As it was announced late last month, Dino Crisis has finally made its way to a modern PlayStation console… Kind of. The announcement said that Dino Crisis was going to join the PlayStation Plus service on October 16, 2024, but what a lot of people didn’t seem to understand was where it was going to end up on the three-tier service: PlayStation Plus Premium.
For years, people have been begging CAPCOM to either release the game, via emulation, onto a service that works with modern consoles, release the game in a playable state like the Resident Evil trilogy on GOG, or remake/remaster the game in some form so that modern gamers could be chased down by their favorite dinosaurs once again… Hell, I’ve led this charge a few times myself here on The Outerhaven… And don’t get me started on that tease of a failure that was ExoPrimal…
Now that Dino Crisis has been given new life on PlayStation Plus, people were excited about buying the game… Until they saw where it landed.
For those who are unaware of the horrible PlayStation Plus service, let me explain. PlayStation Plus was once a wonderful service that gave gamers a huge collection of games, most of which were available to buy, at a discount when you subscribed to their platform… Until they saw what Microsoft was doing with Game Pass and promptly copied what they were doing, just with worse results.
To say that PlayStation Plus and its three tiers is not worth the money is an understatement. The Basic tier, which is just the three monthly games that are decided at random, coupled with the ability to play online, is garbage. Most of the time the games offered on this tier are things that most people already own, or wouldn’t buy if they were in a 90% off sale.
The next tier, called Deluxe, gives you what the original PlayStation Plus service offered. You would get monthly random games, online access, and the ability to download a collection of games that rotate through the service. This is what people know PlayStation Plus for and why it used to be such a success.
The final tier, called Premium, gives you everything the previous two tiers gave, along with a selection of Game Trials and PlayStation Classic games… So games from the PlayStation One and PlayStation 2 eras (You can also get PlayStation 3 games through streaming, but only if you live in the USA). A lot of people, including myself, have problems with this tier and are very vocal about not buying it… Except I needed to for work purposes… Such is life.
For those people who want to buy Dino Crisis, or even have access to it, they would need to subscribe to PlayStation Plus Premium. As anyone who knows how much I hate this idea and has outlined it many times over, I think that it is unfair to force people to subscribe at a higher tier for the ability to get something that they have been begging for over the last few years.
However, there is no malice behind this decision, unlike stripping the Essential PlayStation 4 collection to add it to the Deluxe tier, as this has been the way things have been with Classic PlayStation games since the move to the three-tier service. Access to PlayStation One and PlayStation 2 games has been a Premium-only option for a while now, and anyone who thought that this was going to change for Dino Crisis is an absolute fool who needs to go back to grade school and relearn how to read basic English.
The advertising for Dino Crisis (See the header image for this article) states that the game is going to be on the PREMIUM service in big ass letters for you all to see. But seeing as this is the age of angry people on the internet, X has blown up with complaints about the release of Dino Crisis onto the service… Let’s look at some highlights.
Awsome… Let’s start things out with one of the most popular posts on X… And yes, I’m not going to censor your name or account… Come at me bro!
Posts like this are disgusting and make the whole gaming community look bad. While I understand the frustration of having to subscribe to a Premium tier on PlayStation Plus to get access to two of CAPCOM’s best games (Resident Evil: Director’s Cut is debatable, have you heard the remixed music?) is something that could almost defend someone making threats, but at no point should we devolve into calling someone a piece of shit for something that is beyond their control.
I would almost agree with this one… Except it’s not CAPCOM who made the decision to put Dino Crisis into the Classics Catelogue section, it was PlayStation themselves who created, set up, and curated the sections for their product. If you are going to berate someone, then take aim at Sony or PlayStation, it was their decision.
Bro has a good point here. Buying a PlayStation 3 and a copy of Dino Crisis on PlayStation One is just as much as buying a year of Premium. But do you want to spend that much just to do that? Also, why buy Resident Evil: Director’s Cut when you could buy an original black label or big box version of the game instead? This is some good advice, but ultimately it seems pointless when you look at the big picture. If you want to do something like this, I have a link in this article that can give you other options to get both games on a PlayStation 3, or if you want to buy a PlayStation 3 in order to start a PlayStation 3 or PlayStation One collection then go nuts.
Trophies are rarely added to PlayStation One games unless they are added to something like what happened with the Metal Gear Solid Collection Volume 1. It takes time to add trophies to these old games and sometimes the coding could actually corrupt the game itself. So leaving them out is not a bad thing. Hell, games not having trophies sounds great to me! I don’t need to be awarded every 5 seconds with some data pop-up telling me how good I am, sometimes just playing the game is its own reward. Maybe give that a try sometime!
