In brief: This week, Io Interactive announced a promotion to appease fans who didn’t respond well to Hitman 3’s launch on Steam. Early buyers can get some extra content for free from now through most of February.
When Hitman 3 was first released on Steam last week, it immediately started getting bad reviews from fans angry at its price. Despite coming out on Steam precisely a year after it did on the Epic Games Store, Io still priced it at $59.99, which, to be fair, is still the MSRP on Epic right now.
In response, Io is now letting anyone who bought the standard edition of Hitman 3 before February 19 upgrade to the Deluxe Edition—usually $89.99 on its own—for free. Anyone who purchased the Deluxe Edition or the Hitman Trilogy before that date gets the Seven Deadly Sins expansion season pass for free. Users only need to launch their copies of Hitman 3 for the upgrades to apply.
It’s not the first time the game has encountered controversy. When Hitman 3 launched on Epic, Io initially said those who owned the previous two games on Steam would have to repurchase them on the Epic store to import the levels from those games into Hitman 3. This stipulation garnered harsh backlash. A month later, the studio implemented a workaround that let users import the levels at no extra cost by linking Steam, Epic, and IOI accounts.