Obsidian even went ahead and said that while it couldn’t guarantee anything, it was investigating whether it could also find a way to extend this offer to people who owned the physical version of the game on PS4 or Xbox One. Since players had until May 27 to purchase the base game and still get the upgrade, many went and did exactly that. After all, Spacer’s Choice Edition has been fixed since its troubled launch and comes with all of the DLC. Cool beans!
Except it turns out that people who own the base version of the game can’t upgrade after all on PlayStation and Xbox. “The Spacer’s Choice Edition upgrade was intended to say ‘Thanks’ to anyone who purchased The Outer Worlds base game by providing them a free upgrade to the newly improved version,” the studio later wrote on X.
It continued, “However, due to various entitlement restrictions and backend issues we weren’t able to provide this as smoothly as we wished and our players are, rightfully, upset. If you purchased the base game on Xbox One or PlayStation 4 between 4/30 and 5/27, or have any issues with the upgrade, please contact our support team and we’ll work with you to make it right. Sorry again for the frustration around this.”
It’s unclear what the make-good would be in this situation. A refund for anyone who just purchased the base game? Complimentary DLC? A free $10 upgrade? So far at least, the apology isn’t going over well. “Simply put: scam,” wrote one person on X. “I have a quick fix,” wrote another. “Make the DLC free for a week and everyone’s happy. You could do that and gain a lot of good will, but you prefer to apologize and make excuses.”
At least some people are getting the DLC free. “To their credit they emailed me a code to get spacers choice that also forced the dlc for the og version to activate / be recognized,” wrote one player who had previously been locked out from accessing the PS5 version of the game. “Got both full version now.”
It’s worth noting that this hasn’t been an issue at all on Steam, only on PlayStation and Xbox. The latter is especially confusing since Obsidian is a first-party studio, even though The Outer Worlds was originally published by Private Division, a Take-Two label that no longer even exists. In some ways the entire weird debacle perfectly fits the sci-fi RPG’s unique brand of corporate satire.