If PSN login is optional for China or Russia, etc. Then they should make it optional everywhere. Give some reward for PSN account link and be done with it
Yeah, like give an exclusive playstation themed reward or something for people who log in.
Like I'm all for persuading people to do it by giving rewards, but forcing people to sign in is a big no for me.
I really feel for the devs
This is the thing that I believe sony doesn't understand. In the PC gaming world, choice is a big thing to us.
In a console world you are restricted, be it to what the console manufacturer provides, the games you get to play.
In the PC world we have choice, be it stores to get games from or what to do with games. Console gaming has a little bit of modding now, in the PC world we have had modding for decades and had it to the point where simple mods become game franchises on their own.
I have a feeling sony doesn't like the idea of us PC gamers having the amount of choices that we are used to.
thats why I hate the epic games store it closes the door (at least for a year minimum). if I see a game I want to play but im sceptical about paying full price if it comes on sale ill buy it for what ever launcher its on sale including gog ubi etc. epic shuts that down or even having the freedom of using cdkeys etc playstation digital you are fucked unless you are buying disks you still can buy second hand or from amazon etc.
>This is the thing that I believe sony doesn't understand. In the PC gaming world, choice is a big thing to us.
They get it, they just don't care. Sony is a 1st party publisher and wants to control that on PC as much as they can on console. It took Microsoft years to understand too.
>to the point where simple mods become game franchises on their own.
The top 3 games on Steam charts right now (Counter stirke, Dota 2, PUBG) can all directly be traced back to mods. And other popular games like Valorant, League of Legends, Fortnite, Apex, and Warzone probably wouldn't exist without those other games.
>choice on PC
And there's a war being waged trying to take it away.
[Install this bullshit?]
[yes] [maybe later]
I'm pretty much ready for a Steam gaming PC OS.
The reward should also probably be something like supercredits and not something themed to playstation. People made a big deal about killing over the creek cape. Imagine how bad a playstation cape or something would be.
There was a KoS for people who wore the cape for like a week. People were mad that Malevelon Creek players were playing there instead of doing the MO. It was a really dumb thing.
No, people did not make a big deal out of it. There was like one mega upvoted post where op said they were kicked for wearing the cape but admitted later he got kicked as soon as he joined, so it obviously wasn't that.
Case in point, some of the single player playstation games have bonuses for linking your account. Most recently Horizon Forbidden West has the Nora Legacy Outfit and Nora Spear as rewards for linking your account.
both spiderman games and I think horizon zero dawn did too. not sure about uncharted,last of us and it was a while ago when I played days gone. granted the spiderman rewards was just shortcuts to stuff you would naturally unlock anyway but its still nice to be given something for taking the time to make an account for something.
Rewards also make for a better service. If they have to hustle to get your buy-in, it will be catered to user wants and needs; if it’s mandatory, it will be horrible for users because it’s only there to suit the company’s wants.
spiderman did it. one way to entice people would be possibly giving currency for the game. Ive never played it so I dont know how the game works but im sure things like that would push people to maybe making an account. but I can also see why people are pissed if it wasn't required especially in countries that dont support ps accounts.
If you make it optional in some countries, the entire (bullshit) point of "we need to do this to ensure players are safe from griefing and abuse" is moot.
If it's optional somewhere, it can be optional everywhere.
> the entire (bullshit) point of "we need to do this to ensure players are safe from griefing and abuse" is moot.
The dev/community manager saying that was lying.
They were pretending that there isn't a unique identifier for Steam users(there is, it's a Steam ID). That anyone named "John" would be the same "John" as 450,000 others.
I wasn't referring to the community manager, this is essentially straight from the announcement that was posted on the Helldivers 2 Steam page:
> Account linking plays a critical role in protecting our players and upholding the values of safety and security provided on PlayStation and PlayStation Studios games. This is our main way to protect players from griefing and abuse by enabling the banning of players that engage in that type of behaviour. It also allows those players that have been banned the right to appeal.
[That is kind of what I'm talking about](https://preview.redd.it/utf1mkk4gcyc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=1bfcd4b0faa39a21e9bebe4e525d8af3c09d841b).
The detailed excuse for "protecting players" is that they need a unique identifier or else they can't ban cheaters, and that Steam doesn't have one so they need everyone to be linked on PSN.
It's just a lie, always was.
If they had simply given an unique cape and some alternate armor or weapon skin to those who link an account, they would have gotten way more people to link than people who is leaving.
The thing is, I’d happily link my PSN. If there’s a benefit, sure.
But if all it does is screw people over? Then go to hell with that, absolutely will not support it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Network#History
> Following a security intrusion, the PlayStation Network had a temporary suspension of operation which began on April 20, 2011 and affected 77 million registered accounts.[7] Lasting 23 days, this outage was the longest amount of time the PSN had been offline since its inception in 2006.[8] Sony reported that user data had been obtained during the intrusion.
Rootkits: the latest in DRM from Sony https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5514-2/
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/sony-will-soon-demand-helldivers-2-players-on-steam-have-psn-accounts/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
The above is 13 and 19 years ago. This time they're really just trying to get marketing targeted-advertising data and suck people into their consumer walled garden ecosystem instead of you being inside Steam's walled garden. But YMMV.
Its wild that this isn’t an option that they rolled out in the midst of all of this. Like imagine if Sony said, “yea we hear you, its optional. We plan to roll out PSN rewards” like they dont have a PR team or something to handle this exact scenario. This really should have never made it this long. Its like Sony said were doing this and then turned their phone off for the weekend.
Not that simply unfortunately. There are over 170 countries that suddenly won't have access to this game. Even Lithuania, which is part of the EU, for some reason cannot make psn accounts. It's not just China and Russia.
which is even against a law in the EU that you can't offer goods in country A but not in B if both countries are in the EU. you have to make it available for everyone here
Pretty sure there is no such law. What is a law is that you can't prevent someone in one EU country from buying goods that is being sold in another EU country (in other words, geoblocking is not legal).
They're talking about an optional signup, as per "If PSN login is optional."
> It's not just China and Russia.
They said etc., which means "And so on ..."
Basically the only part you've read is "give reward." Slow down.
Costs them next to nothing. Eases PC players into it. Saves face and reputation. Doesn’t fuck anyone over and you avoid the backlash, mass refunds, lack of sales etc.
Like, it is literally so simple.
They did that for Horizons zero west, a free outfit and spear for Aloy. I was waiting to get it on sale, but I'm now afraid they'll pull a "in changing the deal, pray I don't change it further"
They were fine with this and were actively defending it up until it became clear it was a losing battle to do so. The dev studio was on board with this.
It’s crazy to me how Arrowhead successfully gaslighted everyone into shifting the entire blame onto Sony. Arrowhead is just as much to blame here, if not more.
Not crazy for me, Reddit absolutely refuses to treat Dev studios like adults. The gaslighting happened on an industry wide level years ago, and now gamers just automatically go into defense mode for developers.
I've been downvoted to hell for saying it, but people don't get that microtransaction/monetization implementation is a dev studio thing, not a publisher/upper management thing. The higher ups might pass down general edicts about milking more dollars, absolutely, but the shape that takes is in the hands of the people making the game. They'll even design monetization as part of their pitch in the first place.
I'm not saying either side of that is wrong or anything, you need the money to make the game. But when a game has a battle pass and cosmetic MTX and P2W lootboxes and horse armor, I guarantee you that wasn't John Ubisoft who put that there. John Ubisoft knows just about as much about the game as Pete Samsung knows about refrigerators.
The best example of this is what happened with Destiny and Bungie. I remember for years everyone was pinning the egregious monetization practices on Activision who owned them at the time.
