Sony Is Walking Back One Of Its Biggest PS5 Launch Promises

Horizon: Forbidden West

Credit: Guerilla Games/Sony

For a moment there, it seemed like we had an honest-to-goodness philosophical difference between Microsoft and Sony. Microsoft, for its part, made a commitment to cross-gen releases for two years, as part of a broader focus on building as big a tent as possible under the Xbox brand: Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC, Xbox Series X, xCloud, you name it. Sony, on the other hand, talked up the idea of console generations: that one of the reasons we upgrade our gaming hardware in big leaps is to make experiences that simply wouldn’t have been possible on previous generation hardware, indicating a commitment to the sorts of next-gen exclusives that platform holders have long used to hype up new hardware. There was plenty of disagreement on both sides, but that’s part of the fun when you’ve got a genuine difference in approach.

Now? Things are a little different.

Yesterday, Sony revealed that two of its major next-gen titles, Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Horizon: Forbidden West, would also be coming to PS4. On one level, this is sort of uninteresting: developers will still be able to make fancy improvements on PS5, and millions more will be able to play it on the consoles they already own. But arguably, this keeps these games back from making the sorts of foundational, experience-changing improvements that would have made previous-gen versions impossible. Or, at least, that’s the impression you could easily get from reading Sony’s previous public statements, which now read like an odd sort of argument against Sony’s current strategy.

Here’s what CEO Jim Ryan told Gamesindustry.biz back in May. At the time, it read like a refutation of Microsoft’s cross-gen strategy:

“We have always said that we believe in generations. We believe that when you go to all the trouble of creating a next-gen console, that it should include features and benefits that the previous generation does not include. And that, in our view, people should make games that can make the most of those features.”

Currently, the big confirmed first-party next-gen exclusive appears to be Ratchet and Clank: A Rift Apart, and the developer has made a big deal about how the game’s signature rift-travelling, world-switching gameplay just wouldn’t be possible without an SSD. That’s currently dated for 2021, but we don’t know when. We’ve also got the Demon’s Souls remake, which looks great, though clearly there are no fundamental gameplay concepts that wouldn’t have worked on PS4 because its a remake of a game that came out 11 years ago. Pretty, though.

However things are going to shake out, this is radically different from the vision outlined by Ryan in May, and people are feeling slighted because of that. Not necessarily because PS4 owners will get to play Horizon: Forbidden West, mind you, which is fine. It’s because Sony appeared to make a definitive statement about console generations that it has now walked back considerably.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft has qualified its policy a little bit too: while it still seems committed to releasing first-party games on Xbox One for two years, it seems like this policy was perhaps a little bit easier to state because some of its flashiest first-party titles were more than two years out anyways.

So that’s the state of this philosophical difference: wildly different marketing that has wound up in a more or less similar place.