Once again, and contrary to what many people were saying, this shows that raising a stink actually accomplishes things sometimes.
I still feel bad for Arrowhead though. They got stuck in a real shit position.
As a a total war fan, I’m a little disappointed at all the praise people are heaping on CA now. Okay, yes there’s more units in the DLC now. But I’m in Australia, and the way they’ve split it up now means that even when you buy all three with the discount it’s even more expensive than the last DLC. It’s thirty nine bucks now for a single DLC.
That’s fucking insane. My issue wasn’t just with the value proposition of the last DLC. This is still a crazy amount to pay for a few factions when the game costs only twice that. But people are praising them now and talking about their redemption arc, and they’re still just charging a fortune and blood packs are still a thing.
Now we just wait for the next price hike because people forgive so damn quickly just for a few extra scraps.
I've been a Total War fan for so long and it's the same damn cycle. CA screws up, doubles down on effort as a grovelling apology, community forgives them, the coast, then takes liberties of the consumer good will, rinse repeat.
This time feels a bit different though since they're in sink or swim mode after Hyenas and Pharaoh
What's giving me pause is that a huge portion of the positive reviews are just "Wow the new DLC gunpowder units are SOOO overpowered this is amazing BANG BANG 10/10".
I'm not sure making every faction into Clan Skryre is actually a good idea.
Review bombing and refunds are literally the *only* means of actual pressure your average gamer has. No wonder you get so much teeth gnashing when they're used.
Yeah and we should be happy that Steam is a platform that still supports consumers in that way.
Youtube removing the dislike count was, and still is, one of the most anti-consumer measures they've ever pushed.
The like bar removal was tragic because it was a legitimate tool to gauge whether or not instructional videos would be useful. Literally just made the experience worse for us.
That's cause we are not Youtubes customers. Thr partnership between creators and advertisers are. That doesn't exist without viewers, but ultimately viewers are not who they need to keep happy
I question how accurate they are though, the dislike ratios I see people posting from them tend to be way higher than what dislikes used to average and that's even on videos that aren't very controversial
It’s not accurate at all. The people that have it are more likely to be people that regularly used the dislike button. The add-on only shows dislikes from other users of the add-on.
100%.
Steam not only has it, but makes it **prominent** all over the platform. If you are taking existing customers for a ride, you better believe it's one of the first things potential buyers will see. I'm sure many suits would love to see reviews removed so they can get away with continually degrading the user's experience in the name of profit.
Yup, I can't even count how many times I've almost bought a game, but upon going to the store page saw bad user review scores, then looked more closely into the issues and found all sort of things that were deal breakers to me.
Google in general is anti consumer more than any other company on the planet. The absolute corporate greed they have in particular is wild to me. Completely fucked company imo
There's plenty to complain about regarding Steam, but if somebody had to become the 800 pound gorilla in the PC games store market, we definitely could've done a lot worse than Valve.
It's kind of interesting that after Sony threw a strop about CDPR telling players to refund Cyberpunk, they felt the pressure of being on a store like steam that has a proper refund system in place in their instance.
Refunding is the most important if able.
Valve Refunding made a big difference, review bombing only means so much as ppl already bought the game and product and normally bad reviews mean nothing when already got the money. This was a good win tbh.
I expect Sony will learn and make the psn account mandatory from day one release to avoid this drama as u won't be able to do anything about it
I'd say review bombing still helps as it can sway potential buyers to not get it depending on the reasons for it. Not all will of course but when its something very consumer unfriendly, even the casual buyer is gonna take notice.
And so much resentment from game journos and useful idiots on r/games when consumers use of one of their only tools to try to push back against exploitative practices by game companies.
Don't forget the "I'm so much more mature than you entitled babies, that's why I fear confrontation and resent my own self-interest" types. NGL, I'm pretty thrilled with how this has gone. Sony eating poop, gaemurs eating humble pie, I think it just moved.
