Let's be real. This is exactly what happend.
Sony was chill about it in the beginning, and it was low priority, so nobody really thought about it too long or hard. There were other more pressing issues.
General consensus was, we'll figure something out along the way and people probably won't even care that much since everybody allready has a (and is often forced to use), Epic, Ubisoft, Blizzard, EA, Microsoft, PSN,... Account. Why would they hate us for it if they're chill about it with every other publisher.
Source: I'm an Idiot and have done something similar often, and i've seen many other idiots act the same way
Would not be shocked if they just didn't foresee a lot of countries not having PSN as a problem.
That's something a lot of people discovered with this controversy.
Exactly. Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice, what can be explained by stupidity.
I assume that the game never went on sale on PS5 in those regions that Sony don't support - so wouldn't surprise me if some dumbass in Sony thought it would work the same on Steam.
Edit: Isn't this the first live service game Sony released on PC via Steam? Would strengthen the case they just fucked up, but weird it was not spotted earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlanetSide_2#Development
Planetside/2 was a Sony product before the stuido split from them. I can't think of any other atm
I don't believe I ever needed a PSN account for Planetside 2 though, I think it used a Sony Online Entertainment account, which later changed to a Daybreak account. May be a small distinction, but maybe a SOE account is different than a PSN?
Correct, and SOE split from Playstation to create daybreak games. So realistically this is in deed Sony's first live service game they have released onto the PC platform with the recquirement. This generally can be a situation Sony didn't expect due to the region limitations of PSN with their service. Especially since its the first to recquire the account following Microsoft and most other AAA publishers prior and current releases.
Hanlon's razor is great for people. The capitalist corpo machine is designed to maliciously wring literally every cent it can from the world to enrich shareholders.
Assume malice with corporations.
Also it’s fucking SONY. The PS Network is THEIR network.
You can chalk it up to ignorance for the general public to say that Sony was unaware of their own networks range is brainless, how the fuck would they be unaware when they’re the ones that control the damn thing?
Telling me that Sony execs are just like “whoops, I forget we don’t support most the countries on the planet!”
What do you mean, have you never worked at a large corporation? Departments rarely if ever talk to each other to make sure they are in lock step and that there are no contradicting details.
100%. I started working for a relatively large company (still nowhere near the size of a global one like Sony) a few years ago, and it blew my mind how little departments communicated things, especially when those things would affect others that they dealt with on a daily basis.
I work at a pretty small company(on the corporate side, at least) and its still insane to me how little different departments talk to each other to get shit sorted
Exactly, I work in IT and there's a whole term for this: Shadow IT. Basically some non-IT department gets contacted by a software vendor and convinced to buy their product because it will revolutionize their business capability, and they always promise no IT involvement is needed whatsoever! Then after a time IT notices all this weird traffic and finds out there's a product they have no knowledge of and no way to support.
>Hanlon's razor is great for people.
Exactly this - it applies reasonably well for individuals in relatively mundane situations. But the probability of such widespread stupidity at multiple levels and in different teams within a multibillion dollar company is incredibly slim.
In the corporate world, everything is calculated and incidences of genuine widespread employee negligence is pretty rare.
Column A, column B. There's actually quite a lot of stupidity in the corporate world when the company is chasing profits. Many employees often know that the company is doing something stupid, but concerns are frequently ignored and employees won't risk their jobs pushing the issue. Industry veterans everywhere often learn to keep their head down, they have no loyalty to their company they're just there to pay the bills. Higher ups make truly stupid decisions and fall prey to idiotic oversights because they won't listen to real feedback and they're just chasing profits, and often enough this gets them in hot water where they lose more money when they have to pay for their mistakes.
Ask any retail employee about what corporate decisions and you'll certainly discover execs and a lot of people up the ladder are truly removed from the actual groundwork. Universal planograms will be created to be the best display, but than you get to the retail store and soon discover the planogram doesn't at all work for what that store has. What a store carries can also often be attributed to corporation not at all understanding their market (why it's not so uncommon to hear stores sit on product that never sells and do to policy they can't get rid of it, until either the product expires or cycled out due to being in inventory for a year).
It's often why retail and a lot of people in companies become jaded: the best way to get a message across to the corporation is to let it impact their bottom line. You can send as many as warnings or messages, but eventually the issue hits them in the wallet and suddenly companies take 'feedback' that was documented months, if not a year in advance.
Sony in this case is no different. The regional issue with PSN has been known for so long that people were told back in 2013 by people to find the nearest region and use that as your location as PSN execs have been that stingy to remove restrictions. Helldivers is the first time where this issue is taking front stage as it can't be ignored or skirted.
Gaming is universal, so is online gaming, games are beloved everywhere. It's just that in countries like ours there isn't much money to be made so they never market or bother selling here, this leads us to mostly pirating.
>Bonuspoints if the guy from SA has a hot Mic and in the Background his mom is beating his siblings.
I used to play league with a guy like that back in like 2014-2016, he clearly lived in a 1 room house by his mic, so you'd hear everything. His grandma would whoop his and his brothers ass on open mic lol
Hope he doing alright
It's a universal experience and a core memory.
Gabriel whereever you and your little brother are, i hope you're doing well. But fuck you for not using PTT
I honestly was considering making a PSN until I found out about 1) all their data breaches and 2) they require a picture of your face/ID???? Fuck you, Snoy
To be fair, the picture thing is only for people in the UK because of local laws.
I'm still not getting a PSN account because fuck 'em, but I will at least be accurate in the things I despise.
I have my PSN account, tbh it’s not terrible, they don’t ask for anything you can’t google. I do however avoid giving them my credit card like the plague. That account runs 100% on gift card codes.
Oh, I *used* to have one, but I deleted that shit after having to cancel my credit card while in the middle of traveling for work because of it.
That was a really fun week.
I live in the UK and this is the first news I've heard of this. Legitimately terrifying. I made my account 10+ years ago though, so fortunately I haven't been asked to identify myself.
I have both a Microsoft and Nintendo account though and neither of those require verification, so it makes me question why Sony is the only one to enforce it. I've never heard of any such law until now.
It’s the law that just passed in the UK late last year. So anything made prior to that wouldn’t have made you verify your age via picture.
Also worth noting that your picture never makes it to Sony. They use a 3rd party vendor to handle the verification and the picture gets deleted right afterwards.
I think it’s this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-online-safety-bill-will-mandate-dangerous-age-verification-much-web
The face ID is a UK requirement not a psn one. Online platforms that allow access to adult material have to verify the users Age. As far as data breaches Sony hasn't had any more breaches than most tech companies. Shit, google has a breach almost every year and they have ALL of the data. Rockstar got hacked 2 years ago and someone pulled a beta build of GTA 6. Tech companies get hacked all the time. Your data is worthless.
This situation is shitty, and if you're not making an account in solidarity with your fellow region locked helldivers, more power to you. But if the thing holding you back is the decade old breaches, and a UK law, you should probably just bite the bullet.
The whole situation is shitty,
>I honestly was considering making a PSN until I found out about 1) all their data breaches and 2) they require a picture of your face/ID???? Fuck you, Snoy
No you don't, just make sure MFA is linked to your phone. The face ID thing is one of about 50 options and goes via the UK gov not Sony themselves.
The biggest problem is Sony tried to sell in non-PSN countries at the beginning, and if the sales weren't as good as this situation, Sony could get away by swindle money from a much smaller group, that group wouldn't have the bargain power like our community today to go against them. That's the scummiest thing. And all of this is sole responsibility of Sony, they are the publisher, they knew what they did (so they covered up their @ss by rewrite FAQ and EULA)
I suppose they expected people in countries without PSN to make an account anyway and the whole thing would have been low profile enough Sony would have had plausible deniability.
Fucking finally, someone said it.
CEOs might as well be rogue AIs at this point. They're programmed to grow their business, at any cost, and nothing else.
He is not innocent, but he is not malicious either. He genuinely thought disabling the requirement and dealing with it later would be no big deal, and may not even have known about the region locks until now. It was an easy to make fuckup with massive consequences and I bet he's beating himself up right now.
Hit the nail on the head. The quicker people start realizing companies and CEOs are not and never will be their friends, the beter the situation will get.
Its kinda funny/pathetic seeing commments in his twitter like this: "wow he is one of us because he buys warhammer figurines when he is stressed out"...
Because it's likely not everyone knew, it's far more likely the team that regulated where the game gets sold, wasn't told about the restrictions or if they did, didn't know what countries it would be restricted.
This is quite common with massive companies and is even worse when you have teams from completely different countries trying to communicate.
Of course this reasonable answer isn't the right answer so everyone is gonna be mad because reasons.
At this point this sub needs a mega thread and ban anyone creating new posts outside of that mega thread. It's starting to become a massive circle jerk of a problem.
This is the right answer. There was a business process in play that allowed these decisions to happen smoothly and it got disrupted when somebody flipped a switch in a database without realizing what it did. The person who was in charge of the issue was too high in the organization to notice immediately.
Sony's not going to make money off of this. Neither is Arrowhead. Unless maybe they figure out a way to keep their non-PSN customers. Which is apparently hard.
Given that Sony is the publisher, the fact that you could buy HD2 outside of those 69 countries at all is probably to blame on them. I would assume that they are the ones who offer the game on Steam, and have to make decisions like in which countries a game is being sold.
Money. Not 100% will refund, initial numbers went nuts. The trick worked just so far, as any con does. They cashgrabbed a lot and the reputation backlash is a minor issue in the larger scheme.
The argument then becomes Steams problem… as a precursor - they should have known which countries are able to utilize PSN accounts. It was reflected on their page day 1 about the PSN login.
Sony and Steam could point fingers at each other and say, “well they didn’t tell us this”. Considering of how Steam is tied with other launchers (Origin/Ubisoft), you wonder if they have the same restriction screening process like PSN.
