I posted a thread on this on gaf, but I'm so annoyed I'm posting it here too:
I just found out about this latest anti-consumer act by one of the more scummy Japanese publishers and felt it deserves it's own thread.
In Gundam Breaker 3, the upcoming Gundam G Generations Genesis, and possibly a DBZ game? on PS4, Namco Bandai is purposely blocking remote play for the PS4 versions because they don't want their customers to have access to a portable version of the games they've already bought for $80 without paying another $70 on top (for a total of $150+) in order to enjoy the cross-save TV & portable experience.
Since cross-save got big in Japan in the last 5 years of so with PS3/Vita games, I was looking forward to when more Japanese games moved to PS4 so you could get the same experience through remote play. Then you wouldn't have to decide whether to get it on console or handheld and you wouldn't have to double dip.
Japanese publishers must have realized that some portion of their sales were coming from people paying $150 per game in order to buy both the console & handheld version so they could play on the TV and then go relax in bed and play on the same save.
Every other publisher who moved to PS4 may have been sad they lost those few double dips, but one of PS4's big selling points is the ability to have remote play and play a game you've already bought and paid for, wherever you like. It's part of the system, just like the screenshot function. You don't even have to program for it, as long as your controls work, remote play is from what I know, an automatic streaming of the game from your PS4. In fact, you have to go out of your way to program it so remote play is disabled in your game.
And Namco Bandai decide to do that and it's likely they will continue to do this for all their releases that have Vita versions (which aren't going away anytime soon since Vita is still important to Japan's ecosystem). Why let PS4 players play on Vita (or PC) for the $80 they've already spent on the PS4 version, when they can force those players to spend another $70 on the Vita version as well? It's the equivelent of a publisher blocking the PS4 screenshot system ability and then selling it as DLC for $5. It's fucking gross and incredibly anti-consumer.
Since the Vita is dead in America, I wonder if they'll change this for the US releases. But then again the two Gundam games that do this are not getting a US release. Still it's such a disgusting practice by a publisher that I think it should be more well known. Other publishers may block entire functions like screenshots or video (*cough*Persona 5*cough*) but at least they have some sort of justification that they're trying to avoid online spoilers early on and at least they're not trying to sell it back to you separately. Although if the spoiler justification was actually true, they should patch those features back in after a certain time, but they won't because really it's a stance against streaming/youtube/nico videos of their games since they're afraid they lose sales by people watching the games for free online instead of buying them. Which is sort of Japan's "piracy is losing us billions!!" silliness but that's for another thread and this thread is just about Scamco being Scamco.
