I can’t believe I’m writing about this stupid bullshit again.

3 years ago, Sony announced what can only be described as the most asinine pricing model in the entire game’s industry. There was a desire to charge more for their titles, but they didn’t have the spine to actually raise the price of their games across the board. Instead, Sony elected to only raise the price of the PS5 version of their games. This was a bit odd because, in theory, you could just buy a PS4 copy of the game for 10 dollars cheaper, and still reap the benefits of your new console. The only problem is Sony recognized this, and decided to charge an additional 10 dollar fee for players to access those enhanced graphical settings.

This was a first of its kind move for video games. Sure, the market has been flooded with remastered titles, and ports of older titles on modern consoles which all charge a premium. However, no company has asked for additional scratch so that players can utilize their gaming device’s full graphical processing power.

I wrote about it at the time, and compared it to holding certain graphical settings in a PC game hostage until a fee was paid. The very thought of paying a premium to utilize the additional horsepower of your setup was ridiculous at the time, and has continued to prove an evergreen stance to maintain.

Kratos fighting a Giant in God of War.

Despite the obvious problems with this pricing model, Sony seems to have enjoyed some level of success with it because they’re extending the privilege of paying to unlock graphical settings to the PC crowd too. They announced as much yesterday during a State of Play where it was revealed that Horizon Zero Dawn would receive a remaster. Existing owners of either the PC, or PS5 versions of the game will be able to pay a 10 dollar fee to access the new graphical settings, which is a first of its kind move in the PC space.

At the time of my original article, I joked about how paying a fee for enhanced graphic settings on PC would be fucking stupid. And it still is. Your experience on PC is almost entirely determined by what you were willing to pay for your computer. Those who can afford more expensive parts with higher throughput get to play the game with all the bells and whistles. Meanwhile, everyone else can customize their experience based on what their PC can handle, and what their priorities are. Furthermore, if you upgrade your PC, and suddenly have the ability to play a game on its highest settings then you’re free to do so. There’s no additional costs associated with bumping up the resolution, raising your frame rate, or enabling additional graphical effects. Evidently, Sony wants to change that.

For what it’s worth, I sincerely hope this blows up in Sony’s face. I don’t want to see charging an additional fee for graphical updates to become normalized across the industry. Paying for new PC hardware already costs an arm and a leg. It’d be frankly ridiculous if every game I owned asked for an additional fee before I could actually utilize those new parts to meaningfully improve my experience.

Aloy fighting a robot monster in Horizon Forbidden West.

And I realize some of you might try to hit me with an “uhm actually” because Horizon’s remaster includes more than just graphical updates. Sure, whatever. Many of the additional features listed alongside the announcement of the remaster feel like the marketing team scraping the bottom of the barrel to justify the existence of this product. It’s the kind of stuff that would be met with nothing but snide jeering were this remaster announcement made by any other company.

As an aside, I found it very funny how this was announced with Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered because that original awful pricing strategy was announced alongside Horizon Forbidden West. Apparently, Sony views Horizon as their franchise best suited to delivering poorly thought out announcements of their ass backwards pricing.

Anyway, that’s it from me. I’m sure that time will continue to prove this an evergreen stance to take, but I’m hopeful that the PC market doesn’t respond positively to this nonsense. With any luck, the Horizon remaster will be cracked in less than a week, and all interested parties can obtain the additional graphic settings without having to pay Sony’s ransom price for them.