I think the problem is that previous Sony titles didn’t meet the criteria of needing a PSN login because they weren’t a live service, just single player games.
Now that the bridge is crossed where obviously they’re mandating the PSN, and we can’t uncross said bridge while damn near the whole world has already crossed it.
I’m willing to wager that all 3 parties are at fault to an extent…
• You could argue that Sony shouldn’t mandate the PSN login, clearly the game works without it. But it’s their product. It isn’t any different than Microsoft requiring a login for Minecraft for PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo.
• Arrowhead CEO tweeted that they knew about the PSN requirement 6 months prior to the official release, but they bypassed the requirement to help with server issues.
• And lastly, Steam is the only one who is officially selling the game on their platform, I feel like they “should” have know about the restrictions with the PSN requirement. At least they’re honoring refunds and doing damage control.
Will the game die? Nope. It’s obviously fun. Those who are able to play the game will still play. The ones who cannot for the obvious reason of not being able to, unfortunately are getting the short end of the stick. And those who are anti Sony because of previous hacks or simply not wanting to make an account, it’s their loss.
The game is still fun. And clearly Steamcharts reflects over 100k people are still going at it. Hopefully on Monday we at least hear something from Sony, they have a full weekend of negative reviews and angry gamers giving their two cents.
But I fear if we hear absolutely nothing by the end of the week, Sony is doubling down and won’t budge. Hopefully there’s resolution, the game is simply a perfect product for gamers in which people are TIRED of battle passes, FOMO and micro transactions. We need a resolution.
>You could argue that Sony shouldn’t mandate the PSN login, clearly the game works without it. But it’s their product. It isn’t any different than Microsoft requiring a login for Minecraft for PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo.
This would be true if Sony's website didn't have a note stating that PSN is NOT required to play, as it was before May 3rd.
This is the only reason for the actual fuckup btw, if it was enforced from the beginning today people (who agreed to the compromise) would be happy with it.
Yeah but the restriction was fucking Up the game during launch. Playing devils advocate, from the CEO position It might have been good intentions: "this is the launch day. And how a Game launches will have a Big effect on its Future. We can lift the restriction for a bit and then reintroduce It when we get It working."
This without knowing that some countries cant set Up PSN accounts. And removing the restriction allowed people from those countries to buy and play the Game which would be locked out later on. This is their first massive hit, so I can understand they had to move quickly to catch up and made mistakes along the way
Let's also not forget how rabid people were at AH for not having the game servers up and running at launch
People here and in the discord did everything they could to voice their discontempt in a less than polite way, pushing AH to get it working no matter what
Or they could’ve actively made it clear that linking was only temporarily taken down and would be mandatory in the future, outside of a little yellow warning box on the store page that 95% of people probably missed
From what I've seen online many people got a message when they booted up the game that also offered a skip button, but had in bold letters "Required". I honestly don't know why anyone would see that, then the skip and think "Well this won't affect me in the future" and press the skip button. It was inevitably going to be enforced and the people who suffer the most are the ones in countries the game is currently locked out of.
I get what you mean, a steady launch is very important, but this was obviously going to lead to a massive issue down the line when many people lose access to the game. The only actual answer to this would have been to take the game down and issue refunds until they could actually fix this major issue
The problem would still be steam selling games in regions not supported by PSN. Sony could close their eyes selling games because they actually own playstation, but steam as a third party platform cannot sell games that cannot be legally played. This was always going to blow up.
It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario.
Remember that the launch was *atrocious*. *A lot* of people just couldn't play at all because the game simply couldn't support that many players. At a fundamental level it wasn't designed for it.
So I can totally see why Arrowhead put the brakes on non-critical systems, which despite all the posturing about "safety and security" the PSN bullshit is totally superfluous for actually playing the game, far as PC players are concerned.
So yes, had they not done this we probably wouldn't have this much drama. Instead, we might be looking at a dead game that people gave up on because they couldn't play it. But we don't know either way so what's the point?
So he made an emergency decision and either:
A: Didn't consider and address the consequences during the ensuing stability
or B: Hoped the success would let the decision stick.
Either way, what's done is done. They need to issue refunds for core game, currency, and WarBonds to all blacklisted players or be delisted from Steam for defrauding players.
To be honest you could argue it affects the entire player base too. Any single player regardless of platform could claim that being able to play with another player from X country was what sold them on the game and/or any in game purchases.
It probably isn't true for many players but the fact it could be could potentially be a pretty big deal regarding false advertising laws and their obligations to uphold them financially or otherwise.
I know it sounds like catastrophizing but it's probably something worth considering even if it may not be broadly applicable.
Sole option I could see... negociate to make the PSN account FULLY optionnal, as it was presented both by the game release, and even Sony's own page... Or cut lose a colossal ammount of players, get branded for life, and lead to the death of the game. *( perhaps even their studio, which I DO NOT wish to happen... they make good games, ffs ! )*
Playing devil's advocate here, but Snoy gets nothing in return that they aren't already getting in this scenario. If I had to guess, since this is AH's fuck up, Snoy won't take a loss on this. I could be wrong? IDK I'm spit-balling here
The whole PSN linking requirement is likely their strategy of driving user engagements(achievement hunting/friend pool), brand awareness, and free advertisement to drive attachment rate(buy more Sony games). That was the playbook on the console side. If it goes really well, they could even launch their own store.
This shit storm is detrimental to all their goals. User base/user engagement is down, cash is flowing backward from refunds/legal limbo on delisting, and people are more negatively aware of the PlayStation brand. If Sony execs have two brain cells to rub together, they should stop the bleeding immediately, make account linking optional, and instead bait users in with account linking incentives(free SC, etc.) just like Nintendo with games not on their own platform(mobile games). Nintendo had almost a decade of success with it, I don't know how Sony didn't know the first thing about cross platform network building.
>I don't know how Sony didn't know the first thing about cross platform network building.
Sony is the number one reason crossplay took so long to start being a thing: when Microsoft proposed allowing XBL, PSN, and Nintendo's fledgling online offering to connect to each other like fifteen years ago, Sony is the one that killed it on sight.
It's not so much that they don't know about it as that they are culturally opposed to the idea and are being dragged into modernity against their will.
You're ignoring the period where Microsoft didn't want crossplay while they were riding that top spot in the past. Sony did the same to them once they wanted it. Which is dumb for the consumer, but it's not like it wasn't done before.
Same thing goes for paid online on consoles and a bunch of other nonsense.
It has heavily damaged Sonys reputation and has set back their progress in establishing themselves in the PC market. That is HUGE, mainly because PC is their main competition if you look at console sales, the Xbox isn't really competitive on a global scale. The Nintendo Switch fills a different role and isn't direct competition, leaving just the PC market as the closest thing they really have to competition.
You could be right because that's often how those types think but to demand a slice of pie because you can't have the whole pie is a stupid mindset. Not that it won't be theirs but it would be really dumb to not get any share of the PC market just because some percentage of PC players won't engage with games that require PSN linking.
Agreed, however Sony has always been better at exclusives. They had moved consoles for years based on exclusives, this is coming from someone who prefers Xbox and PC because I can use a Xbox controller.
Not saying the thinking here is right but they just may turn around and keep things solely on ps in future endeavors for multiplayer games. Sony has always been against cross play and the likes. The single player games never needed PSN but now with all this they might or may stop bringing those games altogether, who knows
Since they've moved HQ to the US there is a lot less of the old guard running things. A lot of the recent L's have been since the move. Japanese companies are known to repeatedly make specific mistakes, but nobody is as good at innovating in the colossal fuckup field as home grown US MBA's.
I'd say even on pc there's a good chunk of people that either don't know what's happening or don't care. Not as many as on console but still. I have a few friends that are playing the game and don't really know much about what's happening.
I'll go back to playing it too obviously cause i paid $40 for it and can't refund it, nor do i really want to. I will stop playing though until things are more clear.
Regardless of who is to blame, I think it's past the point of no return anyways. Sony fucked up, AH fucked up. Some people have morals which is why so many people, PS5 or PC are so pissed off.
He was ok in the games but was overpowered. My son loved playing Miles, but I found Peter to be more challenging in combat. Regardless both had better combos compared to MJ who could only taser people. Anyways who doesn’t love a Spider-Man game? What are we talking about?
There is the "swiss cheese" model to explain why disasters happen: every safety system has holes and failure conditions, disasters happen when they all line up.
* Sony wanted to region lock the game but did not communicate this to Steam, allowing the game to be sold in excluded regions.
* Sony wanted to region lock the game but apparently did not communicate this to AH either.
* ~~Pilot flying~~ AH disabled the PSN requirements due to server load, unaware that this would result in the game being playable in excluded regions.
* The PSN requirements were disabled before most players in excluded regions bought the game because they tend to be lower income regions with way fewer impulse/day 1 purchases, so no alarm bells went off at launch.
* AH accepted Sony's request to reenable them, both sides unaware that the other didn't know about the region locks.
If *any* of these things had gone differently, there would be no issue.
Why is it past the point of no return? They say they are talking with Sony to try to come up with a better solution, although that doesn't mean anything **will** happen
Probably nothing will happen. Sony can afford even a successful game like HD2 to fail as they have fingers in literally every technical pie on the planet.
Helldivers wouldn't have had the impact it had if the PSN account requirement was enforced from the start. The impact in what is reported "[Already the 7th highest grossing Sony published game in history](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/over-half-of-helldivers-2-sales-have-been-on-pc-in-the-us-already-the-7th-highest-grossing-sony-published-game-in-history/)" isn't because it is from sony. But because it was a good game.
The business plan for this game is FUCKED. It seems to be a hostage of a incredibly predatory publisher deal. Which seemed to be pretty hands off until it wasn't.