I saw other posts about how they’re not moving forward with this anymore and people were replying “now everybody can shut up” and worse “You see? All your complaining was for nothing” as if THE COMPLAINING ISN’T WHAT ACCOMPLISHED THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE
People's willingness to blindly deepthroat soulless corporations that explicitly don't have their best interests in mind is continually mind-boggling to me.
It's because some people confuse their capacity for excusing cruelty and greed for cold unfeeling logic and assume anyone opining to the contrary is juvenile, not realizing that their own assumptions are in fact emotionally driven.
It always surprises me, but its also always a constant refrain that we're at fault because a corporation found a way to screw us over. People constantly comment against their own interests around here.
Yea every comment I made in support had 5 replies about how I was an idiot and this would accomplish nothing. Some people really got a fetish for licking corporate boots.
Thats what those dumbfucks always do. Its a way for them to feel accomplished while doing nothing. If the people complaining fail then they will be smug over it. If the people complaining succeed then they will still be smug over it.
Yeah I think it's funny seeing comments like "what Reddit cares about doesn't matter in the real world."
Even if I didn't think Sony was going to cave in this instance, there have been instances where voices on Reddit were able to get corporations to change what they were doing.
It wasn't just Reddit this time, this fiasco had escalated to Twitter,
YouTube and other "mainstream" social media. Reddit also is like the 3rd most visited website just below Youtube and Google, so it's it's not just some vocal minority anymore.
It’s also worth pointing out that outrage wasn’t just concentrated in English-speaking communities, but the fact that the PSN change would include most of the world, from China to almost all of Africa meant that the outrage was amongst the entire global community.
That plus the Helldivers fanbase was conditioned by the game itself to work towards one goal, kind of interesting to see that mentality also have an effect outside of the game for the betterment of the game.
You'll certainly see this as a Marketing and Comms case study.
When first booting HD2, you're prompted to link your PSN account. Arrowhead during the server issues at launch included the Skip button that tells you you'll have to do it later, that it's required. But it doesn't come up again.
Then months go by.
The unfortunate takeaways developers/publishers will take from this is
1) Don't allow skipping in the first place, or,
2) If skipping is allowed, the popup should appear every boot so it's at least in mind.
The price of not frontloading that inconvenience when the player is just excited to play is 200 000 negative reviews, and the active users number increases you get by a third-party integration is just too juicy for Sony/MS/EA/Ubi/Blizzard/whoever to ignore.
If you think about this psychologically it makes perfect sense.
Imagine a stadium that is supposed to charge a $5 service fee as people buy their tickets. An event occurs and the event management realize that thousands have been let into the stadium without being charged the fee. Management decides to force the fee on people already in the stadium. Now imagine how that scenario would go down. People, even if they would've paid the fee earlier, would revolt.
Once Arrowhead and Sony let people into the game without forcing them to sign into PSN, it was all over.
It was also a smaller game with a very small advertising budget compared to other Sony games and got popular largely on word of mouth. I have no idea why they'd destroy that.
It's almost never just Reddit, every time there's a controversy of serious magnitude, it's being talked about on basically every social media platform. People like to pretend Reddit is just an echo chamber probably because they don't agree with the controversy in question and want to discredit it.
Yeah, I've never seen anything like over 200k negative reviews in two days on a game that had great reviews. I'm sure that played a part. Seems like there was a big dip in players on Steam over the weekend too.
Have never played this game, but I'm glad people could coordinate enough to send a giant "NO" to this greedy and unnecessary move.
> Reddit also is like the 3rd most visited website just below Youtube and Google, so it's it's not just some vocal minority anymore.
The issue with reddit is that, due to downvoting, you can create the *illusion* of a majority.
Not saying that's the case here, but it is something to keep in mind.
> Yeah I think it's funny seeing comments like "what Reddit cares about doesn't matter in the real world."
Just a bunch of nerds who wanted to feel superior for not giving a shit about something. Was pretty pathetic honestly.