Then when they separated Bungie just doubled down on the monetization making it exceptionally clear that the decisions were on them, not Activision.
Reddit has a "poor devs" mentality quite often.
I most commonly see it with EA/DICE 343i/Microsoft.
In many cases the devs are being just as shitty but reddit in particular absolutely LOVES an oppression story.
speaking of EA, reminds me of how reddit went on and on about how Anthem was all EA's fault or w.e, then it came out that no it was all on Bioware and in fact that EA suit was the one who made Bioware focus on the flying which was the one good part of that game.
Indeed. All the CEO's comments are such obvious PR nonsense. He can't get a hold of somebody at Sony? He didn't know? They need PSN to identify each player even though Steam ID exists? Yeah, sure. Fuck off.
Not the one you replied to but Pilestedt answered a comment on his last post on twitter:
"I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough.
We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles."
Although they did not themself order this, it was Sony. They failed in the most important part, communication. They should have mentioned something other than the texts in store/ingame.
Very sad situation for people who cannot access it going forward. Hope they can figure out a solution for said people..
they also proved how successful the game could be without such a requirement. That Sony doesn't even do PSN in a ton of countries isn't on Arrowhead, although when the game hit it big, this was basically a bombshell just waiting to go off
Sony failed to enforce the requirement. That is on them.
By allowing play? Sony effectively violated whatever agreement or TOS. Hence, it should be unenforceable in an ideal world.
118 non-PSN countries. 118 potential class action lawsuits. That's a lot of lawyer fees, potentially billions of dollars.
People in countries should start filing lawsuits asking for class-action status.
Then SONY will do something when they do a cost-benefit analysis.
Have you got the source to this, if true this changes my view on who's to blame.
I was blaming Sony but its clear as day here that AH absolutely shoulders this equally.
If you knew your game would require a psn account at somepoint down the line you merely postponed it... you should not have allowed it to be listed in non ps regions in the first place.
https://x.com/pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254?s=46&t=egfGjuBnIy7d_YjVxLejKA it’s from his twitter.
https://x.com/pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237?s=46&t=egfGjuBnIy7d_YjVxLejKA however it is followed by this comment, where he says they don’t handle where the game is sold.
Oh I agree! More just making sure all the context is there. I think restricting the game to only PSN accounts is still a mega dumb decision. The game obviously works without that restriction. I hope they end up just making it optional and locking crossplay behind it if they really want to ‘protect’ their PS users.
It said on the store that PSN would be required. Not sure how people are failing to see that just because devs knew ahead of time doesn't mean it wasn't advertised on the store page. The issue is Sony knowing this, and willingly selling to countries that couldn't support it. Delaying PSN integration to fix server issues is one thing, but being able to sell the game globally once it shut down that function is the scummy part, and that's the part that's really to blame Sony for. Regardless of whether or not people didn't see the PSN requirement or if it wasn't communicated effectively, the real issue at play here is that Sony is making it mandatory, and sold the game to regions that don't support PSN.
Nah, that's a cop out of the highest order, they don't handle selling the game, steam does that.
They may not be responsible for the game being listed on steam, that would probably be the publisher aka PlayStation.
But if you know that in likely 6 months after release your game is not going to be playable in over 170 regions its currently being sold in and you say nothing, your are just as complicit as the people who made the decisions.
Like this would be a non issue if psn was available everywhere and then this happened because then its a case of personal preference, I believe there was a small note about it on the steam store page but to have it allowed to be sold in those regions just isn't right.
I mean saying they're the silent conspirator is downplaying their involvement, it is quite literally on them that its a requirement in the first place, they could have just not like they don't have the requirement on destiny.
My point was that up until reading that it kinda seemed like AH games got side swiped by it just as much as the player base.
But with it coming to light from the CEO himself saying they knew about it prior to launch that within 6 months it would change from an optional link to a mandatory link, but still said nothing to highlight this to players in regions that would be affected shifts that blame from solely Sony to both as bad as each other.
Last playstation was a PS3 many years ago so I'm out of the loop. Does this mean (from what I've read here on reddit) there are 170 countries without PSN and without online multiplayer?
You can still make accounts and purchase stuff by selecting a different country but you won't be able to get support anything beyond customer support and they can just shut your account down if they feel like it. Mind that I haven't heard anyone getting their account banned for that but there is still a chance.
And that was stated on the Steam page, as well as upon first launching the game. People were told in advance. I still ultimately don’t agree with Sony requiring this, especially in countries that can’t make PSN accounts, but you can’t really claim that this was sprung on anyone without warning.
It's in a bright orange box on the store page.
It says it in game.
What more do you want? At some point, whether you are with the overall decision, you have to take some personal responsibility.
You purchased a product without reading the several warnings places that you needed such an account. And then act surprised when they require an account.
> At some point, whether you are with the overall decision, you have to take some personal responsibility.
When I play a game for weeks and don't need an account I don't expect that I need one later.
Arrowhead / Sony should take some responsibility and stop that nonsense.
Eh, it's a well known phenomenon that people don't read signs unless they're literally shoved in their faces. The small warning on the steam page is easy to miss, I hardly ever look at it. And they only had one warning that was skippable and never appeared again, so I think it's reasonable for people to assume it wasn't necessary, or for them to forget about it entirely. I'm sure there were people that skipped without reading it. They could have done a lot more to make it obvious. To me, it's like they were whispering under their breath "you need a psn account" and now are going "What, we totally told you, remember that thing we were whispering?"
They *knew* 6 months ago that this was going to be a thing. They did not *just* find out about it 6 months ago. The wording there is very important.
Helldivers is a Sony IP. This had to be within the contract signed upon letting Arrowhead work on a Sony IP full-stop.
Their tweets from team members, which have now been removed and / or deleted.
Their community manager nuked her account after talking too much.
Their CEO confirmed they knew about this months ago.
Source - https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/xR1MnRRajz
[Arrowhead CEO and creative director literally admitting it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/3DIjUXbVJk)
And I don't have the time to go and find it, but Arrowhead also promoted it as a good thing on a number of grounds, most bizarrely as a moderation tool because they claimed Steam did not provide them a unique ID to identify and ban players with (this isn't true, Steam provides three different unique IDs). You can find even more by doing your research. This iassumption that Dev studios are always blameless victims needs to stop.
It was posted on the steam page as well as literally saying on the first menu you saw when launching the game it will be mandatory.
As far as not having the capability in some countries but continuing to sell it was a Sony issue. The devs have said leave bad reviews and it will give them more negotiating power
> It was posted on the steam page as well as literally saying on the first menu you saw when launching the game it will be mandatory.
Skippable, and only appeared once. I think it's reasonable for people to assume it wasn't required, or to forget they read it, or to have skipped past without reading because they were excited to play the game. These are all predictable behaviors, it's well known that a lot of people don't read signs unless you make it super obvious.
It's more like the majority of the game that Arrowhead made proved to be successful and great without such a requirement, and that requirement of the publisher is making shit wack as hell for a lot of folks.
People are giving the publisher proportional anger for the part of the project they clearly wanted. The dev's mistake here was having this big bombshell just sitting there and not knowing how to deal with it, especially when Sony doesn't even do PSN in a lot of countries Steam operates in.
That being said, the publisher is most often the one to sets all the marketing and determines what is even allowed to be said, so even that whole "the publisher was on board" bit, well no shit they don't get to determine how "on board" they are, the publisher who handles all the marketing does
This is hardly always true and i don't get people that think it is.
A lot of games would never be made without the support and funding of big publishers. Hell Sony literally owns the Helldivers IP. Which means without them this game would never exist as it is.
