When the PS3 port of Velocity Ultra was announced yesterday, we let you know that Cross Buy and Cross Saves wouldn’t be offered. The reason FuturLab gave for the lack of these was due to the fact that it was free on PlayStation Plus in Europe, which Managing Director James Marsden explained in further detail on the PS Blog:
We would have loved to have done both Cross Buy and Cross Save (we’re doing it for Velocity 2X), however there are good reasons why we can’t do it.
Cross Buy – Since we (FuturLab) self published on PS Vita, and Curve Studios are publishing on PS3, it wouldn’t make any financial sense for Curve to publish if it were cross buy (because so many people got the PS Vita version for free on PlayStation Plus). We thought it was better to have the game on PS3 without Cross Buy than not at all. Hope you can understand this…
Cross Save – Because the game is being published by different companies (which are both small with limited budgets to make this stuff happen), it would have been too much work to do cross save as it is a complicated process.
The game does however share trophies, as that is a painless process that both companies had enough time and resources to support!
Sorry if you’re disappointed by this, but again it’s the only options we had available!
Following this, someone was quick to point out that Velocity Ultra was never free in the United States, with James replying:
You’re right, we tried to get it on PS Plus in the US but no luck.
However, well over a hundred thousand people got it for free in Europe, which would mean significant sales lost for Curve.
Imagine if we’d made it cross-buy in the US and not Europe, that would have been more work and even more controversial.
We’ve simply chosen the only option that made sense for Curve.
Hope you understand!
Also, with Velocity Ultra having shared trophies with the PlayStation Vita version, a commenter brought up that a shared trophy list would hurt sales. James admitted their mistake:
Yep, looks like we made a bad judgement call on this.
Mainly because I am old and withered and don’t understand why trophies should be important for the enjoyment of a game.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t listen to our fans every day and try and improve what we do.
So, we’re doing what we can right now to reverse this, but it might be too late/too expensive to alter at this point.
Were you one of the over 100,000 people in Europe to grab Velocity Ultra for free? Let us know in the comments below.
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