PlayStation will seemingly implement special branding onto the boxes of cross-gen PlayStation 4 titles which offer a free upgrade to their PS5 versions.
The box forUbisoft’sImmortals Fenyx Risingwas published on Thursday and offers the first look at the “PS5 upgrade available” badge.
ForPlayStation 5,Sony Interactive Entertainmentpreviously indicated thatit was not promoting a unified free cross-generation upgrade programlikeXbox’s Smart Delivery.
Instead, Sony had seemingly left such upgrade programs to the discretion of third-party publishers, with many titles includingMarvel’s Avengers,Cyberpunk 2077andDestiny2 choosing to offer pathways to their PS5 versions at no additional cost.
Although Sony will reportedly not be actively promoting a cross-gen program, its stance on third-party developers is not unlike Xbox’s, which allows studios to decide for themselves whether to support Smart Delivery or not.
Some companiessuch as Electronic Artsare running their own upgrade initiatives. Current-gen owners of games such asFIFA 21and Madden 21 will be able to upgrade to PS5 via its Dual Entitlement scheme.
And while it’s not yet clear if Sony intends to offer free cross-gen upgrades for its own first-party titles, the platform holder is yet to announce any games planned for bothPS4and PS5.
Microsoft’sSmart Deliveryis an initiative which means players “only have to purchase a title once in order to play the best available version for whichever Xbox console they choose to play on”.
This is separate fromXbox Series X backwards compatibility, which will run legacy games at current-gen orincreased performance levels.
