Sony seems to have made a strange decision when it comes to their Playstation Plus offerings.
As reported by Eurogamer, first party title Horizon: Zero Dawn is set to leave the PlayStation Plus Collection. They initially saw the rumor on reddit, but were able to confirm that Sony gives you the notification it is being pulled from the collection.
If you are a PlayStation Plus subscriber, you can claim the game now, and you won’t lose access to the game after its delisted. But obviously, it’s a very strange choice.
This is not the first time that Sony decided to remove their own games from PlayStation Plus. Last year, they removed 19 titles from the collection, including God of War, Uncharted 4, Ratchet and Clank, Days Gone, Until Dawn, Infamous Second Son, The Last Guardian, and The Last of Us Remastered.
While PlayStation Plus copies Game Pass in providing a rolling library of games for subscribers to enjoy, Microsoft does not get into the habit of removing their own first party games.This, among other things, has made Game Pass a much more valuable and successful subscription service than PlayStation Plus.
Even before incorporating games from Activision Blizzard’s library, basically all of Microsoft’s top games have been available to Game Pass subscribers for a nominal fee, and they have continued to do so with each new release.
But some fans do believe they know what Sony is doing here. Sony usually removes the PlayStation 4 version of their games when they are about to release a remake or remaster of the title. So the circumstantial evidence leads to the conclusion that Sony has prepared a new special edition of Horizon: Zero Dawn, for PlayStation 5. We will point out that not every such title removed from the collection has received such a remake or remaster.
Originally released on the PlayStation 4 in 2017, Horizon: Zero Dawn was a breakout title for Guerrilla Games. It proved that they were more than just the Killzone studio, and it immediately catapulted them to one of the top AAA studios in Sony, and in the industry in general.
The game’s last release, Horizon: Zero Dawn Complete Edition, bundled in the Frozen Wilds expansion and all the DLCs, DRM-free, to GOG.com last November 2020. With all the enhancements available on the PC version of the game, and the fact that the title is now DRM-free, it’s surprising that Sony felt a need for a PlayStation 5 port.
But if there are no real improvement a hypothetical PlayStation 5 port could bring over the PC release, it may simply be another remake that will make a tidy profit for Sony. We’ll wait and see, of course, if Sony does announce the remake.