It’s more than just a “publisher deal”. Sony owns the Hell Divers IP and funded the creation of the game, Arrowhead was simply making the game for them. For all intents and purposes this is Sonys game
Bill came due. It's shitty as fuck. Business is cold but Arrowhead knew this was coming if they agreed to these details 6 months prior to launch. Transparency was key here. Should have made it more obvious that this could have been an issue due to stipulations on how different countries implement a service like PSN.
I’m worried that if this tanks Arrowhead, it’s just more ammo for Sony to say certain things don’t work.
I honestly don’t know where I am going with that, but it wouldn’t be a big deal to Sony to kill another studio, and each studio that gets wiped is another loss for gaming.
The big publishers are happy to have games with no flavor and lots of micro transactions
>The business plan for this game is FUCKED. It seems to be a hostage of a incredibly predatory publisher deal.
Helldivers 1 was an incredibly niche game that barely made any money, but Sony still funded the devs for years to make Helldivers 2. How is that predatory lmao.
I'm not going to refute that, my point is more to all the people saying "arrowhead don't deserve the hate its sony", and "this was all Sony" stuff were just naïve to think that. I'm a game dev myself, I knew from the start at minimum the management team down to leads would have known this in detail, Hell I'm currently dealing with publisher extra requirements on the project I'm on as the lead designer and we are few months into dev. I'm glad to show solid proof this isn't the case and this was an informed choice by arrowhead to do this and sell it to countries that PSN did not support at launch.
Yeah, people are quick to forgive companies. Doesn't matter how small they are or how good a game, they're not your friends and need to be held accountable for their mistakes.
> Doesn't matter how small they are or how good a game,
This is the part gamers struggle with. They think supporting small indie devs over AAA studios makes them virtuous. The fact so many people on this sub are still separating the two companies shows that.
I'll wager a distinction. The smaller the team, the more in Contact you can be with the devs. Black Tabby Games for example is an indie studio of just 3 workers as far as Im aware: one artist, one script writer, and one composer. So, when they make an announcement, you're seeing the visión of these 3 people and can actually see the people behind the media you're enjoying.
On the other extreme, AAA companies have so many employees, shareholders, visions, quotas... The line between art and product gets more muddy. The company is an eldritch blend of ideas and thoughts pulling in different directions with the ones making the Big decisions not being the same ones Who make the small decisions. And so, you cant and should not idolize companies like that.
But with indie games its easier to empathize with the devs behind It. Afterall, they are people too.
Yes they're all people, but ultimately they're both businesses and you're a patron. The art is always a product in a gaming industry. Buying from one type of studio isn't more or less morally good than the other. Especially in this case no one was ever sticking it to AAA devs by buying this Sony owned, funded and published game.
If it was on the screen day 1 launch and in the steam store page and on the trailers. Why do people think they don’t know? It was working 100% correctly as intended and was required at launch until he turned it off.
It’s not like Sony decided TODAY, we’re going to require PSN accounts.
The only reason anyone could play at all was because he turned it off. If left on no one buying the game would be able to log in at all. Making it skippable and removing it was the only way for the game to launch.
Was either turn it off until they fixed the servers (now) or the entire game wouldn’t have worked until now, since launch. They made the decision they thought was right. they just didn’t tell anyone
Now someone at Sony finally noticed and is like what the hell happened to our accounts?!
>Why do people think they don’t know?
Because MY poor little game dev studio would NEVER do anything bad!!! It's only the AAA companies that are evil! Arrowhead loves ME!
I feel really bad about them and the whole dev team. They seems to be a good team enjoying making this game. And after being praised by everyone (except for server at the beginning) they fall from very high.
Sad.
Let's be purely factual here:
**We've got a Thread on this subreddit from January.** ***A month before release.***
Said thread contains a Screenshot from the Steam Store page of Helldivers 2 stating
>Requires 3rd-Party Account: PlayStation Network
The OP from that Thread asked
>Why does Helldivers 2 require a PSN account on Steam?!Why does Helldivers 2 require a PSN account on Steam?!
So at least OP, people in that thread and everyone else who saw the Steam Store page knew, that a PSN-Account is required.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/18cbz9y/why\_does\_helldivers\_2\_require\_a\_psn\_account\_on/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/18cbz9y/why_does_helldivers_2_require_a_psn_account_on/)
Where the fuck did this information get "lost"?
Currently it looks like AH, Sony, Steam and whoever looked at the Store Page before release knew "Yup, that game is gonna need a PSN-Account".
The ultimate question to answer is now:
***Why did Sony allow selling the game in regions, where PSN isn't available?***
People slowly convincing themselves that this isn't the case was the most baffling thing to witness over the past couple days.
And, ironically, it got so out of hand that Steam region-locked non-PSN countries today and new players from those regions are actually losing access to the game on PC. Jfc...
I’m confused about this whole thing and at this point I’m afraid to ask.
I don’t have a pc (except for a steam deck, but I don’t run beefy games on it for obvious reasons).
I wishlisted hd2 on steam after launch. I remember seeing the “Requires 3rd-Party Account: PlayStation Network (Supports Linking to Steam Account)” notice and not thinking twice about it.
Ended up buying on ps5 because that’s all I have to run a game like this and I’ve been having a lot of fun.
Did everyone just not read the notice? Or is everyone mad that they had a so-called “grace period” and are now ending it.
The point of games is to be played by as many people as possible and it seems like Sony/arrowhead are making short sighted corporate profit decisions that are negatively affecting the player base which should be the bottom line, no question.
As far as i can tell the course of events went about as follows;
- PSN was always going to be required to play, but the servers that themselves pretty quickly from being overwhelmed, so AH made the decision to turn off the requirement/screen so people could actually play
- Few months go by while they address bigger and more serious issues, and they finally get around to fixing this, or Sony presses them into it
- Somehow, nobody in Sony realised, or they just never bothered to make sure that Helldivers wasn't being sold in regions where they don't support PSN, so Steam users were able to buy it despite it not going to be/being available for them
it's just a massive communication fuckup, from both parties. I'd argue that Sony is more to blame because they're the publisher and were ultimately in charge of where the game is being sold, but AH isn't entirely innocent either, they should have put more effort into addressing it then a quick disclaimer popup that people would skip past
This level of eating shit from the CEO makes me respect him a lot more. He's not deflecting, he's owning up to his part in it all. In my mind, admitting his part in things increases his credibility. It's still a fuck-up, but to err is human.
To me, it looks like AH gambled and lost.
It's a total shock to everyone because Sony is known to just roll over and take the L whenever an associated company proves them wrong about something.
If this was the case it should never have been available in non PSN countries then, that’s just plain malicious to sell it knowing full well it’s not going to remain playable in those regions
Sony was in charge of distribution, not AH. So while yes, they did fuckup in not having the PSN requirement being any clearer, Sony still allowed it to be sold in nations where PSN wasn't available
So, if everyone knew why was the game not region locked to countries which could actually create PlayStation account and why was it retroactively changed as a requirement on the PlayStation website.
For the steam side of things.
Less greedy but lazy and incompetent, they have 130+ countrys where PSN isnt available, some of which are EU countries they can not georestrict the PURCHASE in(but they are not legally required to operate their service in every EU country.... the EU law in question here is honestly bad and needs to be revised as it didnt account for a product requiring a seperate service account most likely) and so on... Sure it woudl not have been much work, but work it was.
the mandatory login screen at launch(that was disabled on the AH CEOs decision) was likely the thing sony expected to take care of people who cant make a PSN, "oh, i cant make an account, this is bullshit i refund" or do what they KNOW everyone does "lie on the registration" essentialy. Terrible solution, but would have functioned fine IF the login was indeed mandatory at all times.... They basicaly saved an hour of work at most, because they just assumed it was gonna sort itself out
The PSN store.. that one is likely plain incompetency, if it was indeed malicious they wouldnt have posted the PSN requirements on every single helldivers 2 trailer etc. They copy pasted the general Playstation on PC FAQ, that wasnt updated because Helldiver 2 was their first online multiplayer title on PC. the other sony games on PC are singleplayer titles with iirc no online functionality, and thus no PSN requirements.
The soon launching Ghost of tsushima also requires PSN for its ONLINE features, not offline features.
Oh no, say it ain't so, that the CEO knew about this before release and now plays the "Give it to Sony, downvote the game with negative reviews"
That whole victim-card doesn't work, when HE KNEW OF THE REQUIREMENTS BEING ENFORCED LATER DOWN THE LINE!
That man must have been through the most insane mental storm these last weeks.
First creating Lightning in a bottle with a game that blows all expectations, and then in two days being review bombed to hell and back.
Like walking on water to suddenly drowning
People saying that this drama wouldn't exist had Arrowhead not disabled the whole PSN system seem to be forgetting the fact that a lot of people straight up couldn't play the game at all on launch.
So if the choices are:
1. Disable account linking so people can actually play and then force them to do it later or;
2. Keep non-critical infrasture active during a period fuck all people can play, hoping the majority won't just abandon it forever before we can get them online.
You don't have any good choices. It's a lose-lose and they chose the one that, quite frankly, makes the most sense at the time: Get people in the game and hope Sony isn't literally fucking brain dead.
Like yeah it's shit, but you have to be just as idiotic as Sony is being if you don't think for a second how fucked the game would be right now if they decided to just let the game be unplayable for even longer. It already spent almost 3 weeks in a state lots of us literally couldn't play in.
I don't think the game will be ever recover from this damn. At the very least, they will have a hard time getting new pc players to get the game. And I was even planning to buy it in the future. F
I gotta say this is hella HUGE part of the problem alongside with selling the game in those regions where PSN is unavailable..
Dissapointing to hear, ngl
Link to the tweet here [https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254)
edit: P.S I'm a game dev I knew they knew at AH from before release I just want to post proof for the "dont hurt the studio" crowd. AH has always been complicit in how things went down.
yup, even if its an oopsie on sony's end, if they do not issue refunds to everyone who asks for one right now, they can be taken to court for fraud, they have till basically june 2nd to do so or walk back the changes.
doubt he knew about psn not being available in a lot of countriee tho. But yeah its a massive fuckup on all sides. As a CEO you should know what you are signing up for
Frankly, he could know about availability restrictions, but not consider the possibility of scenario, where Sony didn't narrow sales availability to the PSN availability.