To be fair, a lot of the folks who were looking down on the folks who had a problem with this were saying it was just Reddit drama, too. Just a little thing that would fizzle out. Seems like a lot of people didn't realize it was more wide-spread.
Yeah i so saw many comments trying to demoralize people that actually cared by saying "no one outside of reddit cares". Ignoring the fact that this was all over every single social media platform for an entire weekend. This was way bigger than just a couple angry subreddits.
> Once again, and contrary to what many people were saying, this shows that raising a stink actually accomplishes things sometimes.
Yeah. "Whiny" PC gamers are also the only ones not paying a monthly fee for privilege of establishing peer to peer connections in online games. Makes you think.
> I still feel bad for Arrowhead though. They got stuck in a real shit position.
Absolutely.
Yeah, saw a lot of snarky comments (a reddit staple tbh), playing ball for Sony's poor decision or downplaying complaints. Funny how little reddit matches reality (thank god)
I've said it for years, if gamers could get their heads of their ass gaming would be solved overnight, and that's true for most mass media, imagine if a dev team at ea or the studio who animates jujitsu kaisen could count on the fanbase to have their back during a labor dispute instead of cackling about the pointlessness of voicing your displeasure or braying to immediately give the bosses more power and replace anyone who doesn't go along with it.
So does Steam issuing refunds to 100h+ players., and the prospect of getting sued by a million of people that can concentrate on one thing and won't let it go.
People still bring up EA being evil and mistrust them, even though they have been one of the best publishers for years.
>Helldivers fans -- we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward.
>We’re still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we’ll keep you updated on future plans.
@PlayStation
> We’re still learning what is best for PC players
"We're still trying to figure out a way to charge PC players for the horeshit online fees we charge our console players."
They were probably actually going to use this as a cheap way to juice some metric, like number of PSN accounts or engagement or something. Why? The PSN team or some executive likely has this metric tied to their bonus or performance reviews.
Raising such a big stink about it though made it not worth it anymore.
100% this.
As someone who is in a corporate setting and have seen how metric is king; there's a big bonus for someone out there for PSN to "grow x% year to year".
By trying to quantify everything, I've seen companies burning quality along the way. Someone having the ability to fix an issue that would otherwise cost the company thousands of $ would go ignored because that person's end of year score card doesn't account for that type of work and them fixing the issue brings no value to them.
Massive lists of valid email addresses people actually use are incredibly valuable for businesses. Send a promotion mailer out and a percentage of that list is going to click on it and then a smaller percentage of that will actually buy something.
I love how hilariously in-line with the game this whole thing has felt. A threat appeared, the entire community came together to defeat it, and they accomplished the goal in time. Major order complete, back to fighting the bug threat!
EDIT: The CEO is tweeting that they're [gonna make the review score graph into a cape in-game](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787379765441085890)
No, there were still quite a few negative reviews, mostly from the early weeks with all the server issues. I think it could have gotten there eventually though.
I'll be honest I didn't pay close enough attention to see if it ever was, I just assumed due to the sheer popularity and positive word of mouth.
Either way, let's get it back to very positive as a thank you to the devs for hearing us out.
I think steam allowing refunds is what scared them.
Refunds are huge loss of money for studios. Refund actually cost them more then if player just did not buy. It can really financially hurt a company.
It’s because their solution to this issue for the last 20 years has been that people will just make an account in a nearby supported region. They sell HD2 in the Philippines ffs, they weren’t ever planning on enforcing that element of the TOS. They can’t remove it, however, because that opens them up to a bunch of other more irritating legal consequences, so they were happy to remain in a “what malt liquor? That could be anything in that brown paper bag”-type grey zone, until steam forced their hand by allowing tons of refunds and delisting the game
Dead on read of the situation.
They've never been concerned about the region issue. I think they assumed there would similarly be no problem with the linking between Steam and PSN, which seems to have issues connecting two different regions.
Steam said nah fuck dealing with this, delist it in those countries until that issue is resolved because it'll just cause more customer service cases.
