied the opposite

That's always the price of being an early adopter. $10 can be a lot for some folks, but I also think it's fairly reasonable for having earlier access to the content. I paid my $80 CAD at launch to play it and have no regrets because I was able to experience the content without worrying about any spoilers, and got to participate in the zeitgeist of all the fan speculation, spoiler videos talking about the ending, and all that other stuff. For me personally, that is well worth the extra $10, but again I do understand everyone's financial situation is different.

If anything, the thing I'm a little more miffed about is the new Yuffie content being exclusive to PS5, especially with that console still being exceptionally hard to find for many people. I mean I get it, you spent a lot of time and resources to spiffy up the game for PS5 and you want to push people towards the "definitive" version, but if anything that's more of a slight towards loyal FF fans than the $10 imo.

Finally, no, they aren't dicks. They gave away a GREAT game for "free" to PS+ subscribers less than a year after the game was released, how often do you see that? Having already done that, they don't owe people anything else on top of that. Had Square chosen not to work with Sony to give away FF7R for free on PS+, would you still be calling them dicks? I would assume not. But instead they did something kind of cool for folks, and get called dicks for that? That's some extreme entitlement when they could've just as easily given you (not you specifically OP, you in the general sense) nothing.

If you paid for it, get the better version on us. If you got it for free, enjoy it, and if you want the better version you can pay for it to support the developers, or wait a while for a sale and pick it up on the cheap. Seems perfectly fair to me. /shrug

@peffy: While I mostly agree with what you said, waiting for DLC to go on sale is usually a mug's game.

I have a whole different rant about the fact that DLC sales are super rare, and the discounts are generally pretty bad. They've gotten a bit better recently, and Microsoft (which never used to have DLC sales) does a few specific Add-On sales a year, but it takes a long, long, time to get good discounts on DLC.

@wchigo: I don't disagree with most of your points, but Square isn't giving away anything. Sony probably paid them a lot for this, likely to combat Game Pass. Square probably agreed to it because they figure they can probably make up the money on upgrade and DLC sales on a game that had already been on sale at various points.

None of these companies are nice. Square also wasn't "nice" when it put Outriders on Game Pass. And Game Pass's success is part of what has pushed Sony to improve its PS Plus offerings recently.

FWIW, I put closer to 10 hours into the DLC and didn't get all the trophies yet (primarily because I haven't done a hard mode run), just by virtue of doing all the side stuff and whatnot. Sure, you can mainline it much quicker, but if you're deliberately looking for bang for your buck, there's stuff to do beyond just four hours.

@bigsocrates: Yes that's true. When I was writing that, I considered adding the caveat "not sure if Square will ever put it on sale, though". I do remember Playstation having "Extended play" sales which are basically DLC and season pass sales.

.....Actually, just googled and there was an Extended Play sale just last month, and a bunch of Final Fantasy XV DLC was on sale. And for example, here's the price history of Episode Ardyn on PSN which shows that it's gone on sale numerous times. I think there's a good chance the Yuffie DLC will go on sale eventually. Just a matter of waiting for it.

That’s a fair point, which is why I added the part about Square working with Sony. If anything I probably should have said Square choosing to get paid by Sony, so no arguments from me there.

Also, I didn’t say any of these companies are nice, as they’re only “nice” insofar as you’re a source of money to them and may keep up the appearance of being your “friend” or “doing what’s right by the fans”, but even then some companies don’t even try and keep up that appearance.

That being said, I personally still don’t think they’re dicks for not providing a free upgrade for folks that got FF7R via PS+. Would it have been a great move for consumers? Undoubtedly yes. Does it make financial sense at the time or even now? Probably not, and would likely go against any fiduciary duties they have to shareholders. You could make the argument “fuck shareholders” and I’m almost certainly right there with ya, but that might be outside the scope of the current discussion.

Overall though, I think we seem to mostly be on the same page on this?

@peffy: I think it's likely the DLC will go on sale eventually to some degree or another, but it's just not as quick or as deep discounts as the main game, and until recently it was way worse, with DLC almost never going on sale during the 7th gen. I guess I just hate how DLC rarely goes on sale and almost NEVER has its base price reduced, while many games get sales quickly or have their base prices reduced a year or two post release.