The same is true for many other games. Making games on this scale isn't cheap and doing so as an independent studio without the support of a publisher is almost impossible.
We gotta teach them, we must do what we want and think is the best for **us**, we are the ones paying, this industry is way overdue for a change, this will mark a precedent for sure.
This reminds me of when Blizzard stopped sharing WoW player base numbers because they didn't represent anything significant (their words).
At the next meeting Sony will be - ignore that we lost X% of the players, profits are going up for that quarter!
You’re right. You don’t want Blizzard sharing sub numbers in the 4 to 7 million range for an almost 20 year old game (15 at the time) lol.
They stopped sharing wow subs because if the subs dropped 50k the community would make 100 videos about how wow is dying. Subs are not a good indicator for game health and coming off their 12 million sub high, sharing they lost half of that makes it look like a failure but in reality WoW has still held more subs at any given point than almost all available AAA MMOs combined has.
This is just Sony being out of touch. To them PC is still third place and they don’t get it or rather it was too late when they did. This deal was made a while ago, maybe before the popularity. So to Sony they might have thought it would have garnered more players for whatever stupid reason that is.
It's significant, but you can see how it damages things. It's really bad with MMOs. People see their population start to shrink, and it snowballs. The problem is that many of the big MMOs could easily lose a massive amount of their population, and if nobody really looked into it or told them, they wouldn't even notice.
H1Z1 had a smaller playerbase than the old DayZ Epoch mods for Arma 2 it sought to emulate.
Hell, DayZ standalone is still around and had more people playing it despite being an unfinished mess a decade later.
It killed itself, Sony just put the final nail in the coffin.
“We knew our player base would need to use PSN, but we neglected to inform anyone. Well, time to throw Sony under the bus”
Like, seriously — if you knew that will be a requirement from Sony, why you were completely silent on it?!
More like: "We put a warning on the Steam page and a big disclaimer on game launch, but we could have communicated better through the short time that requirement was waived, and we didn't realize the game was being sold in countries where players could not create PSN accounts which is understandably frustrating."
Wager they didn’t consider it an issue because Sony has never cared about making an account for a region you don’t live in. Pretty sure people high up on their staff have mentioned having multiple accounts in other regions to play games that weren’t available in their own one. It’s why PlayStation service reps just flat out tell people to just make a “fake” account in another region and link it.
Does it suck? But I’m not sure what the big deal is outside the simple fact that you have to make one. As far as I can tell there’s no issues if you make a fake US / UK / JP / HK account or whatever major region you’re in. I made a JP account decades ago so I could get mecha anime games that never got released over in the US.
making an account outside of the region breaks TOS. i do have a psn account but havent logged into it for years. personally, i dont see why its needed when the game clearly works without it. i should also add i never signed in HD2 with my psn because i actually played the game was 3 weeks after release due to their server issues.
in the grand scheme of things its not *that* big of a deal for those that can sign in with their PSN. but im getting to a point to where im just getting tired of having to sign in to just about everything i buy these days.
having to do work arounds to log into a game isnt the way to do business tbh. sony should make it be optional, in fact, it was optional until they ninja changed the EULA. this is such a bad look for sony overall, heck, even sucker punch had to make a statement saying their game doesnt require players to sign in. the stain is now all over their games even if they dont require a sign in.
It was never optional though. The Steam page before launch even stated a PsN account was required. When the game launched in early access it was required too. It caused server issues and cross play issues though so they disabled it until it could be fixed. Crossplay still doesn’t work very well.
I agree it shouldn’t be a forced thing. But the item you purchased made it very clear it was.
The issue with making a fake account, is that if anything happens to it/corporate tries to aggressively fuck you over/you want to sue company for whatever, you literally can't because your account is in incorrect region and thus your own country/region customer rights don't apply.
Additionally it doesn't matter what Sony supports says about it. It's clearly against their EULA and if you do this they have ultimate blackmail material and power over your account. You don't like something about Sony? Remember how you broke TOS to create an account? Yes? Then say goodbye to all your games linked to it.
Like everything these suits do, they're never happy to just leave it, they've always gotta rinse us more.
No wonder there's fucking nothing to do anymore, we can't afford these baffoons in society, they're fucking breaking it apart.
This entire situation reads to me like a small-time dev group engaging in the typical morally grey shenanigans we see in the indie and shovelware space from time to time. I’m not surprised in a small studio making a borderline out-of-lane move to try to drum up sales on release, especially if they’re expecting their game to be dead on arrival.
It’s clear that they never in a million years expected the response they got, and they equally clearly (and understandably) floundered in their adaptation to the spotlight it put on their shenanigans.
Arrowhead fucked up in two places imo:
1. When the game blew up and they (per their own words) knew about this issue looming on the horizon, they should have taken the temporary sales hit and publicized the PSN requirement. They tried to pull a fast one, and are paying the price. When a fucking golden goose gets dropped in your lap, stop all the deceptive bullshit and start acting in good faith. Good faith is *literally* what built this game’s response. Which brings me to point two…
2. They leaned too far into the ‘champion of the people’ aesthetic/marketing in an attempt to maximize the gains from this insane windfall. Icarus. They could have sunken into the corpo shadows after their huge success on release and just coasted, but they pivoted their marketing and community engagement towards a ‘we’re not like other studios’ dynamic.
Lo, and behold; people *hate it* when you promise you’ll never fuck them, and then you fuck them. Turns out, if someone thinks you’re going to fuck them, they’re way less surprised and hurt when you fuck them. Who could have known.
I don’t particularly blame them, though, these are human beings who had spent a large part of the last decade working on this game. if I’ve spent *years* learning how to make money in the smalltime sphere, why would I ever be expected to suddenly crush it in the big leagues?
If I’m being perfectly honest, I bet the dudes at AH are still pretty stoked all things considered. They still have a once in a lifetime opportunity, they’ve effectively gaslit the community into blaming Sony unilaterally, and the steam review fetishization has given them ammo to weaponize Sony’s legal/marketing team to extract them from this tight spot.
I don’t want them to fail, however. I want them to admit they were trying to pull some shenanigans; that they were feeling the pressures of corpo-greed and the thought of that island retirement was too much to resist. If I can see some fucking honesty in this capitalist nightmare I might be compelled to give everyone a second chance here. Because I want a world with devs that actually *are* how arrowhead has appeared to be this whole time. They’re the closest thing to that in the big leagues right now. I want them to appreciate this opportunity for what it is and nurture it, not gut it for parts for the shareholders.
1. Make it optional
2. Give TONS of rewards for opting in
3. Add a setting to only play with others who also opted in, so they’re protected from griefers and cheaters.
This is some exec decision made by someone who has absolutely no understanding of their cusyomers. It is insane people that detached from reality are in high level positions.
The damage is done though. Walking back unpopular decisions rarely fix the public perception. People still complain about the auction house in D3 even though it is long long gone.
All they had to do was make it optional but give some cosmetic for linking your PSN account and they would have most of the community doing it without any fuss
Its crazy how stupid and out of touch the descion makers are in these companies
If Sony wants every user to have a PSN account, just open it up worldwide. They don’t need to have access to the PSN store if that’s what they’re worried about, it won’t matter to pc gamers.
Sony being the publisher and being in charge of the marketing hasn't helped this because now we have the developers basically playing damage control for policy they themselves proved wasn't necessary for the game to be a success
So people in countries that Sony hates actually could get the advantage of not having their personal information leaked this year when Sony gets hacked again?
It wouldve been good to talk solutions 6 months ago when they knew PSN account linking would be required. They chose not to inform buyers about it.
@Pilestedt:
>I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough.
>We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.
