Accessibility Remasters are a Disability Tax

In the five years or so that I’ve been publishing Access-Ability as a weekly series, PlayStation’s first party studios have, time and time again, pushed forward gaming accessibility in new, interesting, and novel ways. They’ve been at the forefront of the push for high contrast mode support in games, they laid out the blueprint for modern accessibility onboarding and common disability category preset options, and have been leading the charge in the AAA space on introducing cinematic audio descriptions and sightless player navigation tools to their releases.

PlayStation is one of the first publishers that comes to mind when I want to point to examples of accessibility efforts being done correctly in the AAA gaming space, but their approach to accessibility is not free from critique, and today I want to talk about a trend I’m seeing with the publisher that I have really mixed feelings about.

Let’s talk about PlayStation’s cycle of selling accessibility improvements as a component of paid upgrades to games.

This all starts, more innocuously, in late 2020 when Spider-Man: Miles Morales launched alongside the release of the PlayStation 5. The short form sequel introduced a number of accessibility settings options that had not been present in the previous entry in the series, but had recently been popularised by their inclusion in The Last of Us: Part 2.

The game featured support for high contrast mode, and a dedicated accessibility menu offering options such as increased dodge window timings, quick time event autocomplete, changing button holds to toggles, and enhanced auto aim.

While these accessibility settings were designed for Miles Morales, they were also ported back to the original Spider-Man title, both as part of the simultaneously releasing PS5 remaster, and importantly an update to the PS4 original version of the game.

I want to be clear up front, this I think was a great move. People who already owned the PS4 version of Spider-Man and didn’t want to pay extra money to upgrade to a version with improved graphics or loading times could still access these new accessibility improvements at no additional cost. In my opinion, this is the blueprint that accessibility patches for recent older games should follow.

In an ideal world, accessibility improvements should be available to all users, whether or not they are interested in new content additions or improved graphical performance upgrades that come with an additional cost.

However, in September 2022 we saw the release of The Last of Us: Part 1, a PS5 remake of Naughty Dog’s narrative heavy PS3 and PS4 shooter, which took a different approach to accessibility additions.

The PS5 remake of the Last of Us featured graphical improvements compared to the original release, as well as taking advantage of PS5 specific hardware features such as DualSense adaptive trigger functionality, and added in a bunch of accessibility support features from The Last of Us: Part 2.

There was no upgrade path for owners of the PS3 or PS4 version of the game to pay a smaller fee to upgrade to the new PS5 release with its increased accessibility support, players needed to purchase a new version of the game at full price to gain access to new features such as sightless blind player navigation tools, high contrast visuals, and the newly introduced cinematic audio descriptions.

Now, I do get from a business perspective why these new accessibility features were likely tied into this new paid remaster of the game. Backporting a large number of accessibility settings to an older game, particularly accessibility settings which require fundamentally restructuring parts of the game such as adding pathfinding for blind players, is a lot of work, and bundling those settings into a paid remaster helps to recoup some of those costs. Disabled players may not particularly care about the new visual upgrades present in the remaster, but by paying for the remaster to get access to the new accessibility features it offers, you recoup some of those development costs from them.

Additionally, reportedly this remake of Part 1 was remade from the ground up, rather than making changes layered on top of the original game’s code. I don’t know how accurate that claim is, but on paper that’s part of the justification for not porting the new accessibility features to the older versions of the game.

And yeah, if executives at the top of the company are presenting the options available as either pay for accessibility feature additions as part of a remaster or don’t get them at all, then yes, I obviously prefer a world where those updates exist. Fundamentally, the most important thing to me is that people have the tools they need to experience more video games. That doesn’t mean I can’t be kind of frustrated regardless by accessibility features ending up behind a paywall like this. I can still be frustrated that in essence this acts as a disability tax, putting a paywall between disabled players and accessibility feature improvements that in a just world wouldn’t come with an additional cost.

If you’re a non disabled gamer, and you don’t care about graphical quality, you could buy a second hand copy of The Last of Us on PS4 for cheap. If you need those new accessibility features, your only option is to pay more for the newer release of the game. That essentially forces an increased cost onto disabled players, which isn’t ideal.

I get that Spider-Man being a PS4 title from only a few years prior probably made it easier to justify backporting accessibility features than it was in The Last of Us, originally released on the PS3. I can still be frustrated that Spider-Man’s example isn’t the blueprint we ended up following going forward for accessibility features being added to older PlayStation games when they get PS5 ports and remasters.

In January 2024, we saw this trend continue with The Last of Us: Part 2 Remastered on PS5. This remaster at least offered players an option to upgrade their PS4 copy of the game to the PS5 remaster for £10 rather than being sold exclusively as a full priced new release, and it offered new content such as a roguelike mode, but the remaster’s accessibility improvements were once again exclusive to the remaster, and not ported to the PS4 version of the game.

Most notably, this meant that cinematic audio descriptions of cutscenes were gated behind a £10 upgrade, yet again bundled in with other paid updates rather than offered as a free patch for existing owners of the game.

In October 2024 we saw a remastered version of Until Dawn released on PS5, again offering no upgrade path for existing owners of the game, being sold as a full priced new release, and adding accessibility features to the new remaster but not the original release. These included new Quick Time Event options, increased visual cues for optional items, new options for customising controls, and new options for cognitive accessibility.

Today, Days Gone Remastered is releasing on PS5. Once again it’s a full price new release, and once again new accessibility features are being added exclusively to this new more expensive version of the game. These include remappable controls, high contrast mode, UI narration, audio cues for collectables, and an FOV slider for motion sickness prone players.

And again, I understand from a business perspective why this is the model PlayStation as a publisher is taking. It’s using paid patches to recoup costs for time spent on accessibility work, and making the choice that there’s more value in focusing on accessibility efforts on a new release rather than potentially doubling up the work to add those same features to an older version of the game that’s unlikely to sell significant numbers of copies in the future. I understand why this is the approach being taken from an outside perspective.

But, fundamentally, I feel like accessibility improvements should where possible not be paywalled behind paid updates or more expensive versions of a game. I believe that using accessibility updates as part of the value proposition for selling these kinds of remasters and upgrades is antithetical to the way we ideally should be treating accessibility, and they functionally act as a disability tax, pushing disabled consumers toward more expensive purchases and away from cheaper alternatives otherwise available.

I understand this more in the case of remasters of far older games – When a game like Tomba gets remastered for example I can see why it’s being sold as a new release and the accessibility improvements are exclusive to that new version of the game. When the gap between initial release and remaster is measured in decades I find that much easier to justify than when we’re talking in some cases as little as four years from a game’s original release, to the new more accessible remaster.

I know I singled out PlayStation in this video. This is not behaviour exclusive to them as a publisher, but they are the publisher most consistently engaging in the practice with relatively recent game releases, and as such are the publisher that most frequently reminds me about this particular industry practice. I understand why this is happening, but I feel obligated to point out that in a perfect world this isn’t how we would be handling adding modern accessibility features to relatively recent last gen releases.