@wchigo: I do think we are mostly on the same page, although I would say "They are not being dicks in a way that isn't common in the gaming industry as a whole." I think the games industry has bad commercial practices, but Square is acting pretty normally and even in a somewhat consumer friendly way in that context.

I am just very committed to that "corporations are not our friends" life and I didn't think you were really saying Square was being nice I just think it's useful to remember that this is really about a bunch of big companies getting paid and nothing related to PS Plus or Game Pass is really "free." We pay for our subscriptions gosh darn it!

I don't see how releasing paid DLC over a year later is screwing anyone. It's not like the game was unfinished at launch or were nickel and diming people along the way.

Also IMO, the DLC is pretty good and worth the asking price.

@chaser324: I think once you pass 50 hours on a $60 game your console should automatically start siphoning extra money away from your account and sending it to the developer for every additional hour spent playing.

I don’t remember what game it was recently that did this but I remember getting burned in the exact same way as the OP. Bought game at launch, full price, which is what publishers generally want you to do in order to get maximum profit and nice rising graphs on the quarterly report. Then a few months later they announced DLC and a “Complete” edition that was cheaper overall than what it would cost me to buy the DLC alone having already owned the base game. In those situations it’s hard to not somehow feel cheated or given a raw deal as an “early adopter” that probably had to go through some patch-pains and all. The problem is that DLC very rarely goes on sale on its own, while GOTY bundles do. It’s sometimes ridiculous to see a game go on sale for $5 and yet the DLC is still $19.99. It’s a weird tactic on the publisher side too because it just incentivizes people to wait half a year and buy the complete edition on a discount instead of paying full price at launch.

for what it's worth, it's not that different than the old expansion pack model. And prices for games generally drop over time. You're almost always paying more for a game if you bought it at launch rather than a over a year later.

@humanity: Sometimes you can feel you got a raw deal even if they don't charge. If I recall the ReCore definitive edition upgrade was free, so buyers didn't get screwed, but it basically completed an incomplete game, so if you played it at launch you still got a raw deal!

Nobody's here talking about those of us who suffered by having to play FF VII Remake when it had the bad door texture, which they've now fixed. No free upgrade can delete the pain of that texture!

After FFXV I was prepared for DLC for FFVIIR. What gets me is why the hell they decided to make it PS5 only. I am not planning on getting a PS5 for awhile, however Square could have easily sold me and many others day 1 on this DLC for PS4. Especially since its DLC for a PS4 game. Now I'm just gonna wait and probably pick this up for 5 bucks on sale some time in the future. All in all I think Square and Sony are leaving a lot of money on the table and a lot of fans in the dust with this decision. Its very strange to me.

@bigsocrates: I missed my terrible door but found comfort in the unaltered hexagonal bottles that are still in that places bathroom.

@efesell: It boggles my mind that a company as big and rich as Square doesn't have some round bottle assets somewhere to repurpose. FF VII Remake in general was this baffling mix of incredibly detailed visuals and ugly PS3 era stuff.

Did they do anything about the horrible textures on the...groundboxes...for the slums? They were so low res they kind of reminded me of the original FF VII's backgrounds!

This is not a square "screwing over it's loyal fans," this is just one of the perils of buying a game for full price. Games will always drop in price as time passes after their launch. Games there were successful are likely to get a GOTY Edition or similar equivalent that includes all the post launch content in one package for a price much cheaper than buying the game full price at launch and then all the DLC one by one.

This is just one of those realities you need accept when you choose to buy a game at launch. If value is more important to you than playing a game at release, then wait. If you're willing to pay to play a game immediately, don't get mad when it drops in price down the line.

@bigsocrates: I don't think they did but I unironically love that asset I think it looks rad as hell.

@efesell: I mean, I kind of love it too, but mostly because, as I said, it makes me nostalgic for the original. As just an asset in a video game it's pretty bad. And here's another example that I do NOT love.

The game is such a bizarre combination of breathtaking and hideous. Sometimes it looks like this

Meanwhile, PC players be like "Well I'll just wait another year" towards the EGS exclusivity rumors.

Oh, the huge manatee.