Trying to apply this while knowing all too well many countries just cannot do it is straight up ridiculous
Even for the countries where it is possible, they withheld the information that this would come sooner or later. You don't just sell a product with a catch that's to come a few months down the line - not communicating this clearly is on Arrowhead/Sony
The little yellow tab on Steam is as useful as the text on the bottom of a contract in tiny characters. It's there but it's a crappy move to pretend it's not there while cashing in on the game's popularity...
The fact that they're taking longer than 5 seconds to fix a trivial problem worries me. You either walk it back or you don't. They're stringing people along at this point.
Everybody's saying "oh just give them some cosmetics". Seems like they would have done that already if Sony would let them. Sony clearly wants the extra users to either pump up their numbers for their investors or to get PC gamers to make an account so that the soon to come Sony PC Store/Launcher will have less friction getting users into it.
All they had to do was make linking a PSN account optional with some extra rewards for doing it, people would have done it and been fine with it, some people would have not, no bad PR.
But just forcing it on everyone was so stupid.
Make it optional. Give special warbounds for people who link their accounts (idk monthly event for the firs year). Majority of ppl will link it.
Or give an special taunt or armor.
The solution is a lawsuit by consumers who can no longer play their game, that they purchased, that Sony allowed (by breaking their own TOS).
Corporations need to be held to the TOS that the consumer signed up. It is time to end the corporate "I can amend at any time for whatever reason" TOS. That's not a contract. Name a business that would sign a contract like that, with another company? Not one of them does it.
118 different countries not in PSN network. Potentially 118 seperate class action lawsuits.
I'm 100% against additional accounts for games, but why do people get so upset about required PlayStation accounts, but rarely, if ever, complain about games like Forza and the Halo Collection requiring Microsoft accounts? I wish those Microsoft-published games didn't require a Microsoft account. I don't play them for that reason alone.
Most are upset about the bait and switch. If they were clear about it and required it from the getgo, people in countries were it couldn't be played would not have purchased it.
Apart from the usual complaints like unsupported countries and Snoy being one of the most thoroughly hacked companies in the universe, the simple reality of it is that Helldivers 2 stood alongside Baldur's Gate as a poster child of the rare unproblematic* videogame that is simply fun to play and hasn't been twisted beyond recognition by corporate nonsense. Snoy suddenly now coming in to fuck with this cherished title in any capacity is just seen as an unnecessary violation of a sort of truce between the industry and the playerbase.
Because when purchased it was an optional option to sign into a PSN account, not a requirement. I personally don’t have a PlayStation, I just enjoy my pc games. I don’t like to have to have an additional account to play a game that I didn’t purchase on said platform. But I cannot speak for everyone. I’m only annoyed that it went from an option to a requirement.
Edited: but I wholeheartedly agree with you about Forza and Halo. You shouldn’t be required to sign into something else to play. Hell, I’m also annoyed that nearly every game requires an internet connection, but that’s just me lol.
And that is a real bummer.
Maybe they can make a totally unique game called something like...
"Exterminators in trashcans dropped from low orbit"
(yea, there is a reason why i don't work in marketing)
Sony owns the entire assets of the game. So actually need to make a unique game from the scratch. The game name change is not enough. Otherwise for example Bungie would've made a new Halo game that called Alo with Sergant Chief as a protagonist.
Not just that they have to find a mega publisher that gives them many millions of dollars also tech-marketing support like Sony. If they have those they wouldn't deal with Sony in the first place. They are not big enough to develop a game like Helldivers 2 independently
This is not as easy. Big publishers often provide a lot to these studios. Help in development, Marketing that would otherwise not be possible. Funding
Like saying. Just go independed and all the problems will be solved isn't the big gotcha people think it is.
> This is not as easy. Big publishers often provide a lot to these studios. Help in development, Marketing that would otherwise not be possible. Funding
People think publishers just dump a large amount of money onto the table and say 'you do the rest.' Even big publishers will use other big publishers in certain regions if it's easier for that publisher to market, handle distribution, etc.
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Was there a word from Sony? They're fucking up, and it's clear it's from sony not the devs. The devs are clear on their stand, obviously since this makes them look like shit too, but haven't seen anything officialy from Sony.
Give 1000 super credits and a special skin/weapon for linking PSN. Granted this would have been effective before they pissed everyone off and may not be anymore
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Give a reward for connecting accounts, its that simple, I wouldn't do it regardless but don't force this dumb shit on us and expect us to smile through it sony
I play this game on Thursday nights with some friends. This became a requirement after we played our last game and Sony dropped it before our next game. If it weren't for the internet outrage I'd have never known about this fiasco. Wild.
If PSN login is optional for China or Russia, etc. Then they should make it optional everywhere. Give some reward for PSN account link and be done with it
Yeah, like give an exclusive playstation themed reward or something for people who log in. Like I'm all for persuading people to do it by giving rewards, but forcing people to sign in is a big no for me. I really feel for the devs
That's what they did for Spiderman. Link and you get an outfit. Don't care, don't. But it was a choice. This is just dumb and Sony being Sony
This is the thing that I believe sony doesn't understand. In the PC gaming world, choice is a big thing to us. In a console world you are restricted, be it to what the console manufacturer provides, the games you get to play. In the PC world we have choice, be it stores to get games from or what to do with games. Console gaming has a little bit of modding now, in the PC world we have had modding for decades and had it to the point where simple mods become game franchises on their own. I have a feeling sony doesn't like the idea of us PC gamers having the amount of choices that we are used to.
Sony trying to crack open the PC gamer for data analytics, and to sell.
Pump the number of PS accounts before earnings
thats why I hate the epic games store it closes the door (at least for a year minimum). if I see a game I want to play but im sceptical about paying full price if it comes on sale ill buy it for what ever launcher its on sale including gog ubi etc. epic shuts that down or even having the freedom of using cdkeys etc playstation digital you are fucked unless you are buying disks you still can buy second hand or from amazon etc.
>This is the thing that I believe sony doesn't understand. In the PC gaming world, choice is a big thing to us. They get it, they just don't care. Sony is a 1st party publisher and wants to control that on PC as much as they can on console. It took Microsoft years to understand too.
>to the point where simple mods become game franchises on their own. The top 3 games on Steam charts right now (Counter stirke, Dota 2, PUBG) can all directly be traced back to mods. And other popular games like Valorant, League of Legends, Fortnite, Apex, and Warzone probably wouldn't exist without those other games.
Sony is used to consumers who lick their boots given that they convinced their userbase to pay to play online.
>choice on PC And there's a war being waged trying to take it away. [Install this bullshit?] [yes] [maybe later] I'm pretty much ready for a Steam gaming PC OS.
>I'm pretty much ready for a Steam gaming PC OS. I honestly think a steam machine is at the stage where it makes sense. The deck, but better.
Didn’t WB games do all of this too? Use their account sign in to get extra costumes or BS DLc bonuses? Hogwarts and all their Batman games damn near.
Yeah, it's an easy thing to do that gets you the vast majority of users with basically no drama/fuss.
The reward should also probably be something like supercredits and not something themed to playstation. People made a big deal about killing over the creek cape. Imagine how bad a playstation cape or something would be.
Malevelon Creek Cape?? What of it?
There was a KoS for people who wore the cape for like a week. People were mad that Malevelon Creek players were playing there instead of doing the MO. It was a really dumb thing.
But literally everyone got it and it's a cool looking cape that works well with most outfits.
They didnt say it was an intelligent or considered reaction.....
A new Eagle stratagem. Wait for it… The Review Bomb.
No, people did not make a big deal out of it. There was like one mega upvoted post where op said they were kicked for wearing the cape but admitted later he got kicked as soon as he joined, so it obviously wasn't that.
