Pete Hines, Bethesda’s VP of marketing, has explained why console players will have to pay full price for Skyrim: Special Edition while PC players get it for free if they already own Skyrim and all of its expansions.
When Bethesda announced that PC players would have the ability to get Skyrim: Special Edition for free, many console players felt that this was unfair as they would have to pay for it. When a fan asked why this was the case on Twitter, Hines replied by saying that they were making the game available for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 while PC is already capable of running Skyrim with high resolution textures.
@SerpentMonkey we’re making a game available for Xbox one and PS4. It already exists on PC, with high res textures.
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) June 18, 2016
@SerpentMonkey because it’s for a new platform. Just like any other remaster for new platforms.
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) June 18, 2016
Essentially, it boils down to the fact that Bethesda was just remastering it for the current generation of consoles. Anyone with Skyrim on PC doesn’t need a remastered version. The price can be hard to justify to a lot of people, but I can understand the thought process behind the decision. Console players are paying for an upgrade, and Skyrim with all of its expansions offers a ton of value. However, it’s still a little unfair because the high-resolution texture pack was available for free to PC owners to begin with. They never had to pay for that upgrade in the first place. Plus, the remastered version and the original PC version don’t even look the same even with the fancy texture pack.
Jennifer is a games journalist, former games journalist and PR Manager at Gearbox. They contributed 234 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: went on to write for Windows Central and later managed PR for Gearbox Software.