PS4 box offers first look at ‘PS5 upgrade’ branding

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 for Ubisoft’s Immortals Fenyx Rising was published on Thursday and offers the first look at the “PS5 upgrade available” badge.

For PlayStation 5, Sony Interactive Entertainment previously indicated that it was not promoting a unified free cross-generation upgrade program like Xbox’s Smart Delivery.

Instead, Sony had seemingly left such upgrade programs to the discretion of third-party publishers, with many titles including Marvel’s Avengers, Cyberpunk 2077 and Destiny 2 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 companies such as Electronic Arts are running their own upgrade initiatives. Current-gen owners of games such as FIFA 21 and 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 both PS4 and PS5.

Microsoft’s Smart Delivery is 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 from Xbox Series X backwards compatibility, which will run legacy games at current-gen or increased performance levels.

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