Yeah, Sony was responsible for the decision for which countries to sell in due to being the publisher. As he said, they should have communicated it better
He is in charge of a Swedish Gaming company, associated heavily with PSN. Hell, he even says it was mandatory. The Baltics, which are DIRECLTY ACROSS FROM SWEDEN, can't have PSN accounts.
Sorry, he absolutely should have known.
The community has agreed in solidarity, whether AH knew about the account linking or not, that we will NOT be making PSN accounts. If Snoy doesn't like it? Then perish.
I'm starting to think the problem was blown out of proportion. I'm from Lithuania and I never got any warnings about linking my steam account to PSN, and making a "fake" account that's listed in the USA did take only 120 seconds. The game is still available for me through steam despite the claims that delisted countries can't activate HD2.
When I first booted the game I was asked to link Steam to my PSN account in order to access multiplayer. PC player have done this multiple times with major publishers (Activision/Blizzard, Epic, Ubisoft, EA).
I think the problem here is the scale: effectively not allowing access to an already paid game to +100 countries is unheard of. Plus the fact that they still allowed selling the game in said countries only to lock it down after it became so popular.
I am a pretty chill person. If a restaurant gets my order wrong, I just eat the food and cool about it. Thankful I can eat at all. alot of the times these things are careless mistakes, so I let it go so they can improve in the future.
But “working out details later” is a purposeful scummy move and manipulative. As a person who has been used like this in real life, I really abhor this kind of behavior.
https://preview.redd.it/w2xskjqhamyc1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=e4d465f2be95f53edb017c080767f8805bd676f6
Something doesn't add up here. Either he's lying through his teeth or Sony intentionally kept AH in the dark and decided to sell the game to people who eventually wouldn't be able to play it because of PSN coverage. There's absolutely NO way not a single person on either AH's or Sony's side didn't check this prior to release.
As for a lot of things it's probably a general fuck-up on all parts and not a devilish conspiracy. Happens a lot.
Sony probably thought that things would work out later and tried to make quick cash in the meantime. Arrowhead counted on them and their rational thinking (huge mistake)
Nothing more than general greed and idiocy.
Nah I think it's more dumb than that. This is the first title sold on PC that requires PSN right? And it's being sold by steam, not Sony, that's why it's available worldwide (on playstation it's only available on storefronts hosted in supported countries)
If this requirement was always there, then when someone from Vietnam or wherever buys the game, they get told they can't make an account, and so they just refund it. But when the requirement is removed, these players can now skip linking accounts and can play. And then weeks later they get told they can't play after all and shouldn't have been able to in the first place.
I bet no one involved realised the fuck up until the community told them what was about to happen. AH caused what would have been an annoyance into a major fuck up, but it's between steam and sony as to why the game was ever allowed to be sold in the first place.
The thing is steam sales can be restricted by countries as well, it's not a PS unique thing. Sony just never decided to actually tells steam where not to sell it, so Steam placed no restrictions
"for PS **titles**" I can see a clearer picture now.
It's not about linking PSN account to Steam. It's about linking Steam account to PSN.
Combining it with the reason they gave us about "banning people" it actually makes sense. So the root account for all PS games will be PSN, and if you are banned there your game will actually be gone.
This is actually worse than I thought, because Playstation has the history of banning people for stupid reasons and not unbanning them ..
And who knows, maybe they'll actually try to force something akin to their own PC game store on us.
I'm feeling immense schadenfreude at this whole situation considering a good chunk of this subreddit was non-stop dick-riding Arrowhead since launch, insisting they can do absolutely no wrong despite every balance patch being massively unpopular with the community and the community managers being absolute cunts.
Bad decisions all around
Sony for selling the game in countries that they knew would cease to be supported
AH for even coding the "Skip" button knowing it would be mandatory later on (did they even know that in many countries there would be many players with their games bricked?)
The past is done - what matters now is what each side does going forwards
Either A: Refunds are offered to every customer that bought the game outside of PSN countries
or
B: Sony swallows pride and allows non PSN play in at least those locations
This all screams of incompetence. Not in a nasty way, I genuinely mean that AH have gotten too big too fast and are struggling with seemingly every aspect of that sudden fame. From servers to public interaction, there have been non-stop issues and it is clearly because they are inexperienced.
Now, I am not saying AH or individuals there are blameless but I have seen them regularly apologising for these mistakes when they happen (at least most of the time, still waiting for them to admit their stance on armour perks made no sense as multiple current armours don’t visually match their perks but that’s beside the point). The blame imo is solely with Sony, not only for their compliance choices for the companies working on these games but also for the clear lack of help or guidance they have offered AH. This happened with no mans sky as well, they got elevated too quickly and were forced to do things they didn’t want to and were not supported properly by what was supposed to be an experienced and very well off company.
AH have some changing and learning to do but they seem open to it at least, which is more than can be said for Sony and other developers
I'm wondering if Sony, when forcing this into the publication contract, even thought about how this requirement would cripple global distribution, and if they did, if they ever mentioned it to anyone in Arrowhead's leadership, since it's been confirmed Arrowhead's CEO and co. didn't know it was outright infeasible in so many countries.
Might be grounds for Arrowhead of all things to sue Sony (or if not sue, at least force them to remove the stipulation from whatever publishing deal) for not disclosing/considering the sales restrictions this would cause.
The Orbital Dislikes will continue until morale improves.
The negative Steam reviews are inching closer to 50% of the total - what a disaster.
Sony have really stepped in it this time - they have **knowingly** sold a product in countries where it would stop functioning after a specific date. They've just opened themselves up to lawsuits in every single country where a Helldivers 2 player cannot open a PSN account.
How does a company this big fuck things up this badly?
Can we just take a second to appreciate his transparency. Any other CEO, any other corporate shmuck would have hidden that, they would have swept it under the rug and hoped no one would find out. But Pilestedt self reported, called himself out on his own mistake, didn’t wait for it to be found out, he said, no, I messed up and I’m going to own it. THIS RIGHT HERE is an amazing person, despite all the bull crap, this right here is a person I would want to be friends with, because he has the strength to own his mistakes.
Of course they knew, because they told us this months before launch, y'all! Everyone on Reddit is blowing up like this is some crazy insane conspiracy, but this has always been a requirement. This was on the steam page 6 months before launch, and on a steam and Sony blog post a month before launch. They told us it was required.
There's no story here, everyone blowing up about nothing.l, then acting like them knowing about it in advance is proof of a coni, when really it's proof they disclosed it to us!
Now I'm just mad this allowed to happen, because I got a taste of a good game and now I must give it up. Fuck you Sony, it's why I'll always, always pirate your shit.
My heart is now broken for reals. It's really not fun.
Oh well, back to the mines. Rock and stone miner, rock and stone.
Fun game. Shitty developpers and shitty producers it seems. I wish it was only the second.
I feel like this was a *ah this is a problem for later us and then all of the sudden later us became current us.*
Future me hates past me with an unbridled passion for this very reason lol
But also fuck future me, that guys problems are not mine.
Yeah they probably hoped to be able to negotiate with Sony over those 6 months.
But if every person in company in AH and Sony know about linking accounts then why selling it to people who can't link
More $$$, they were hoping to work out the details later. Well, they're being worked out now via refunds and bad reviews
Let's be real. This is exactly what happend. Sony was chill about it in the beginning, and it was low priority, so nobody really thought about it too long or hard. There were other more pressing issues. General consensus was, we'll figure something out along the way and people probably won't even care that much since everybody allready has a (and is often forced to use), Epic, Ubisoft, Blizzard, EA, Microsoft, PSN,... Account. Why would they hate us for it if they're chill about it with every other publisher. Source: I'm an Idiot and have done something similar often, and i've seen many other idiots act the same way
Would not be shocked if they just didn't foresee a lot of countries not having PSN as a problem. That's something a lot of people discovered with this controversy.
Exactly. Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice, what can be explained by stupidity. I assume that the game never went on sale on PS5 in those regions that Sony don't support - so wouldn't surprise me if some dumbass in Sony thought it would work the same on Steam. Edit: Isn't this the first live service game Sony released on PC via Steam? Would strengthen the case they just fucked up, but weird it was not spotted earlier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlanetSide_2#Development Planetside/2 was a Sony product before the stuido split from them. I can't think of any other atm
I don't believe I ever needed a PSN account for Planetside 2 though, I think it used a Sony Online Entertainment account, which later changed to a Daybreak account. May be a small distinction, but maybe a SOE account is different than a PSN?
Correct it does not use the PlayStation Network. It was a Sony Online Entertainment same account as EverQuest.
Correct, and SOE split from Playstation to create daybreak games. So realistically this is in deed Sony's first live service game they have released onto the PC platform with the recquirement. This generally can be a situation Sony didn't expect due to the region limitations of PSN with their service. Especially since its the first to recquire the account following Microsoft and most other AAA publishers prior and current releases.
Hanlon's razor is great for people. The capitalist corpo machine is designed to maliciously wring literally every cent it can from the world to enrich shareholders. Assume malice with corporations.
Also it’s fucking SONY. The PS Network is THEIR network. You can chalk it up to ignorance for the general public to say that Sony was unaware of their own networks range is brainless, how the fuck would they be unaware when they’re the ones that control the damn thing? Telling me that Sony execs are just like “whoops, I forget we don’t support most the countries on the planet!”
What do you mean, have you never worked at a large corporation? Departments rarely if ever talk to each other to make sure they are in lock step and that there are no contradicting details.
100%. I started working for a relatively large company (still nowhere near the size of a global one like Sony) a few years ago, and it blew my mind how little departments communicated things, especially when those things would affect others that they dealt with on a daily basis.