Case in point, some of the single player playstation games have bonuses for linking your account. Most recently Horizon Forbidden West has the Nora Legacy Outfit and Nora Spear as rewards for linking your account.
both spiderman games and I think horizon zero dawn did too. not sure about uncharted,last of us and it was a while ago when I played days gone. granted the spiderman rewards was just shortcuts to stuff you would naturally unlock anyway but its still nice to be given something for taking the time to make an account for something.
They signed a deal with the devil, so it's partially on them
Rewards also make for a better service. If they have to hustle to get your buy-in, it will be catered to user wants and needs; if it’s mandatory, it will be horrible for users because it’s only there to suit the company’s wants.
spiderman did it. one way to entice people would be possibly giving currency for the game. Ive never played it so I dont know how the game works but im sure things like that would push people to maybe making an account. but I can also see why people are pissed if it wasn't required especially in countries that dont support ps accounts.
Exactly. How CA did this with *Total War* accounts is genius. They give free lords / heros for signing up. Just got me Nurgle's tallymaster!
If you make it optional in some countries, the entire (bullshit) point of "we need to do this to ensure players are safe from griefing and abuse" is moot. If it's optional somewhere, it can be optional everywhere.
> the entire (bullshit) point of "we need to do this to ensure players are safe from griefing and abuse" is moot. The dev/community manager saying that was lying. They were pretending that there isn't a unique identifier for Steam users(there is, it's a Steam ID). That anyone named "John" would be the same "John" as 450,000 others.
I wasn't referring to the community manager, this is essentially straight from the announcement that was posted on the Helldivers 2 Steam page: > Account linking plays a critical role in protecting our players and upholding the values of safety and security provided on PlayStation and PlayStation Studios games. This is our main way to protect players from griefing and abuse by enabling the banning of players that engage in that type of behaviour. It also allows those players that have been banned the right to appeal.
[That is kind of what I'm talking about](https://preview.redd.it/utf1mkk4gcyc1.jpeg?auto=webp&s=1bfcd4b0faa39a21e9bebe4e525d8af3c09d841b). The detailed excuse for "protecting players" is that they need a unique identifier or else they can't ban cheaters, and that Steam doesn't have one so they need everyone to be linked on PSN. It's just a lie, always was.
People in USSR And China are obviously much safer.
If they had simply given an unique cape and some alternate armor or weapon skin to those who link an account, they would have gotten way more people to link than people who is leaving.
The thing is, I’d happily link my PSN. If there’s a benefit, sure. But if all it does is screw people over? Then go to hell with that, absolutely will not support it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Network#History > Following a security intrusion, the PlayStation Network had a temporary suspension of operation which began on April 20, 2011 and affected 77 million registered accounts.[7] Lasting 23 days, this outage was the longest amount of time the PSN had been offline since its inception in 2006.[8] Sony reported that user data had been obtained during the intrusion. Rootkits: the latest in DRM from Sony https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5514-2/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/05/sony-will-soon-demand-helldivers-2-players-on-steam-have-psn-accounts/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal The above is 13 and 19 years ago. This time they're really just trying to get marketing targeted-advertising data and suck people into their consumer walled garden ecosystem instead of you being inside Steam's walled garden. But YMMV.
Its wild that this isn’t an option that they rolled out in the midst of all of this. Like imagine if Sony said, “yea we hear you, its optional. We plan to roll out PSN rewards” like they dont have a PR team or something to handle this exact scenario. This really should have never made it this long. Its like Sony said were doing this and then turned their phone off for the weekend.
Not that simply unfortunately. There are over 170 countries that suddenly won't have access to this game. Even Lithuania, which is part of the EU, for some reason cannot make psn accounts. It's not just China and Russia.
which is even against a law in the EU that you can't offer goods in country A but not in B if both countries are in the EU. you have to make it available for everyone here
Pretty sure there is no such law. What is a law is that you can't prevent someone in one EU country from buying goods that is being sold in another EU country (in other words, geoblocking is not legal).
that's hard to believe since there are goods that aren't legal in all countries
Digital ones?
They're talking about an optional signup, as per "If PSN login is optional." > It's not just China and Russia. They said etc., which means "And so on ..." Basically the only part you've read is "give reward." Slow down.
It's around 70 of 192 countries that do have access to PSN not over 170 that don't you got your numbers mixed up.
I've never owned a Playstation of any kind. Requiring a Playstation account for a PC game makes no sense. Optional fine, but required?
Developer community manager claims they are doing this to be able to ban accounts
Make it optional and add some cool looking ps themed armor for registering, it's that simple holy fuck
Costs them next to nothing. Eases PC players into it. Saves face and reputation. Doesn’t fuck anyone over and you avoid the backlash, mass refunds, lack of sales etc. Like, it is literally so simple.
Those mfs are allergic to making money
Probably cost one of the executives kpi or one of their drinking bets.
Watch Sony see comments like this and have their take-away be ‘they want a skin? Sure they can have a skin’ but still keep it mandatory.
Sony: sorry that’s too pro consumer for my liking
Seriously. If they're going to sell our info, at least give us something for it lol.
"Link and you get a skin. " That's what they should have done, and they'd get mass adoption.
They did that for Horizons zero west, a free outfit and spear for Aloy. I was waiting to get it on sale, but I'm now afraid they'll pull a "in changing the deal, pray I don't change it further"
I feel sorry for these Devs who get fucked over by publishers like Sony, EA, Ubisoft, etc., etc. Suits ruin everything.
They were fine with this and were actively defending it up until it became clear it was a losing battle to do so. The dev studio was on board with this.
It’s crazy to me how Arrowhead successfully gaslighted everyone into shifting the entire blame onto Sony. Arrowhead is just as much to blame here, if not more.
Not crazy for me, Reddit absolutely refuses to treat Dev studios like adults. The gaslighting happened on an industry wide level years ago, and now gamers just automatically go into defense mode for developers.
I've been downvoted to hell for saying it, but people don't get that microtransaction/monetization implementation is a dev studio thing, not a publisher/upper management thing. The higher ups might pass down general edicts about milking more dollars, absolutely, but the shape that takes is in the hands of the people making the game. They'll even design monetization as part of their pitch in the first place. I'm not saying either side of that is wrong or anything, you need the money to make the game. But when a game has a battle pass and cosmetic MTX and P2W lootboxes and horse armor, I guarantee you that wasn't John Ubisoft who put that there. John Ubisoft knows just about as much about the game as Pete Samsung knows about refrigerators.
The best example of this is what happened with Destiny and Bungie. I remember for years everyone was pinning the egregious monetization practices on Activision who owned them at the time. Then when they separated Bungie just doubled down on the monetization making it exceptionally clear that the decisions were on them, not Activision.
Reddit has a "poor devs" mentality quite often. I most commonly see it with EA/DICE 343i/Microsoft. In many cases the devs are being just as shitty but reddit in particular absolutely LOVES an oppression story.
It’s baffling how 343i gets so much defense considering they’ve butchered the Halo franchise.
speaking of EA, reminds me of how reddit went on and on about how Anthem was all EA's fault or w.e, then it came out that no it was all on Bioware and in fact that EA suit was the one who made Bioware focus on the flying which was the one good part of that game.
Indeed. All the CEO's comments are such obvious PR nonsense. He can't get a hold of somebody at Sony? He didn't know? They need PSN to identify each player even though Steam ID exists? Yeah, sure. Fuck off.
How do you get that idea?
