Remedy Entertainment And Sony Engage In Needless Anti-Consumer Practice For Control Expansion

Control is a supernatural third-person action-adventure in which players explore the meticulously archived mysteries of the Federal Bureau of Control (FBC), a secret U.S. government agency tasked with containing and studying phenomena which violate the laws of reality. 

Earlier this week developer Remedy Entertainment released a teaser trailer giving a March 26th release date for Control’s first big expansion, The Foundation. However, today they revealed that the March 26th release date does not include Xbox One gamers, who will needlessly have to wait a further three months till June 25th to get their hands on it.

Remedy Entertainment already upset Xbox fans of Control by releasing in-game pre-order bonuses exclusive to the PS4, but this needless anti-consumer three-month delay for Xbox players awaiting the first expansion has understandably frustrated them further.

In this current generation Sony have had more than enough well-received exclusive titles for their PlayStation 4 console. So the question must be asked: why do Sony continue to sponsor this kind of throwback anti-consumer nonsense, or generate the ill-will associated with it?

It’s worth remembering that in the previous generation where Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console was more popular than Sony’s PlayStation 3, Microsoft were the ones paying for platform-exclusive content and timed-exclusivity on titles that were available on both platforms.

However, the tide turned back in 2013 when Microsoft revealed the Xbox One console and announced that they would be restricting users abilities to share or sell their used games. This understandably upset gamers and Sony delighted in mocking them for this glaringly anti-consumer practice with a video featuring Sony President Shuhei Yoshida saying “This is how you share your games on PS4” before simply handing a game to SCEA head of publisher relations Adam Boyes.

“and that’s how Sony won this generation in 21 seconds”

The top comment with over 18k likes by Like Clockwork64

The short video was so successful that it forced Microsoft to backtrack on all of its anti-consumer practices and gave Sony a commanding lead at the start of the Xbox One/PS4 console generation. A lead that Microsoft never recovered from.

However, as soon as Sony began selling twice as many consoles as Microsoft, they started engaging in the same anti-consumer practices they mocked Microsoft for at the start of the generation. It has become common place for titles available on multiple platforms to have exclusive content only available on the PS4. This content can range from simple in-game cosmetics to complete missions and even full game areas that are exclusive to Sony’s console. The result is that even though gamers on both platforms play the same price for the same game, they don’t get access to all of the content made for the game by the developers.

With this upcoming generation, will Sony’s hubris and arrogance associated with having the current most popular console cause them to engage in yet more anti-consumer practices? Will Microsoft’s desire to win back gamers cause them to engage in more consumer-friendly practices? Could we see the PS5 being less powerful and more expensive than the Xbox Series X, in the exact same way the Xbox One was less powerful and more expensive than the PS4 at the start of this generation? Will this cause another flip-flop in popularity between the success for the next-generation of consoles from the two gaming giants? Exciting times ahead.