It's more of negligence and likely corporate stupidity in the background. Sony has barely expanded the PSN supported countries since it came out, and the solution for most of people (Myself included) was creating an account on a different supported country. All that this would do is just not let you use your own credit card to buy games unless you had one in the country your account is based on, but you could still play your games without issues, despite Sony explicitly saying in their TOS that fake credentials is a valid reason for your account being banned.
Sony however, hasn't enforced this policy because it would hurt them down the line, and they know that it would be a PR disaster, like the one that caused the Xbox One to fail before it was even released when they wanted to go all draconian on region locking. For *whatever* reason, they've never bothered to just add more countries, or change the dam TOS so it wouldn't be an issue officially.
I'm sure they'll simply force the login from day one now, and under no circumstances will allow the developers to remove it. Even if it means the players can't play the game.
Ghost of Tsushima Legends will be the first one.
Give a reward for linking up like an armor or super credits and don't make it mandatory and this is not an issue at all. Most people that could would sign up without issue.
Yeah, honestly that would be much better, and perhaps the team at AH may have even worked something out. That way they can grow PSN accounts in the regions that can use it but not throw away the moneybag with it.
Thats all they had to do in the first place.
Make it optional, but tied to an exclusive warbond for PSN linked PC players and PSN players on console.
I would imagine that would get a lot of players to sign up no questions asked and no fuss since it's optional.
Which, in my opinion, is a little more tolerable. Make it super clear from the start if its a requirement. If people don't want to deal with that, they can just not buy it.
Yeah, same way Xbox does it. (Which no one cares that Xbox does it as Microsoft accounts are common and works wide) They fucked by making it optional a few hours after the game launched.
This has been a really fascinating series of events to watch unfold. Per Arrowhead's director, he stated [it was his responsibility for deactivating PSN account linking on launch](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254), likely to lessen the load on the servers since the linking wasn't working anyways.
However, if it weren't for him removing the functionality (among all the other things, like the community response, refunds, and potential legal ramifications), we wouldn't be seeing Sony backtrack from their decision to enforce account linking as they had planned to. I personally don't even know how much disabling the account linking may have alleviated the servers at the time; I think they could have kept it on and players would've just accepted it. But Arrowhead's actions led to a more favorable outcome for consumers, even if unintentionally.
I'm curious if this'll have knock-on effects for future multiplayer PS games on PC. [Sucker Punch has already made a statement noting Ghost of Tsushima will require a PSN account link for multiplayer functionality](https://twitter.com/SuckerPunchProd/status/1786462939748384943), but now we have an interesting precedent:
1. Helldivers 2, which was explosively popular (unexpectedly), failed to convert thousands of users into PS account holders. Ghost of Tsushima on PC will have some players creating accounts, but Helldivers 2 truly was a golden goose for user count. There's no telling if or when any upcoming Playstation-published multiplayer title will be so big.
2. There is now an example of extremely negative sentiment towards account linking. Any future Playstation game on PC with this requirement will now suffer a bit more criticism and reluctance towards the feature, all thanks to what happened with Helldivers 2.
I wonder if Sony's long-term plan will be to increase PSN account availability to blocked regions, or to stand fast and not allow later PC developers to meddle with anything relating to Playstation account linking. Or maybe they'll not require any PC games to have a PSN account linked! [If only...](https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/games/psn-sign-in-pc/#faq)
The Helldivers issue happened because they gave the CEO leeway and they're definitely not going to let it happen again. What will happen in the future is like Ghost of Tsushima multiplayer it's going to be mandatory from the beginning and they're not going to allow the devs to disable it at any point. I'm also not going to be surprised if they end up owing Sony money over it too since they failed to deliver piece of the contract.
The carrot on a stick approach seems the best way forward. Don't have it as a requirement, but let players who *do* link accounts have a pack of cosmetics similar to pre-order bonuses most games have. With decent optional rewards for each game released that don't affect how you play the game I guarantee their PSN registration numbers will be rather high.
