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Refunds offered as Techland scraps PS4 version of The Beast
Developed over time first seen 4 months ago
Techland has cancelled the PlayStation 4 version of Dying Light: The Beast and says refunds will be offered to players who expected to receive it through Dying Light 2’s earlier season pass. The decision matters because the game had effectively replaced promised post-launch content for Dying Light 2, leaving some last-generation players without access to a product they had been led to expect. Techland said releasing the game on older hardware would have meant compromising the quality of the experience too heavily.
When Dying Light 2 launched, its season pass promised two DLC packs, with the first arriving on both PS5 and PS4. The second later became Dying Light: The Beast, a standalone release that PS5 Ultimate Edition owners could still access, while work on a PS4 version continued until now. In a public statement, Techland apologised and said affected players on the cancelled platform would be eligible for refunds, describing the move as a result of technical limitations rather than a decision to abandon last-gen consoles.
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In short
- Techland has scrapped The Beast on PS4
- Affected players are being offered refunds
- Technical limits ended the last-gen version
How this story developed
- 4 months ago Techland then clarified that the cancelled PS4 release concerned content originally sold as Dying Light 2’s second season pass expansion, reaffirmed refunds for affected players, and said the move reflected technical constraints rather than a retreat from last-generation consoles.
- 4 months ago Techland said it had scrapped the PlayStation 4 version of Dying Light: The Beast and would refund players who had expected to receive it through Dying Light 2’s season pass, explaining that older hardware would force too many compromises to the game.
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
The strongest case for Techland's decision rests on genuine technical limitations that cannot be overcome without fundamentally compromising the experience on last-generation hardware. Releasing an inferior version would disservice all players, and the company's offer of refunds demonstrates responsible good faith rather than naked profit-seeking. Given that development revealed the gulf was simply too wide, cancelling allows Techland to deliver the ambitious experience players expect on capable hardware whilst respecting PS4 players' prior investment through refunds and maintaining the quality standard its franchise demands.
The case against
The season pass was explicitly marketed to PS4 players with the clear promise of this content, creating a legitimate contractual expectation upon which consumers based their purchasing decisions. A refund after extended development constitutes a broken commitment; if technical impossibility was genuinely foreseeable, Techland should have communicated this far earlier rather than continuing development and accepting players' money. This pattern epitomises how the industry systematically abandons last-generation console owners, leaving them with shrinking content libraries whilst defending such decisions through vague appeals to quality rather than acknowledging the broken promises involved.
Explained simply
Techland is the studio behind the Dying Light series, an action game franchise built around exploring a city overrun by zombies. When it released Dying Light 2, the studio sold a season pass promising extra downloadable content afterwards, including a second expansion that later took shape as a separate, standalone release called Dying Light: The Beast, available on newer PlayStation 5 consoles.
The issue centres on PlayStation 4, an older console generation, where a version of The Beast had been planned but never finished. Players who bought Dying Light 2 on PS4, and who had been told they would eventually get this content as part of their season pass, were left without it once Techland decided the PS4 edition would not go ahead.
This matters because it touches on how much game companies owe customers when promised content doesn't materialise, particularly for those still using older hardware. Techland's response, cancelling the PS4 version and offering refunds, is one way studios have handled similar situations elsewhere in the industry.
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Originally published by Push Square as “Refunds for Dying Light 2 PS4 Users as The Beast Is Cancelled for Last-Gen System”.