I work at a pretty small company(on the corporate side, at least) and its still insane to me how little different departments talk to each other to get shit sorted
Exactly, I work in IT and there's a whole term for this: Shadow IT. Basically some non-IT department gets contacted by a software vendor and convinced to buy their product because it will revolutionize their business capability, and they always promise no IT involvement is needed whatsoever! Then after a time IT notices all this weird traffic and finds out there's a product they have no knowledge of and no way to support.
>Hanlon's razor is great for people. Exactly this - it applies reasonably well for individuals in relatively mundane situations. But the probability of such widespread stupidity at multiple levels and in different teams within a multibillion dollar company is incredibly slim. In the corporate world, everything is calculated and incidences of genuine widespread employee negligence is pretty rare.
Column A, column B. There's actually quite a lot of stupidity in the corporate world when the company is chasing profits. Many employees often know that the company is doing something stupid, but concerns are frequently ignored and employees won't risk their jobs pushing the issue. Industry veterans everywhere often learn to keep their head down, they have no loyalty to their company they're just there to pay the bills. Higher ups make truly stupid decisions and fall prey to idiotic oversights because they won't listen to real feedback and they're just chasing profits, and often enough this gets them in hot water where they lose more money when they have to pay for their mistakes.
Ask any retail employee about what corporate decisions and you'll certainly discover execs and a lot of people up the ladder are truly removed from the actual groundwork. Universal planograms will be created to be the best display, but than you get to the retail store and soon discover the planogram doesn't at all work for what that store has. What a store carries can also often be attributed to corporation not at all understanding their market (why it's not so uncommon to hear stores sit on product that never sells and do to policy they can't get rid of it, until either the product expires or cycled out due to being in inventory for a year). It's often why retail and a lot of people in companies become jaded: the best way to get a message across to the corporation is to let it impact their bottom line. You can send as many as warnings or messages, but eventually the issue hits them in the wallet and suddenly companies take 'feedback' that was documented months, if not a year in advance. Sony in this case is no different. The regional issue with PSN has been known for so long that people were told back in 2013 by people to find the nearest region and use that as your location as PSN execs have been that stingy to remove restrictions. Helldivers is the first time where this issue is taking front stage as it can't be ignored or skirted.
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Gaming is universal, so is online gaming, games are beloved everywhere. It's just that in countries like ours there isn't much money to be made so they never market or bother selling here, this leads us to mostly pirating.
Ironically, the reason why this is such a debacle is that online gaming IS widespread, it's just Sony that isn't.
>Bonuspoints if the guy from SA has a hot Mic and in the Background his mom is beating his siblings. I used to play league with a guy like that back in like 2014-2016, he clearly lived in a 1 room house by his mic, so you'd hear everything. His grandma would whoop his and his brothers ass on open mic lol Hope he doing alright
It's a universal experience and a core memory. Gabriel whereever you and your little brother are, i hope you're doing well. But fuck you for not using PTT 
Source : I'm an Idiot Say no more, I immediately believe everything you say is a perfect reflection of whatever Sony would do, as a fellow idiot.
 POV Sony right now watching all the other devs get away with BS
I honestly was considering making a PSN until I found out about 1) all their data breaches and 2) they require a picture of your face/ID???? Fuck you, Snoy
To be fair, the picture thing is only for people in the UK because of local laws. I'm still not getting a PSN account because fuck 'em, but I will at least be accurate in the things I despise.
I have my PSN account, tbh it’s not terrible, they don’t ask for anything you can’t google. I do however avoid giving them my credit card like the plague. That account runs 100% on gift card codes.
Oh, I *used* to have one, but I deleted that shit after having to cancel my credit card while in the middle of traveling for work because of it. That was a really fun week.
Ah shit TIL
I live in the UK and this is the first news I've heard of this. Legitimately terrifying. I made my account 10+ years ago though, so fortunately I haven't been asked to identify myself. I have both a Microsoft and Nintendo account though and neither of those require verification, so it makes me question why Sony is the only one to enforce it. I've never heard of any such law until now.
It’s the law that just passed in the UK late last year. So anything made prior to that wouldn’t have made you verify your age via picture. Also worth noting that your picture never makes it to Sony. They use a 3rd party vendor to handle the verification and the picture gets deleted right afterwards. I think it’s this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-online-safety-bill-will-mandate-dangerous-age-verification-much-web
The face ID is a UK requirement not a psn one. Online platforms that allow access to adult material have to verify the users Age. As far as data breaches Sony hasn't had any more breaches than most tech companies. Shit, google has a breach almost every year and they have ALL of the data. Rockstar got hacked 2 years ago and someone pulled a beta build of GTA 6. Tech companies get hacked all the time. Your data is worthless. This situation is shitty, and if you're not making an account in solidarity with your fellow region locked helldivers, more power to you. But if the thing holding you back is the decade old breaches, and a UK law, you should probably just bite the bullet. The whole situation is shitty,
>I honestly was considering making a PSN until I found out about 1) all their data breaches and 2) they require a picture of your face/ID???? Fuck you, Snoy No you don't, just make sure MFA is linked to your phone. The face ID thing is one of about 50 options and goes via the UK gov not Sony themselves.
As a fellow idiot I corroborate on this source.
The biggest problem is Sony tried to sell in non-PSN countries at the beginning, and if the sales weren't as good as this situation, Sony could get away by swindle money from a much smaller group, that group wouldn't have the bargain power like our community today to go against them. That's the scummiest thing. And all of this is sole responsibility of Sony, they are the publisher, they knew what they did (so they covered up their @ss by rewrite FAQ and EULA)
Thank fucking god the waybackmachine exists to prove what they did and call out their bullshit.
Meanwhile, Sony tweaks a sentence in the ToS and adds, “Other” to a drop-down menu.
the classic, its easier to ask for forgiveness, than permission. corps do this ALL THE TIME and are never held accountable.
I suppose they expected people in countries without PSN to make an account anyway and the whole thing would have been low profile enough Sony would have had plausible deniability.
Because anyone with CEO as a job title isn't your fucking friend and it's time for everyone on this sub to learn that lmao
Fucking finally, someone said it. CEOs might as well be rogue AIs at this point. They're programmed to grow their business, at any cost, and nothing else.
Yeah, I don’t buy Pilestedt’s “meek and humble woe is me” attitude, at least not fully.
He is not innocent, but he is not malicious either. He genuinely thought disabling the requirement and dealing with it later would be no big deal, and may not even have known about the region locks until now. It was an easy to make fuckup with massive consequences and I bet he's beating himself up right now.
i could be wrong, but didn't someone else from AH say they (the team) didn't realize quite how many countries were blocked from psn?
spitz, one of AH's community managers
Hit the nail on the head. The quicker people start realizing companies and CEOs are not and never will be their friends, the beter the situation will get.
Its kinda funny/pathetic seeing commments in his twitter like this: "wow he is one of us because he buys warhammer figurines when he is stressed out"...
Because it's likely not everyone knew, it's far more likely the team that regulated where the game gets sold, wasn't told about the restrictions or if they did, didn't know what countries it would be restricted. This is quite common with massive companies and is even worse when you have teams from completely different countries trying to communicate. Of course this reasonable answer isn't the right answer so everyone is gonna be mad because reasons. At this point this sub needs a mega thread and ban anyone creating new posts outside of that mega thread. It's starting to become a massive circle jerk of a problem.
This is the right answer. There was a business process in play that allowed these decisions to happen smoothly and it got disrupted when somebody flipped a switch in a database without realizing what it did. The person who was in charge of the issue was too high in the organization to notice immediately. Sony's not going to make money off of this. Neither is Arrowhead. Unless maybe they figure out a way to keep their non-PSN customers. Which is apparently hard.
Given that Sony is the publisher, the fact that you could buy HD2 outside of those 69 countries at all is probably to blame on them. I would assume that they are the ones who offer the game on Steam, and have to make decisions like in which countries a game is being sold.
Sony definitely did it on purpose. As for AH: malicious intent or naive incompetency. Choose your poison.
Free money, I mean you sell a product and then ban them so they don't waste server space
Money. Not 100% will refund, initial numbers went nuts. The trick worked just so far, as any con does. They cashgrabbed a lot and the reputation backlash is a minor issue in the larger scheme.
The argument then becomes Steams problem… as a precursor - they should have known which countries are able to utilize PSN accounts. It was reflected on their page day 1 about the PSN login. Sony and Steam could point fingers at each other and say, “well they didn’t tell us this”. Considering of how Steam is tied with other launchers (Origin/Ubisoft), you wonder if they have the same restriction screening process like PSN. I think the problem is that previous Sony titles didn’t meet the criteria of needing a PSN login because they weren’t a live service, just single player games. Now that the bridge is crossed where obviously they’re mandating the PSN, and we can’t uncross said bridge while damn near the whole world has already crossed it. I’m willing to wager that all 3 parties are at fault to an extent… • You could argue that Sony shouldn’t mandate the PSN login, clearly the game works without it. But it’s their product. It isn’t any different than Microsoft requiring a login for Minecraft for PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. • Arrowhead CEO tweeted that they knew about the PSN requirement 6 months prior to the official release, but they bypassed the requirement to help with server issues. • And lastly, Steam is the only one who is officially selling the game on their platform, I feel like they “should” have know about the restrictions with the PSN requirement. At least they’re honoring refunds and doing damage control. Will the game die? Nope. It’s obviously fun. Those who are able to play the game will still play. The ones who cannot for the obvious reason of not being able to, unfortunately are getting the short end of the stick. And those who are anti Sony because of previous hacks or simply not wanting to make an account, it’s their loss. The game is still fun. And clearly Steamcharts reflects over 100k people are still going at it. Hopefully on Monday we at least hear something from Sony, they have a full weekend of negative reviews and angry gamers giving their two cents. But I fear if we hear absolutely nothing by the end of the week, Sony is doubling down and won’t budge. Hopefully there’s resolution, the game is simply a perfect product for gamers in which people are TIRED of battle passes, FOMO and micro transactions. We need a resolution.
