Control publisher admits its new-gen upgrade wasn't handled "in the best way"

The Control next-gen upgrade confusion was a dark spot for an otherwise beloved game, and developer 505 Games doesn't plan to repeat it.

505 Games president Neil Ralley discussed his company's controversial move to only offer next-gen upgrades for people who bought Control Ultimate Edition, a version which bundled in all of Control's story DLC and was released a year after the base game, in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. Ralley said certain decisions made earlier in development restricted how it could offer new-gen versions of the game to existing customers.

Though Ralley said they were the right decisions at the time, they ultimately created "blockers" that prevented the publisher from going back and reorganizing the way it could distribute the game.

"We learnt a lot from that. Did we as a publisher handle it in the best way and communicate it in the best way to the audience? Maybe not," Ralley said. "But we did our best to satisfy consumers... 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."

Thankfully, the upgrade issues don't seem to have darkened the overall prospects for Control. Developer Remedy is partnering with 505 Games on a co-op spinoff codenamed Condor, and a "bigger-budget Control-game" is also in the works, though still quite a ways off.

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