I've always found it ridiculous that Sony is allowed to sell their consoles and games in my county without allowing me to create a PSN account. They even sell the digital PS5, which REQUIRES a PSN account to get any games.<p>And then, even if you break their TOS and create an account in another country, you're still constantly inconvenienced - you can't pay for games using your local payment method, for example, and a useful Playstation mobile app is not even listed in the local app store.<p>IMO they should either provide the same level of service in all countries, or be forced to charge significantly less when selling their hardware in unsupported countries.
As a Helldivers 2 PC player who also owns a PS5, this new requirement doesn't bother me personally.<p>However, adding a requirement (it was previously optional) is boneheaded, maybe illegal. It must be terrible to be Arrowhead; they have to sit by and watch while their player base implodes because of a Sony edict.
This really sucks for some people, but the true impact may be overreported and is definitely blown out of proportion by the review bombing. While all this is hugely controversial on reddit, if you look at steam charts, the player count did not take any obvious hit. In fact it follows the natural trend after every content release. So at least on steam the delisting seems to have affected almost no active players. It's very possible that whoever is responsible looked at the data, saw the true player numbers from those 100 countries and decided it was worth taking the L in favour of tightening the online service to make future development easier. Especially since this "requirement" was in there already from the beginning, they just didn't enforce it (likely because they never thought the game would see this much success).
“Players shocked pikachu sony does something annoying.”<p>any older users here may remember the SOE (sony online entertainment) days. They’d do evil stuff that would make this look like a rookie move.
I wonder if it breached the contract/TOS between the game company and valve.<p>I guess lawyers at valve had to work extra to come up with a decision, because they're probably going to court over this.
I still haven't forgotten the time that Sony deliberately and secretly infected millions of computers with a rootkit in order to enforce DRM that also introduced exploitable security vulnerabilities, and then lied about it, and then after the backlash shipped an "uninstaller" that just <i>hid the rootkit better and introduced more exploitable security vulnerabilities</i>.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...</a><p>I feel bad for Arrowhead, but let it be known that if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Maybe next time they'll think twice before partnering with such a trash company.
I find the support for Arrowhead surprising. They went into business with Sony and allowed this. The CEO tweeting "We just want to make gaaameeees" is such a weak ass excuse. Take some responsibility for your choices.
Can someone explain the logic behind not supporting all countries by default? What does Sony have to lose by letting people in tiny countries buy their games?
I tried to buy the game on Playstation's site a couple of weeks ago and kept getting this inscrutable error:
Something went wrong.<p>After digging into the network tab, seems I'm failing a fraud screen somehow. No way to get around it.<p>Oh well, guess I won't buy your game.<p><pre><code> "errorCode": 3329793,
"humanReadableCode": "failedFraudScreen",
"humanReadableValidationErrors": [],
"apiName": "purchase"</code></pre>
I wonder why the number of countries doesn't add up.<p>PSN is available in 73 out of 195 countries, while Steam is available everywhere.<p>Shouldn't that put the number of countries where the game isn't available anymore at 122 instead of 177?<p>(not that it matters much in practice of course)
I’m very happy to hear this.<p>Too many good games have had their player bases gimped by the rise of stupid “one hit wonder” games like palworld or helldivers 2.<p>The Finals is somehow struggling to maintain a decent player base despite being objectively one of the freshest and best game releases in a decade. I can’t get my friends to play it because they’re too busy memeing about space bugs on a mediocre shooter.<p>Glad to see that these games time and time again shoot themselves in the foot. Good riddance!
On Steam: If there's little yellow boxes in the right hand column, someone somewhere is reserving the right to ruin your day in <i>some</i> way. Helldivers 2 has three of them: DRM, Third party account, and third party EULA.<p>Best avoid games with little yellow boxes, especially if you prefer just playing games vs legal drama. (And of course gog.com doesn't have any little yellow boxes)
There's so much coverage of this from the gamer crowd that entirely ignores that a PSN account was required from the beginning but waived because of the unexpected popularity of the game and how Sony couldn't handle it. To be fair, when they had problems and added a Skip button, they should have made it more clear that a PSN account would be required in the future, but given the willful ignorance of the facts by the sensationalist reports, I don't know that it would've mattered.<p>Seems more like the gaming community was looking for a reason to be pissed off than this being an actual issue. I wouldn't be surprised if this was being stoked by the same folks trying to create antisemitic conspiracies about diversity consultants (check out NeverKnowsBest's Gamergate 2.0 video for context, <a href="https://youtu.be/CGmESJM6BFQ?si=RsfLWiewo7uXZY8r" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/CGmESJM6BFQ?si=RsfLWiewo7uXZY8r</a> )
If you live in a country where you can't create a PSN account, just create one for another country. You can trivially find addresses to use online. To make digital purchases, you can import gift cards from the same region as your account. I believe Play-Asia sells those. If you buy games from multiple regions, you need an account for each region so you can access their DLCs.<p>For many years, I wouldn't connect an actual payment to my account due to security concerns and would just go to the store to buy a gift card whenever I wanted to make a digital purchase. There's no reason why you can't import the gift cards.<p>Basically, the whole "create an account in a different country" thing is an IQ test like the "enter an age of 13 or older to create an account" IQ test that was forced onto the internet by a stupid law the US government passed in the late 90s. Just use the obvious workaround to protect the company from legal liability over stupid laws like a normal person would.
This was known right from the launch. no surprises here.<p><a href="https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/4196868529806518741?l=english" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/553850/view/41968685...</a><p>Attention Helldivers,<p>Due to technical issues at the launch of HELLDIVERS™ 2, we allowed the linking requirements for Steam accounts to a PlayStation Network account to be temporarily optional. That grace period will now expire. See details below in this post.<p>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.<p>As such, as of May 6th, all new HELLDIVERS 2 players on Steam will be required to connect their Steam account to a PlayStation Network account. Current players on Steam will start to see the mandatory login from May 30th and will be required to have linked a Steam and PlayStation Network account by June 4th. PlayStation Network accounts are free and easy to set up using this link
<a href="https://www.playstation.com/support/account/create-account-for-psn/" rel="nofollow">https://www.playstation.com/support/account/create-account-f...</a><p>We understand that while this may be an inconvenience to some of you, this step will help us to continue to build a community that you are all proud to be a part of.<p>Many thanks for your continued support of HELLDIVERS 2!<p>Sony Interactive Entertainment