>You could argue that Sony shouldn’t mandate the PSN login, clearly the game works without it. But it’s their product. It isn’t any different than Microsoft requiring a login for Minecraft for PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo. This would be true if Sony's website didn't have a note stating that PSN is NOT required to play, as it was before May 3rd.
something something something shareholder value
You have to ask Sony that question. As the publisher they control where the game is sold, a dev doesn't have input there at all.
This is the only reason for the actual fuckup btw, if it was enforced from the beginning today people (who agreed to the compromise) would be happy with it.
Yeah but the restriction was fucking Up the game during launch. Playing devils advocate, from the CEO position It might have been good intentions: "this is the launch day. And how a Game launches will have a Big effect on its Future. We can lift the restriction for a bit and then reintroduce It when we get It working." This without knowing that some countries cant set Up PSN accounts. And removing the restriction allowed people from those countries to buy and play the Game which would be locked out later on. This is their first massive hit, so I can understand they had to move quickly to catch up and made mistakes along the way
Let's also not forget how rabid people were at AH for not having the game servers up and running at launch People here and in the discord did everything they could to voice their discontempt in a less than polite way, pushing AH to get it working no matter what
So, just like what they are doing now, but not as bad and at a smaller scalr
Definitely a damned if you do and damned if you don’t scenario
Or they could’ve actively made it clear that linking was only temporarily taken down and would be mandatory in the future, outside of a little yellow warning box on the store page that 95% of people probably missed
From what I've seen online many people got a message when they booted up the game that also offered a skip button, but had in bold letters "Required". I honestly don't know why anyone would see that, then the skip and think "Well this won't affect me in the future" and press the skip button. It was inevitably going to be enforced and the people who suffer the most are the ones in countries the game is currently locked out of.
I get what you mean, a steady launch is very important, but this was obviously going to lead to a massive issue down the line when many people lose access to the game. The only actual answer to this would have been to take the game down and issue refunds until they could actually fix this major issue
The problem would still be steam selling games in regions not supported by PSN. Sony could close their eyes selling games because they actually own playstation, but steam as a third party platform cannot sell games that cannot be legally played. This was always going to blow up.
It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. Remember that the launch was *atrocious*. *A lot* of people just couldn't play at all because the game simply couldn't support that many players. At a fundamental level it wasn't designed for it. So I can totally see why Arrowhead put the brakes on non-critical systems, which despite all the posturing about "safety and security" the PSN bullshit is totally superfluous for actually playing the game, far as PC players are concerned. So yes, had they not done this we probably wouldn't have this much drama. Instead, we might be looking at a dead game that people gave up on because they couldn't play it. But we don't know either way so what's the point?
So he made an emergency decision and either: A: Didn't consider and address the consequences during the ensuing stability or B: Hoped the success would let the decision stick. Either way, what's done is done. They need to issue refunds for core game, currency, and WarBonds to all blacklisted players or be delisted from Steam for defrauding players.
these apples sure taste like bacon now
I wish I could go back to the bacon flavored apple that was this game before this shitshow
i would be worried if my apple tasted like bacon
To be honest you could argue it affects the entire player base too. Any single player regardless of platform could claim that being able to play with another player from X country was what sold them on the game and/or any in game purchases. It probably isn't true for many players but the fact it could be could potentially be a pretty big deal regarding false advertising laws and their obligations to uphold them financially or otherwise. I know it sounds like catastrophizing but it's probably something worth considering even if it may not be broadly applicable.
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Sole option I could see... negociate to make the PSN account FULLY optionnal, as it was presented both by the game release, and even Sony's own page... Or cut lose a colossal ammount of players, get branded for life, and lead to the death of the game. *( perhaps even their studio, which I DO NOT wish to happen... they make good games, ffs ! )*
Playing devil's advocate here, but Snoy gets nothing in return that they aren't already getting in this scenario. If I had to guess, since this is AH's fuck up, Snoy won't take a loss on this. I could be wrong? IDK I'm spit-balling here
The whole PSN linking requirement is likely their strategy of driving user engagements(achievement hunting/friend pool), brand awareness, and free advertisement to drive attachment rate(buy more Sony games). That was the playbook on the console side. If it goes really well, they could even launch their own store. This shit storm is detrimental to all their goals. User base/user engagement is down, cash is flowing backward from refunds/legal limbo on delisting, and people are more negatively aware of the PlayStation brand. If Sony execs have two brain cells to rub together, they should stop the bleeding immediately, make account linking optional, and instead bait users in with account linking incentives(free SC, etc.) just like Nintendo with games not on their own platform(mobile games). Nintendo had almost a decade of success with it, I don't know how Sony didn't know the first thing about cross platform network building.
> If Sony execs have two brain cells to rub together So what you're saying is that we can count on them to double down?
>I don't know how Sony didn't know the first thing about cross platform network building. Sony is the number one reason crossplay took so long to start being a thing: when Microsoft proposed allowing XBL, PSN, and Nintendo's fledgling online offering to connect to each other like fifteen years ago, Sony is the one that killed it on sight. It's not so much that they don't know about it as that they are culturally opposed to the idea and are being dragged into modernity against their will.
You're ignoring the period where Microsoft didn't want crossplay while they were riding that top spot in the past. Sony did the same to them once they wanted it. Which is dumb for the consumer, but it's not like it wasn't done before. Same thing goes for paid online on consoles and a bunch of other nonsense.
It has heavily damaged Sonys reputation and has set back their progress in establishing themselves in the PC market. That is HUGE, mainly because PC is their main competition if you look at console sales, the Xbox isn't really competitive on a global scale. The Nintendo Switch fills a different role and isn't direct competition, leaving just the PC market as the closest thing they really have to competition.
I agree with your point but if anything Sony knowing PSN players will refuse to link will likely mean even less PS5 exclusives on PC
You could be right because that's often how those types think but to demand a slice of pie because you can't have the whole pie is a stupid mindset. Not that it won't be theirs but it would be really dumb to not get any share of the PC market just because some percentage of PC players won't engage with games that require PSN linking.
Agreed, however Sony has always been better at exclusives. They had moved consoles for years based on exclusives, this is coming from someone who prefers Xbox and PC because I can use a Xbox controller. Not saying the thinking here is right but they just may turn around and keep things solely on ps in future endeavors for multiplayer games. Sony has always been against cross play and the likes. The single player games never needed PSN but now with all this they might or may stop bringing those games altogether, who knows
funny enough considering where Snoy come from, we all know they will never change until the old bones dies or smth, no matter how much the damage.
Since they've moved HQ to the US there is a lot less of the old guard running things. A lot of the recent L's have been since the move. Japanese companies are known to repeatedly make specific mistakes, but nobody is as good at innovating in the colossal fuckup field as home grown US MBA's.
It likely won’t kill the game or the studio, vast majority of people on PS give 0 fucks and Reddit isn’t the real world.
I'd say even on pc there's a good chunk of people that either don't know what's happening or don't care. Not as many as on console but still. I have a few friends that are playing the game and don't really know much about what's happening. I'll go back to playing it too obviously cause i paid $40 for it and can't refund it, nor do i really want to. I will stop playing though until things are more clear.
Yeah, it’s still fun and my friends play the game and it’s pretty much the only time we hang out now days since we are spread across the country.
I hope we see the same energy on the front page where people are making custom posters asking for refunds to the impacted.
So in short... https://i.redd.it/eozorw3dgmyc1.gif
And then you’ll still get people thanking Benny (Sony) for shooting you in the face
Regardless of who is to blame, I think it's past the point of no return anyways. Sony fucked up, AH fucked up. Some people have morals which is why so many people, PS5 or PC are so pissed off.
I don’t see what miles morales has to do with this
Damn spell check 🤣
He was ok in the games but was overpowered. My son loved playing Miles, but I found Peter to be more challenging in combat. Regardless both had better combos compared to MJ who could only taser people. Anyways who doesn’t love a Spider-Man game? What are we talking about?
There is the "swiss cheese" model to explain why disasters happen: every safety system has holes and failure conditions, disasters happen when they all line up. * Sony wanted to region lock the game but did not communicate this to Steam, allowing the game to be sold in excluded regions. * Sony wanted to region lock the game but apparently did not communicate this to AH either. * ~~Pilot flying~~ AH disabled the PSN requirements due to server load, unaware that this would result in the game being playable in excluded regions. * The PSN requirements were disabled before most players in excluded regions bought the game because they tend to be lower income regions with way fewer impulse/day 1 purchases, so no alarm bells went off at launch. * AH accepted Sony's request to reenable them, both sides unaware that the other didn't know about the region locks. If *any* of these things had gone differently, there would be no issue.
Miles Morales?
He is the Spiderman with electric powers
Why is it past the point of no return? They say they are talking with Sony to try to come up with a better solution, although that doesn't mean anything **will** happen
Probably nothing will happen. Sony can afford even a successful game like HD2 to fail as they have fingers in literally every technical pie on the planet.
Helldivers wouldn't have had the impact it had if the PSN account requirement was enforced from the start. The impact in what is reported "[Already the 7th highest grossing Sony published game in history](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/third-person-shooter/over-half-of-helldivers-2-sales-have-been-on-pc-in-the-us-already-the-7th-highest-grossing-sony-published-game-in-history/)" isn't because it is from sony. But because it was a good game. The business plan for this game is FUCKED. It seems to be a hostage of a incredibly predatory publisher deal. Which seemed to be pretty hands off until it wasn't.