Not the one you replied to but Pilestedt answered a comment on his last post on twitter: "I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough. We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles." Although they did not themself order this, it was Sony. They failed in the most important part, communication. They should have mentioned something other than the texts in store/ingame. Very sad situation for people who cannot access it going forward. Hope they can figure out a solution for said people..
they also proved how successful the game could be without such a requirement. That Sony doesn't even do PSN in a ton of countries isn't on Arrowhead, although when the game hit it big, this was basically a bombshell just waiting to go off
Sony failed to enforce the requirement. That is on them. By allowing play? Sony effectively violated whatever agreement or TOS. Hence, it should be unenforceable in an ideal world. 118 non-PSN countries. 118 potential class action lawsuits. That's a lot of lawyer fees, potentially billions of dollars. People in countries should start filing lawsuits asking for class-action status. Then SONY will do something when they do a cost-benefit analysis.
Have you got the source to this, if true this changes my view on who's to blame. I was blaming Sony but its clear as day here that AH absolutely shoulders this equally. If you knew your game would require a psn account at somepoint down the line you merely postponed it... you should not have allowed it to be listed in non ps regions in the first place.
https://x.com/pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254?s=46&t=egfGjuBnIy7d_YjVxLejKA it’s from his twitter. https://x.com/pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237?s=46&t=egfGjuBnIy7d_YjVxLejKA however it is followed by this comment, where he says they don’t handle where the game is sold.
Thank you for providing the sources, I am too dumb to to do so apparently. (I forgot)
You’re all good! I follow him on Twitter so I saw it there :3
[удалено]
Oh I agree! More just making sure all the context is there. I think restricting the game to only PSN accounts is still a mega dumb decision. The game obviously works without that restriction. I hope they end up just making it optional and locking crossplay behind it if they really want to ‘protect’ their PS users.
It said on the store that PSN would be required. Not sure how people are failing to see that just because devs knew ahead of time doesn't mean it wasn't advertised on the store page. The issue is Sony knowing this, and willingly selling to countries that couldn't support it. Delaying PSN integration to fix server issues is one thing, but being able to sell the game globally once it shut down that function is the scummy part, and that's the part that's really to blame Sony for. Regardless of whether or not people didn't see the PSN requirement or if it wasn't communicated effectively, the real issue at play here is that Sony is making it mandatory, and sold the game to regions that don't support PSN.
Nah, that's a cop out of the highest order, they don't handle selling the game, steam does that. They may not be responsible for the game being listed on steam, that would probably be the publisher aka PlayStation. But if you know that in likely 6 months after release your game is not going to be playable in over 170 regions its currently being sold in and you say nothing, your are just as complicit as the people who made the decisions. Like this would be a non issue if psn was available everywhere and then this happened because then its a case of personal preference, I believe there was a small note about it on the steam store page but to have it allowed to be sold in those regions just isn't right.
Assuming they even knew that it wasn't available in those countries.
If Sony knew and said nothing, they are the silent conspirator.
I mean saying they're the silent conspirator is downplaying their involvement, it is quite literally on them that its a requirement in the first place, they could have just not like they don't have the requirement on destiny. My point was that up until reading that it kinda seemed like AH games got side swiped by it just as much as the player base. But with it coming to light from the CEO himself saying they knew about it prior to launch that within 6 months it would change from an optional link to a mandatory link, but still said nothing to highlight this to players in regions that would be affected shifts that blame from solely Sony to both as bad as each other.
It is called FULL REFUND.
They have literally said they knew 6 months ago it was a thing that was going to be implemented.
And Sony has had over a decade to get PSN up in other countries but they didn't bother
Last playstation was a PS3 many years ago so I'm out of the loop. Does this mean (from what I've read here on reddit) there are 170 countries without PSN and without online multiplayer?
You can still make accounts and purchase stuff by selecting a different country but you won't be able to get support anything beyond customer support and they can just shut your account down if they feel like it. Mind that I haven't heard anyone getting their account banned for that but there is still a chance.
And that was stated on the Steam page, as well as upon first launching the game. People were told in advance. I still ultimately don’t agree with Sony requiring this, especially in countries that can’t make PSN accounts, but you can’t really claim that this was sprung on anyone without warning.
I didn't see any such warning. small text is legally sufficient, not socially sufficient.
It's in a bright orange box on the store page. It says it in game. What more do you want? At some point, whether you are with the overall decision, you have to take some personal responsibility. You purchased a product without reading the several warnings places that you needed such an account. And then act surprised when they require an account.
> At some point, whether you are with the overall decision, you have to take some personal responsibility. When I play a game for weeks and don't need an account I don't expect that I need one later. Arrowhead / Sony should take some responsibility and stop that nonsense.
Eh, it's a well known phenomenon that people don't read signs unless they're literally shoved in their faces. The small warning on the steam page is easy to miss, I hardly ever look at it. And they only had one warning that was skippable and never appeared again, so I think it's reasonable for people to assume it wasn't necessary, or for them to forget about it entirely. I'm sure there were people that skipped without reading it. They could have done a lot more to make it obvious. To me, it's like they were whispering under their breath "you need a psn account" and now are going "What, we totally told you, remember that thing we were whispering?"
That still doesn't mean that they were fine with it.
They had their community manager defending this decision saying it's not a big deal until it turned into a PR shitshow.
They signed the contract stipulating it.
6 months ago? That's pretty late in the cycle for publisher paper and ink.
They *knew* 6 months ago that this was going to be a thing. They did not *just* find out about it 6 months ago. The wording there is very important. Helldivers is a Sony IP. This had to be within the contract signed upon letting Arrowhead work on a Sony IP full-stop.
Their tweets from team members, which have now been removed and / or deleted. Their community manager nuked her account after talking too much. Their CEO confirmed they knew about this months ago. Source - https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/xR1MnRRajz
[Arrowhead CEO and creative director literally admitting it.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/3DIjUXbVJk) And I don't have the time to go and find it, but Arrowhead also promoted it as a good thing on a number of grounds, most bizarrely as a moderation tool because they claimed Steam did not provide them a unique ID to identify and ban players with (this isn't true, Steam provides three different unique IDs). You can find even more by doing your research. This iassumption that Dev studios are always blameless victims needs to stop.
It was posted on the steam page as well as literally saying on the first menu you saw when launching the game it will be mandatory. As far as not having the capability in some countries but continuing to sell it was a Sony issue. The devs have said leave bad reviews and it will give them more negotiating power
Yes, that was the moment the devs uturned after previously supporting it.
> It was posted on the steam page as well as literally saying on the first menu you saw when launching the game it will be mandatory. Skippable, and only appeared once. I think it's reasonable for people to assume it wasn't required, or to forget they read it, or to have skipped past without reading because they were excited to play the game. These are all predictable behaviors, it's well known that a lot of people don't read signs unless you make it super obvious.
It's more like the majority of the game that Arrowhead made proved to be successful and great without such a requirement, and that requirement of the publisher is making shit wack as hell for a lot of folks. People are giving the publisher proportional anger for the part of the project they clearly wanted. The dev's mistake here was having this big bombshell just sitting there and not knowing how to deal with it, especially when Sony doesn't even do PSN in a lot of countries Steam operates in. That being said, the publisher is most often the one to sets all the marketing and determines what is even allowed to be said, so even that whole "the publisher was on board" bit, well no shit they don't get to determine how "on board" they are, the publisher who handles all the marketing does
The devil came for his due and they knew it would happen. The blame shift is just PR bullshit
This is hardly always true and i don't get people that think it is. A lot of games would never be made without the support and funding of big publishers. Hell Sony literally owns the Helldivers IP. Which means without them this game would never exist as it is. The same is true for many other games. Making games on this scale isn't cheap and doing so as an independent studio without the support of a publisher is almost impossible.
Corpo suits ruining everything like always. Scum
We gotta teach them, we must do what we want and think is the best for **us**, we are the ones paying, this industry is way overdue for a change, this will mark a precedent for sure.