One thing I will agree with is the lack of cross-buy with the PlayStation 3 release. Back in the day, Dino Crisis was released onto the PlayStation 3 with emulation, something that Sony did a lot of back then. People who bought the game back then should be allowed to play it with this new release, as the license should be the same one they had back then. However, this version seems to have a whole new license, stopping people from being able to get access to the game this time around… More about this later.
Finally, it’s not CAPCOM’s fault, it’s PlayStation.
This one is very valid. People have been wanting a remake of Dino Crisis in the same vein as Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3, and Resident Evil 4, with updated graphics and a smoother storyline. Some others would be happy with running Dino Crisis through the RE Engine, much like that lazy remaster of Dead Rising recently got. People wanted anything to do with Regina and her lizard-slaying adventures on a modern console and have been denied many times over, with the most recent being the stupidest quote on record by Shinji Mikami, the mind behind Resident Evil and Dino Crisis, who stated: “So even if I were to decide to make a remake or a new version of Dino Crisis, I don’t really feel like there’s a whole lot of space for that kind of game right now, just since Monster Hunter has become such a big game.”
People online right now are understandably upset by Dino Crisis being behind the PlayStation Plus paywall, as this could give CAPCOM enough ammo to state that no one wants Dino Crisis because they weren’t willing to shell out the extra to subscribe to the Premium tier of PlayStation Plus to play the original version. CAPCOM seems to find weird ways to say no to fans by using the sales or player numbers of other titles in the same franchise as a source of why it is not worth making or remaking, something that people have been wanting.
I’m all for game preservation, especially for games as beloved as Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Dino Crisis. The second-hand market on a lot of these games is getting expensive, with most games commanding a $100+ price tag to get a complete copy. The digital era was meant to fix this by making things like older games available forever for people to buy in order to keep prices down. However, companies love profit, so things like games preservation are either exploited for profit (I’m looking at you Nintendo), or get left in the hands of online pirates, and they have to fight legal battles to continue to do the work that the companies should be doing themselves.
Calling the release of Dino Crisis in this manner an “anti-consumer move” isn’t accurate. Dino Crisis is now preserved online, but not in the way that a lot of people want. It’ll remain a part of the PlayStation Plus service until the license is ended between CAPCOM and PlayStation, and we begin this whole thing over again.
As I mentioned before, this is not the first time that Dino Crisis has returned from the grave to get new life as a digital download. Previously, the game was available through the PlayStation Store on PlayStation 3, allowing people to buy the game and play it on that console to this day. But it seems that with the closure of the PlayStation 3 Store, PlayStation is not honoring the purchases made back then.
This might change soon, however, as people who bought Resident Evil: Director’s Cut back on the PlayStation 3 are allowed to get the game anytime they want, without needing the Premium tier upgrade. The screenshot above is from my own PlayStation 5, where I have the same account I bought Resident Evil: Director’s Cut on back in the day, and I’m allowed to get it at any time… I really should have bought Dino Crisis when I had a chance back then… Oh wait, I own the physical versions that I can play on my PlayStation One, PlayStation 2, or PlayStation 3!
Should people be upset that Dino Crisis is only available on PlayStation Plus Premium? Yes and No.
For the Yes side of things, this shows that people are angry about being forced to pay for something that they don’t want all of, to get access to one piece of content. Some could say this is exploitative by PlayStation, and I’d be inclined to agree with them. No one should be forced to pay extra for a single item, especially when its a subscription service that can remove that content, without warning, at any time.
Also, there is something to be said about PlayStation, or CAPCOM, to lock out the ability to buy content from a service that allows people to buy content through the service. Dino Crisis is a rare game that does this, while other games on the same tier and catalog of the service are available to buy at a discount. I do not know who to blame here, but someone needs to fix this ASAP or people are not going to bother with the Premium service at all, or even PlayStation Plus in general.
On the opposite side, there is something to be said about consumer expectations. Many people went into all of this thinking that Dino Crisis was going to be a standalone option on the PlayStation Store, allowing them to buy the game outright, or get the game through a lower tier of service, thus setting expectations that PlayStation or CAPCOM did not need to appease… Why? From the day of the announcement, Dino Crisis was only going to be released as a part of the Classics Catalog, which has been a Premium tier service item since the switch to this tiered service. All the advertising about the release of this game said as much in every Press Release and advertisement. It’s not PlayStation’s or CAPCOM’s fault if you cannot read and understand something that was presented clearly from day one.
You get what you get, so don’t get upset… or at least make outlandish claims on the internet.