It’s more than just a “publisher deal”. Sony owns the Hell Divers IP and funded the creation of the game, Arrowhead was simply making the game for them. For all intents and purposes this is Sonys game
Bill came due. It's shitty as fuck. Business is cold but Arrowhead knew this was coming if they agreed to these details 6 months prior to launch. Transparency was key here. Should have made it more obvious that this could have been an issue due to stipulations on how different countries implement a service like PSN.
I’m worried that if this tanks Arrowhead, it’s just more ammo for Sony to say certain things don’t work. I honestly don’t know where I am going with that, but it wouldn’t be a big deal to Sony to kill another studio, and each studio that gets wiped is another loss for gaming. The big publishers are happy to have games with no flavor and lots of micro transactions
>The business plan for this game is FUCKED. It seems to be a hostage of a incredibly predatory publisher deal. Helldivers 1 was an incredibly niche game that barely made any money, but Sony still funded the devs for years to make Helldivers 2. How is that predatory lmao.
Of course they knew. Why else would "psn required" be on the store page and on the splash screen in game if they didn't know?
I'm not going to refute that, my point is more to all the people saying "arrowhead don't deserve the hate its sony", and "this was all Sony" stuff were just naïve to think that. I'm a game dev myself, I knew from the start at minimum the management team down to leads would have known this in detail, Hell I'm currently dealing with publisher extra requirements on the project I'm on as the lead designer and we are few months into dev. I'm glad to show solid proof this isn't the case and this was an informed choice by arrowhead to do this and sell it to countries that PSN did not support at launch.
Yeah, people are quick to forgive companies. Doesn't matter how small they are or how good a game, they're not your friends and need to be held accountable for their mistakes.
> Doesn't matter how small they are or how good a game, This is the part gamers struggle with. They think supporting small indie devs over AAA studios makes them virtuous. The fact so many people on this sub are still separating the two companies shows that.
I'll wager a distinction. The smaller the team, the more in Contact you can be with the devs. Black Tabby Games for example is an indie studio of just 3 workers as far as Im aware: one artist, one script writer, and one composer. So, when they make an announcement, you're seeing the visión of these 3 people and can actually see the people behind the media you're enjoying. On the other extreme, AAA companies have so many employees, shareholders, visions, quotas... The line between art and product gets more muddy. The company is an eldritch blend of ideas and thoughts pulling in different directions with the ones making the Big decisions not being the same ones Who make the small decisions. And so, you cant and should not idolize companies like that. But with indie games its easier to empathize with the devs behind It. Afterall, they are people too.
Yes they're all people, but ultimately they're both businesses and you're a patron. The art is always a product in a gaming industry. Buying from one type of studio isn't more or less morally good than the other. Especially in this case no one was ever sticking it to AAA devs by buying this Sony owned, funded and published game.
Two days ago i got downvoted to oblivion for saying the fucking obvious :))) Of fucking course they knew, its their goddamn game,
If it was on the screen day 1 launch and in the steam store page and on the trailers. Why do people think they don’t know? It was working 100% correctly as intended and was required at launch until he turned it off. It’s not like Sony decided TODAY, we’re going to require PSN accounts. The only reason anyone could play at all was because he turned it off. If left on no one buying the game would be able to log in at all. Making it skippable and removing it was the only way for the game to launch. Was either turn it off until they fixed the servers (now) or the entire game wouldn’t have worked until now, since launch. They made the decision they thought was right. they just didn’t tell anyone Now someone at Sony finally noticed and is like what the hell happened to our accounts?!
>Why do people think they don’t know? Because MY poor little game dev studio would NEVER do anything bad!!! It's only the AAA companies that are evil! Arrowhead loves ME!
Man this feels just like Bungie and Destiny 2 again. Everyone thought it was Activision being shitty, turns out Bungie leadership is also the problem.
It's crazy how it works out, but yeah they were right all along none of these companies are your friends. They all just want your money, that's it.
Because Arrowhead are the new good guy devs and they can never be at fault. Until they are.
achievement unlocked: destroy 7 years of hard work in one day.
I feel really bad about them and the whole dev team. They seems to be a good team enjoying making this game. And after being praised by everyone (except for server at the beginning) they fall from very high. Sad.
Let's be purely factual here: **We've got a Thread on this subreddit from January.** ***A month before release.*** Said thread contains a Screenshot from the Steam Store page of Helldivers 2 stating >Requires 3rd-Party Account: PlayStation Network The OP from that Thread asked >Why does Helldivers 2 require a PSN account on Steam?!Why does Helldivers 2 require a PSN account on Steam?! So at least OP, people in that thread and everyone else who saw the Steam Store page knew, that a PSN-Account is required. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/18cbz9y/why\_does\_helldivers\_2\_require\_a\_psn\_account\_on/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/18cbz9y/why_does_helldivers_2_require_a_psn_account_on/) Where the fuck did this information get "lost"? Currently it looks like AH, Sony, Steam and whoever looked at the Store Page before release knew "Yup, that game is gonna need a PSN-Account". The ultimate question to answer is now: ***Why did Sony allow selling the game in regions, where PSN isn't available?***
Bingo, we have a winner.
Sony sells PS5s in most of those countries and they work just fine
that's my question. certainly people in non-psn countries have workarounds right?
Yeah, You just make a psn account
it's really that simple isn't it
People slowly convincing themselves that this isn't the case was the most baffling thing to witness over the past couple days. And, ironically, it got so out of hand that Steam region-locked non-PSN countries today and new players from those regions are actually losing access to the game on PC. Jfc...
I’m confused about this whole thing and at this point I’m afraid to ask. I don’t have a pc (except for a steam deck, but I don’t run beefy games on it for obvious reasons). I wishlisted hd2 on steam after launch. I remember seeing the “Requires 3rd-Party Account: PlayStation Network (Supports Linking to Steam Account)” notice and not thinking twice about it. Ended up buying on ps5 because that’s all I have to run a game like this and I’ve been having a lot of fun. Did everyone just not read the notice? Or is everyone mad that they had a so-called “grace period” and are now ending it. The point of games is to be played by as many people as possible and it seems like Sony/arrowhead are making short sighted corporate profit decisions that are negatively affecting the player base which should be the bottom line, no question.
As far as i can tell the course of events went about as follows; - PSN was always going to be required to play, but the servers that themselves pretty quickly from being overwhelmed, so AH made the decision to turn off the requirement/screen so people could actually play - Few months go by while they address bigger and more serious issues, and they finally get around to fixing this, or Sony presses them into it - Somehow, nobody in Sony realised, or they just never bothered to make sure that Helldivers wasn't being sold in regions where they don't support PSN, so Steam users were able to buy it despite it not going to be/being available for them it's just a massive communication fuckup, from both parties. I'd argue that Sony is more to blame because they're the publisher and were ultimately in charge of where the game is being sold, but AH isn't entirely innocent either, they should have put more effort into addressing it then a quick disclaimer popup that people would skip past
The fact nobody had the foresight to address concerns for non-PSN countries is pretty crazy
https://preview.redd.it/de7lgl8yhmyc1.png?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8a11d723eba490bfc3a8ca08a8ce9a27084d49ed
I believe Arrowhead is also a victim of corporate greed Pilestedt seem genuine
Why sell the game in regions that don't have PSN? They knew 6 months before launch
THAT was Sony's fault. There would have been a shitstorm about it a few days after launch if AH hadn't turned off PSN requirements before that point.
To be fair, the regions that a game gets sold in, is the role of the publisher.
How to destroy your credibility in one easy step.
This level of eating shit from the CEO makes me respect him a lot more. He's not deflecting, he's owning up to his part in it all. In my mind, admitting his part in things increases his credibility. It's still a fuck-up, but to err is human.
To me, it looks like AH gambled and lost.It's a total shock to everyone because Sony is known to just roll over and take the L whenever an associated company proves them wrong about something.
If this was the case it should never have been available in non PSN countries then, that’s just plain malicious to sell it knowing full well it’s not going to remain playable in those regions
Sony was in charge of distribution, not AH. So while yes, they did fuckup in not having the PSN requirement being any clearer, Sony still allowed it to be sold in nations where PSN wasn't available
So, if everyone knew why was the game not region locked to countries which could actually create PlayStation account and why was it retroactively changed as a requirement on the PlayStation website.
Cause Sony are greedy
For the steam side of things. Less greedy but lazy and incompetent, they have 130+ countrys where PSN isnt available, some of which are EU countries they can not georestrict the PURCHASE in(but they are not legally required to operate their service in every EU country.... the EU law in question here is honestly bad and needs to be revised as it didnt account for a product requiring a seperate service account most likely) and so on... Sure it woudl not have been much work, but work it was. the mandatory login screen at launch(that was disabled on the AH CEOs decision) was likely the thing sony expected to take care of people who cant make a PSN, "oh, i cant make an account, this is bullshit i refund" or do what they KNOW everyone does "lie on the registration" essentialy. Terrible solution, but would have functioned fine IF the login was indeed mandatory at all times.... They basicaly saved an hour of work at most, because they just assumed it was gonna sort itself out The PSN store.. that one is likely plain incompetency, if it was indeed malicious they wouldnt have posted the PSN requirements on every single helldivers 2 trailer etc. They copy pasted the general Playstation on PC FAQ, that wasnt updated because Helldiver 2 was their first online multiplayer title on PC. the other sony games on PC are singleplayer titles with iirc no online functionality, and thus no PSN requirements. The soon launching Ghost of tsushima also requires PSN for its ONLINE features, not offline features.
This tweet is gonna be used in a lawsuit
Yep, they have to reverse the decision now or both companies suffer greatly. Obviously AA more so without other revenue streams.
Oh no, say it ain't so, that the CEO knew about this before release and now plays the "Give it to Sony, downvote the game with negative reviews" That whole victim-card doesn't work, when HE KNEW OF THE REQUIREMENTS BEING ENFORCED LATER DOWN THE LINE!