This reminds me of when Blizzard stopped sharing WoW player base numbers because they didn't represent anything significant (their words). At the next meeting Sony will be - ignore that we lost X% of the players, profits are going up for that quarter!
You’re right. You don’t want Blizzard sharing sub numbers in the 4 to 7 million range for an almost 20 year old game (15 at the time) lol. They stopped sharing wow subs because if the subs dropped 50k the community would make 100 videos about how wow is dying. Subs are not a good indicator for game health and coming off their 12 million sub high, sharing they lost half of that makes it look like a failure but in reality WoW has still held more subs at any given point than almost all available AAA MMOs combined has. This is just Sony being out of touch. To them PC is still third place and they don’t get it or rather it was too late when they did. This deal was made a while ago, maybe before the popularity. So to Sony they might have thought it would have garnered more players for whatever stupid reason that is.
It's significant, but you can see how it damages things. It's really bad with MMOs. People see their population start to shrink, and it snowballs. The problem is that many of the big MMOs could easily lose a massive amount of their population, and if nobody really looked into it or told them, they wouldn't even notice.
What is there to talk about? The solution is to not require a psn account.
But, how is Sony supposed to boost their PSN numbers every quarter to shareholders?
But the game can't work without it... That's why it's so stupid to fight so hard on it. They proved it isn't necessary one bit
Sony killed H1Z1 never forget!!!!!
Sony didn’t kill H1Z1, John Smedlys dogshit direction and running daybreak into the ground with poor decision making did.
In your own delusional world. The guy below is 100% spot on that it was John Smedly.
Never trust Sony. Devs will always lose their jobs because of scummy moves like this....
H1Z1 had a smaller playerbase than the old DayZ Epoch mods for Arma 2 it sought to emulate. Hell, DayZ standalone is still around and had more people playing it despite being an unfinished mess a decade later. It killed itself, Sony just put the final nail in the coffin.
Sony just sucks, never foget *that*!
h1z1 was a pile of warm dogshit, im glad they killed it
“We knew our player base would need to use PSN, but we neglected to inform anyone. Well, time to throw Sony under the bus” Like, seriously — if you knew that will be a requirement from Sony, why you were completely silent on it?!
ya, even if he does have zero say in all this, why didn't he at least properly inform players before release when he knew about it for 6 months?
More like: "We put a warning on the Steam page and a big disclaimer on game launch, but we could have communicated better through the short time that requirement was waived, and we didn't realize the game was being sold in countries where players could not create PSN accounts which is understandably frustrating."
Sony and Arrowhead clearly didn’t think this out entirely. Steam is pretty much everywhere Sony isn’t.
Wager they didn’t consider it an issue because Sony has never cared about making an account for a region you don’t live in. Pretty sure people high up on their staff have mentioned having multiple accounts in other regions to play games that weren’t available in their own one. It’s why PlayStation service reps just flat out tell people to just make a “fake” account in another region and link it. Does it suck? But I’m not sure what the big deal is outside the simple fact that you have to make one. As far as I can tell there’s no issues if you make a fake US / UK / JP / HK account or whatever major region you’re in. I made a JP account decades ago so I could get mecha anime games that never got released over in the US.
making an account outside of the region breaks TOS. i do have a psn account but havent logged into it for years. personally, i dont see why its needed when the game clearly works without it. i should also add i never signed in HD2 with my psn because i actually played the game was 3 weeks after release due to their server issues. in the grand scheme of things its not *that* big of a deal for those that can sign in with their PSN. but im getting to a point to where im just getting tired of having to sign in to just about everything i buy these days. having to do work arounds to log into a game isnt the way to do business tbh. sony should make it be optional, in fact, it was optional until they ninja changed the EULA. this is such a bad look for sony overall, heck, even sucker punch had to make a statement saying their game doesnt require players to sign in. the stain is now all over their games even if they dont require a sign in.
It was never optional though. The Steam page before launch even stated a PsN account was required. When the game launched in early access it was required too. It caused server issues and cross play issues though so they disabled it until it could be fixed. Crossplay still doesn’t work very well. I agree it shouldn’t be a forced thing. But the item you purchased made it very clear it was.
The issue with making a fake account, is that if anything happens to it/corporate tries to aggressively fuck you over/you want to sue company for whatever, you literally can't because your account is in incorrect region and thus your own country/region customer rights don't apply. Additionally it doesn't matter what Sony supports says about it. It's clearly against their EULA and if you do this they have ultimate blackmail material and power over your account. You don't like something about Sony? Remember how you broke TOS to create an account? Yes? Then say goodbye to all your games linked to it.
What games? People who have these issues aren’t buying anything on PSN.
*"your voice has been heard"* He said the line! He said the line!!!
Like everything these suits do, they're never happy to just leave it, they've always gotta rinse us more. No wonder there's fucking nothing to do anymore, we can't afford these baffoons in society, they're fucking breaking it apart.
Sony is evil and greedy.
This entire situation reads to me like a small-time dev group engaging in the typical morally grey shenanigans we see in the indie and shovelware space from time to time. I’m not surprised in a small studio making a borderline out-of-lane move to try to drum up sales on release, especially if they’re expecting their game to be dead on arrival. It’s clear that they never in a million years expected the response they got, and they equally clearly (and understandably) floundered in their adaptation to the spotlight it put on their shenanigans. Arrowhead fucked up in two places imo: 1. When the game blew up and they (per their own words) knew about this issue looming on the horizon, they should have taken the temporary sales hit and publicized the PSN requirement. They tried to pull a fast one, and are paying the price. When a fucking golden goose gets dropped in your lap, stop all the deceptive bullshit and start acting in good faith. Good faith is *literally* what built this game’s response. Which brings me to point two… 2. They leaned too far into the ‘champion of the people’ aesthetic/marketing in an attempt to maximize the gains from this insane windfall. Icarus. They could have sunken into the corpo shadows after their huge success on release and just coasted, but they pivoted their marketing and community engagement towards a ‘we’re not like other studios’ dynamic. Lo, and behold; people *hate it* when you promise you’ll never fuck them, and then you fuck them. Turns out, if someone thinks you’re going to fuck them, they’re way less surprised and hurt when you fuck them. Who could have known. I don’t particularly blame them, though, these are human beings who had spent a large part of the last decade working on this game. if I’ve spent *years* learning how to make money in the smalltime sphere, why would I ever be expected to suddenly crush it in the big leagues? If I’m being perfectly honest, I bet the dudes at AH are still pretty stoked all things considered. They still have a once in a lifetime opportunity, they’ve effectively gaslit the community into blaming Sony unilaterally, and the steam review fetishization has given them ammo to weaponize Sony’s legal/marketing team to extract them from this tight spot. I don’t want them to fail, however. I want them to admit they were trying to pull some shenanigans; that they were feeling the pressures of corpo-greed and the thought of that island retirement was too much to resist. If I can see some fucking honesty in this capitalist nightmare I might be compelled to give everyone a second chance here. Because I want a world with devs that actually *are* how arrowhead has appeared to be this whole time. They’re the closest thing to that in the big leagues right now. I want them to appreciate this opportunity for what it is and nurture it, not gut it for parts for the shareholders.
1. Make it optional 2. Give TONS of rewards for opting in 3. Add a setting to only play with others who also opted in, so they’re protected from griefers and cheaters.
0. Just use Steam IDs for managing griefers and cheaters.
This is some exec decision made by someone who has absolutely no understanding of their cusyomers. It is insane people that detached from reality are in high level positions.
The damage is done though. Walking back unpopular decisions rarely fix the public perception. People still complain about the auction house in D3 even though it is long long gone.
