After all this speculation, Sony finally confirmed Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered in this week’s State of Play. But it seems the pulled a dirty trick on us along the way too.
As reported by MP1st, Sony has quietly raised the price of the original version of Horizon Zero Dawn on the PlayStation Store. That means if you waited this long to buy this version of the game on PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5, now you have to pay more. This does not affect the version of the game on Steam, Epic Game Store, or GOG.com. We may add here that the GOG version is DRM-free.
Now, we did not want to misrepresent this situation, so we looked back at this game’s price history, as well as the situations where Sony offered the game without full retail.
When Horizon Zero Dawn launched all the way back in February 2017 for the PlayStation 4, it retailed for $ 49.99. Sony then released a Complete Edition which bundled the DLC on December 2017, also for $ 49.99.This price history on PSPRices then shows that the game hit $ 39.99 in 2018. It then dropped and moved around in the $ 19.99 to $ 9.99 price point in the last six years after that.
If you were one of those gamers who were paying attention, you might have gotten this game for free. Sony gave Horizon Zero Dawn away as part of their Play At Home initiative. If you had a PlayStation account, you could have claimed this and other games with no strings attached, if you remembered to do it while Play At Home was live in 2021.
Finally, there is PlayStation Plus. Horizon Zero Dawn joined PlayStation Plus in 2022, as part of Sony’s reorganization of their subscription program. It then left the program in May of this year, and as we had reported, fans rightly speculated that it was because they were set to remaster the game.
So to be clear, the original Horizon Zero Dawn did not go up to an unreasonably high price that was higher than its original retail price. In fact, Sony clearly devalued the game for most of its lifetime, and it’s easy to see that as a move to try and get as many gamers to buy the game as possible.
Sony was historically generous in pricing Horizon Zero Dawn. They literally gave it away for free! But those giveaways and lower price points were all really business decisions. The decision to bring it back up to $ 39.99 is obviously a business decision too.
We shouldn’t consider all of this as a reason to thank or be angry at Sony, though we won’t stop you if you feel one way or the other. The important thing is this information should guide your buying decisions, when it comes to this game. You can choose to still buy it on the PlayStation Store for PlayStation 4, get a physical retail copy, buy it on PC, or get the upcoming remaster. As Dave Thomas would say, have it your way.