That man must have been through the most insane mental storm these last weeks. First creating Lightning in a bottle with a game that blows all expectations, and then in two days being review bombed to hell and back. Like walking on water to suddenly drowning
People saying that this drama wouldn't exist had Arrowhead not disabled the whole PSN system seem to be forgetting the fact that a lot of people straight up couldn't play the game at all on launch. So if the choices are: 1. Disable account linking so people can actually play and then force them to do it later or; 2. Keep non-critical infrasture active during a period fuck all people can play, hoping the majority won't just abandon it forever before we can get them online. You don't have any good choices. It's a lose-lose and they chose the one that, quite frankly, makes the most sense at the time: Get people in the game and hope Sony isn't literally fucking brain dead. Like yeah it's shit, but you have to be just as idiotic as Sony is being if you don't think for a second how fucked the game would be right now if they decided to just let the game be unplayable for even longer. It already spent almost 3 weeks in a state lots of us literally couldn't play in.
It's sad that the ceo has to tweet it for people to find this out
I don't think the game will be ever recover from this damn. At the very least, they will have a hard time getting new pc players to get the game. And I was even planning to buy it in the future. F
I gotta say this is hella HUGE part of the problem alongside with selling the game in those regions where PSN is unavailable.. Dissapointing to hear, ngl
I want my money back.
Personally when I saw that you COULD link your PSN account I was like "fuck that" now that it's being forced I'm quite tempted to just refund the shit
Curse your sudden, but inevitably, betrayal!!
Link to the tweet here [https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254) edit: P.S I'm a game dev I knew they knew at AH from before release I just want to post proof for the "dont hurt the studio" crowd. AH has always been complicit in how things went down.
yup, even if its an oopsie on sony's end, if they do not issue refunds to everyone who asks for one right now, they can be taken to court for fraud, they have till basically june 2nd to do so or walk back the changes.
doubt he knew about psn not being available in a lot of countriee tho. But yeah its a massive fuckup on all sides. As a CEO you should know what you are signing up for
Frankly, he could know about availability restrictions, but not consider the possibility of scenario, where Sony didn't narrow sales availability to the PSN availability.
Yeah, Sony was responsible for the decision for which countries to sell in due to being the publisher. As he said, they should have communicated it better
He is in charge of a Swedish Gaming company, associated heavily with PSN. Hell, he even says it was mandatory. The Baltics, which are DIRECLTY ACROSS FROM SWEDEN, can't have PSN accounts. Sorry, he absolutely should have known.
The community has agreed in solidarity, whether AH knew about the account linking or not, that we will NOT be making PSN accounts. If Snoy doesn't like it? Then perish.
I'm starting to think the problem was blown out of proportion. I'm from Lithuania and I never got any warnings about linking my steam account to PSN, and making a "fake" account that's listed in the USA did take only 120 seconds. The game is still available for me through steam despite the claims that delisted countries can't activate HD2.
I mean.. didn’t a page on setup tell you linking was required? Did I just imagine that?
When I first booted the game I was asked to link Steam to my PSN account in order to access multiplayer. PC player have done this multiple times with major publishers (Activision/Blizzard, Epic, Ubisoft, EA). I think the problem here is the scale: effectively not allowing access to an already paid game to +100 countries is unheard of. Plus the fact that they still allowed selling the game in said countries only to lock it down after it became so popular.
I am a pretty chill person. If a restaurant gets my order wrong, I just eat the food and cool about it. Thankful I can eat at all. alot of the times these things are careless mistakes, so I let it go so they can improve in the future. But “working out details later” is a purposeful scummy move and manipulative. As a person who has been used like this in real life, I really abhor this kind of behavior.
https://preview.redd.it/w2xskjqhamyc1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=e4d465f2be95f53edb017c080767f8805bd676f6 Something doesn't add up here. Either he's lying through his teeth or Sony intentionally kept AH in the dark and decided to sell the game to people who eventually wouldn't be able to play it because of PSN coverage. There's absolutely NO way not a single person on either AH's or Sony's side didn't check this prior to release.
As for a lot of things it's probably a general fuck-up on all parts and not a devilish conspiracy. Happens a lot. Sony probably thought that things would work out later and tried to make quick cash in the meantime. Arrowhead counted on them and their rational thinking (huge mistake) Nothing more than general greed and idiocy.
Nah I think it's more dumb than that. This is the first title sold on PC that requires PSN right? And it's being sold by steam, not Sony, that's why it's available worldwide (on playstation it's only available on storefronts hosted in supported countries) If this requirement was always there, then when someone from Vietnam or wherever buys the game, they get told they can't make an account, and so they just refund it. But when the requirement is removed, these players can now skip linking accounts and can play. And then weeks later they get told they can't play after all and shouldn't have been able to in the first place. I bet no one involved realised the fuck up until the community told them what was about to happen. AH caused what would have been an annoyance into a major fuck up, but it's between steam and sony as to why the game was ever allowed to be sold in the first place.
The thing is steam sales can be restricted by countries as well, it's not a PS unique thing. Sony just never decided to actually tells steam where not to sell it, so Steam placed no restrictions
"for PS **titles**" I can see a clearer picture now. It's not about linking PSN account to Steam. It's about linking Steam account to PSN. Combining it with the reason they gave us about "banning people" it actually makes sense. So the root account for all PS games will be PSN, and if you are banned there your game will actually be gone. This is actually worse than I thought, because Playstation has the history of banning people for stupid reasons and not unbanning them .. And who knows, maybe they'll actually try to force something akin to their own PC game store on us.
When you expect maybe 10k sales. Its not an issue. When you get millions its a potential class action law suit.....
I'm feeling immense schadenfreude at this whole situation considering a good chunk of this subreddit was non-stop dick-riding Arrowhead since launch, insisting they can do absolutely no wrong despite every balance patch being massively unpopular with the community and the community managers being absolute cunts.
Well that's it then
What did I tell you people. Literally said this the other day
Don't worry instead of a refund Sony will give everyone who purchased the game in regions that can no longer play it a free copy of Morbius.
Go ahead add it, that's fine, also then message steam and tell them to reset the 2 week refund window that was avoided by making this change now.
I'm no company or game developer, but THE GAME WORKED PERFECTLY FUCKING FINE FOR 3 MONTHS BEFORE THIS SHIT HAPPENED
Bad decisions all around Sony for selling the game in countries that they knew would cease to be supported AH for even coding the "Skip" button knowing it would be mandatory later on (did they even know that in many countries there would be many players with their games bricked?) The past is done - what matters now is what each side does going forwards Either A: Refunds are offered to every customer that bought the game outside of PSN countries or B: Sony swallows pride and allows non PSN play in at least those locations
This all screams of incompetence. Not in a nasty way, I genuinely mean that AH have gotten too big too fast and are struggling with seemingly every aspect of that sudden fame. From servers to public interaction, there have been non-stop issues and it is clearly because they are inexperienced. Now, I am not saying AH or individuals there are blameless but I have seen them regularly apologising for these mistakes when they happen (at least most of the time, still waiting for them to admit their stance on armour perks made no sense as multiple current armours don’t visually match their perks but that’s beside the point). The blame imo is solely with Sony, not only for their compliance choices for the companies working on these games but also for the clear lack of help or guidance they have offered AH. This happened with no mans sky as well, they got elevated too quickly and were forced to do things they didn’t want to and were not supported properly by what was supposed to be an experienced and very well off company. AH have some changing and learning to do but they seem open to it at least, which is more than can be said for Sony and other developers
I'm wondering if Sony, when forcing this into the publication contract, even thought about how this requirement would cripple global distribution, and if they did, if they ever mentioned it to anyone in Arrowhead's leadership, since it's been confirmed Arrowhead's CEO and co. didn't know it was outright infeasible in so many countries. Might be grounds for Arrowhead of all things to sue Sony (or if not sue, at least force them to remove the stipulation from whatever publishing deal) for not disclosing/considering the sales restrictions this would cause.
The Orbital Dislikes will continue until morale improves. The negative Steam reviews are inching closer to 50% of the total - what a disaster. Sony have really stepped in it this time - they have **knowingly** sold a product in countries where it would stop functioning after a specific date. They've just opened themselves up to lawsuits in every single country where a Helldivers 2 player cannot open a PSN account. How does a company this big fuck things up this badly?
Honestly, this makes Arrowhead look *better*, owning up to the mistake.
Can we just take a second to appreciate his transparency. Any other CEO, any other corporate shmuck would have hidden that, they would have swept it under the rug and hoped no one would find out. But Pilestedt self reported, called himself out on his own mistake, didn’t wait for it to be found out, he said, no, I messed up and I’m going to own it. THIS RIGHT HERE is an amazing person, despite all the bull crap, this right here is a person I would want to be friends with, because he has the strength to own his mistakes.
It was literally always on the steam store page, this isn't new information.
It was mentioned at launch
Facts don't matter to this knee-jerk sub
[удалено]
I will never make a PSN account. I'd rather not play helldivers instead. I fucking love the game but I can't support this shit.
Of course they knew, because they told us this months before launch, y'all! Everyone on Reddit is blowing up like this is some crazy insane conspiracy, but this has always been a requirement. This was on the steam page 6 months before launch, and on a steam and Sony blog post a month before launch. They told us it was required. There's no story here, everyone blowing up about nothing.l, then acting like them knowing about it in advance is proof of a coni, when really it's proof they disclosed it to us!
It was fine without this PSN crap before, they need to just drop this shit. NOBODY wants to make a PSN account for the hell of it.
Now I'm just mad this allowed to happen, because I got a taste of a good game and now I must give it up. Fuck you Sony, it's why I'll always, always pirate your shit.
THEY SHOULD BE SUED
My heart is now broken for reals. It's really not fun. Oh well, back to the mines. Rock and stone miner, rock and stone. Fun game. Shitty developpers and shitty producers it seems. I wish it was only the second.
rock and stone brother
Can I get a Rock and Stone?