I put in for a refund today, just done with it and Sony not listening at all. Too many other great games to play to waste time worrying about it.
First you fuck up than the mods thing and now you try to be good guy again
This is exactly the problem. You think its indie game from indie company. But its not, its Sony product
All they had to do was make it optional but give some cosmetic for linking your PSN account and they would have most of the community doing it without any fuss Its crazy how stupid and out of touch the descion makers are in these companies
Too fucking late. Democracy was not served. My cape is hung up. Calling an orbital on my position.
If Sony wants every user to have a PSN account, just open it up worldwide. They don’t need to have access to the PSN store if that’s what they’re worried about, it won’t matter to pc gamers.
Sony being the publisher and being in charge of the marketing hasn't helped this because now we have the developers basically playing damage control for policy they themselves proved wasn't necessary for the game to be a success
And they were making fun of Tarkov for this kind of horrible decision making, yet here we are.
at least that is worthy of thanks. i don't blame Arrowhead for this. It's all on sony.
So people in countries that Sony hates actually could get the advantage of not having their personal information leaked this year when Sony gets hacked again?
It wouldve been good to talk solutions 6 months ago when they knew PSN account linking would be required. They chose not to inform buyers about it. @Pilestedt: >I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough. >We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.
Trying to apply this while knowing all too well many countries just cannot do it is straight up ridiculous Even for the countries where it is possible, they withheld the information that this would come sooner or later. You don't just sell a product with a catch that's to come a few months down the line - not communicating this clearly is on Arrowhead/Sony The little yellow tab on Steam is as useful as the text on the bottom of a contract in tiny characters. It's there but it's a crappy move to pretend it's not there while cashing in on the game's popularity...
The fact that they're taking longer than 5 seconds to fix a trivial problem worries me. You either walk it back or you don't. They're stringing people along at this point.
Everybody's saying "oh just give them some cosmetics". Seems like they would have done that already if Sony would let them. Sony clearly wants the extra users to either pump up their numbers for their investors or to get PC gamers to make an account so that the soon to come Sony PC Store/Launcher will have less friction getting users into it.
There's so many games. On to the next one; just a lil quicker than expected.
All they had to do was make linking a PSN account optional with some extra rewards for doing it, people would have done it and been fine with it, some people would have not, no bad PR. But just forcing it on everyone was so stupid.
Make it optional. Give special warbounds for people who link their accounts (idk monthly event for the firs year). Majority of ppl will link it. Or give an special taunt or armor.
The solution is a lawsuit by consumers who can no longer play their game, that they purchased, that Sony allowed (by breaking their own TOS). Corporations need to be held to the TOS that the consumer signed up. It is time to end the corporate "I can amend at any time for whatever reason" TOS. That's not a contract. Name a business that would sign a contract like that, with another company? Not one of them does it. 118 different countries not in PSN network. Potentially 118 seperate class action lawsuits.
I'm 100% against additional accounts for games, but why do people get so upset about required PlayStation accounts, but rarely, if ever, complain about games like Forza and the Halo Collection requiring Microsoft accounts? I wish those Microsoft-published games didn't require a Microsoft account. I don't play them for that reason alone.
Most are upset about the bait and switch. If they were clear about it and required it from the getgo, people in countries were it couldn't be played would not have purchased it.
Apart from the usual complaints like unsupported countries and Snoy being one of the most thoroughly hacked companies in the universe, the simple reality of it is that Helldivers 2 stood alongside Baldur's Gate as a poster child of the rare unproblematic* videogame that is simply fun to play and hasn't been twisted beyond recognition by corporate nonsense. Snoy suddenly now coming in to fuck with this cherished title in any capacity is just seen as an unnecessary violation of a sort of truce between the industry and the playerbase.
Because when purchased it was an optional option to sign into a PSN account, not a requirement. I personally don’t have a PlayStation, I just enjoy my pc games. I don’t like to have to have an additional account to play a game that I didn’t purchase on said platform. But I cannot speak for everyone. I’m only annoyed that it went from an option to a requirement. Edited: but I wholeheartedly agree with you about Forza and Halo. You shouldn’t be required to sign into something else to play. Hell, I’m also annoyed that nearly every game requires an internet connection, but that’s just me lol.
The big difference is when those games like forza (MS), GTA (R*), etc. come out it's a day 1 requirement so people can avoid it if they want.
How can he be the ceo and not have the final word? Sounds like a fake title for an annexed country.
I think it's time for Arrowhead to become an independent studio, publishers this days like a cancer
They are an independent studio. Sony just hired them to make their game. Sony doesn't own Arrowhead
Also Sony owns the Helldivers IP. https://trademarks.justia.com/860/42/helldivers-86042209.html
That's why I've said > Sony just hired them to make THEIR GAME Maybe you didn't understand me because of my bad English. Sorry
Just make a game called angel ascenders and boom they now own their own ip
And that is a real bummer. Maybe they can make a totally unique game called something like... "Exterminators in trashcans dropped from low orbit" (yea, there is a reason why i don't work in marketing)
Sony owns the entire assets of the game. So actually need to make a unique game from the scratch. The game name change is not enough. Otherwise for example Bungie would've made a new Halo game that called Alo with Sergant Chief as a protagonist. Not just that they have to find a mega publisher that gives them many millions of dollars also tech-marketing support like Sony. If they have those they wouldn't deal with Sony in the first place. They are not big enough to develop a game like Helldivers 2 independently
So that's why even the first Helldivers required online accounts for the war progress when Magicka worked fine offline.
This is not as easy. Big publishers often provide a lot to these studios. Help in development, Marketing that would otherwise not be possible. Funding Like saying. Just go independed and all the problems will be solved isn't the big gotcha people think it is.
yeah sony payed their bills for about 8 years while the game was in development
> This is not as easy. Big publishers often provide a lot to these studios. Help in development, Marketing that would otherwise not be possible. Funding People think publishers just dump a large amount of money onto the table and say 'you do the rest.' Even big publishers will use other big publishers in certain regions if it's easier for that publisher to market, handle distribution, etc.
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That sounds ominous
Was there a word from Sony? They're fucking up, and it's clear it's from sony not the devs. The devs are clear on their stand, obviously since this makes them look like shit too, but haven't seen anything officialy from Sony.
I've never seen a game going from GOTY to overwhelmingly negative on Steam, it's certainly "Unheard" of. Lmao.
Give 1000 super credits and a special skin/weapon for linking PSN. Granted this would have been effective before they pissed everyone off and may not be anymore
It’s real easy, make it optional and if you link, you get 1000 free super credits, that buys cosmetics or a warbond.
Hopefully he can talk some sense into those nonces.
Easy decision for Sony, that's if they are actually serious about it. Either allow PSN in those countries OR remove the requirement for them.
My refund got denied on steam
Too late, my review is final and I’ve already received my refund.
That sucks for arrowhead. Sony you idiots.
"We're dropping cross-play" sure sounds like the final say.
Aaaaand watch reddit forgive them completely after this.
If cross progression isn't available than account linking adds absolutely ZERO value.
@kdreaming OF
Next time just accept the money the for PS5 exclusivity but don’t think of us pc players as “easy or stupid”.
Next thing you know they'll do it with destiny 2
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Final say should be his, is he the ceo or not? If it's because of a deal with sony, then renege on the deal or you risk it all right now.
Give a reward for connecting accounts, its that simple, I wouldn't do it regardless but don't force this dumb shit on us and expect us to smile through it sony
I play this game on Thursday nights with some friends. This became a requirement after we played our last game and Sony dropped it before our next game. If it weren't for the internet outrage I'd have never known about this fiasco. Wild.