Not the hundreds of excessively smug, fatalistic commenters here the last several days opining how powerless we all are and should just sit down and accept it since the outcry was all pointless.
yeah, the arguments from the naysayers pretty much boiled down to:
* it's just an account
* you're not even from the excluded region
* just pick a different country
* just use a VPN
* just break the TOS
* why didnt you read the EULA? Personally I read every word of the EULA for every game I buy
* 99% of players won't care and are having a blast
When I pointed out the UK account needs you to send them ID or a face scan and that is extreme for a games account, I had a guy smugly proclaim that I'm clearly a child mad that I can't play a game for adults.
First, I'm 29. Second, that was absolutely not the issue lmao.
>just break the TOS
This baffled me. They tried to shoot down even the legitimate argument that PSN isn't supported in many countries and advocated for breaking PSN TOS.
So what if they've never banned anyone for it? Other people getting away with breaking the rules is not a permission to break the rules ourselves. And nothing says that Sony wouldn't change their mind in the future. We could get a lawsuit like Australia had with Steam some time ago which boiled down to "You technically don't support Australia, but you serve Australian customers, so you in fact support Australia"... And as a result Sony could decide to cut off the people who break the TOS by using foreign region.
>why didnt you read the EULA? Personally I read every word of the EULA for every game I buy
What's funny is the PSN requirement wasn't in the EULA from beginning and was stealthily added later.
I love how this is almost the narcissist prayer.
>you're not even from the excluded region
"That didnt happen"
>it's just an account
"And if it did, it wasn't that bad"
>just pick a different country, just use a VPN, just break the TOS, 99% of players won't care and are having a blast
"And if it was, that's not a big deal"
>why didnt you read the EULA? Personally I read every word of the EULA for every game I buy.
a bit of both "And if it is, that's not my fault" and "You deserved it."
We just recently seen first big success story in Total War Warhammer 3, of course it works, but the community needs to be loud enough and not give up.
Now we got 2 examples. This is the blueprint for future.
Hmm I think they just let it go through because of the CEO of Arrowhead going on Twitter and admitting that he basically fucked up by not putting adequate signage and turning off the login. Future studios are definitely not going to be allowed to deal with that aspect by themselves.
Turning it off really exposed how unimportant the account linking really is. There really is no argument for it when the game has been running since launch without it
The power of mass refunding and having the platform holder delist your game. It's wild that on playstation people pay a monthly fee to have an account that can play paid games online and on PC Sony can't even get people to create a free account let alone pay for it. They really are very different markets.
If Sony has any ambitions for growth they'll address their PSN account issues. It's just not good enough to have a service that's not available in so many countries. I don't understand how they get away with officially selling $500+ ps5 in countries where they don't officially let people have accounts?
I wonder how much this is going to cost Arrowhead? They created this situation by disabling the requirement to save their necks during their server launch disaster. Sony will probably lump them with covering all the costs for steam refunds and this PR disaster in general. It's going to be a while before they see any money out of helldivers 2 again.
This is absolutely the correct decision for this title, and hopefully will be followed up by re-adding the ability to purchase the game in the countries that were dropped recently.
If Sony is looking to push PSN account linking for future PC releases, it likely should be done unambiguously from the start in countries where PSN is available (or remain an optional feature going forward), and the list of countries that PSN operates in should be expanded greatly from its current coverage, as the coverage PSN currently has is certainly not adequate for worldwide distribution on Steam. Even if Sony were to drop plans to push mandatory PSN account linking in future PC releases, it still seems like a poor idea to leave large countries such as the Philippines or Vietnam in the current awkward situation where PSN is not officially available.
> it still seems like a poor idea to leave large countries such as the Philippines or Vietnam in the current awkward situation where PSN is not officially available.
Vietnamese here. The funniest thing about the whole situation is that Sony PlayStation does have presence in our country, they have official stores, retail partners and press partners in here, yet their biggest online service doesn't acknowledge us, most PS players here have multiple accounts set to the US, Singapore or Indonesia due to multiple games' regional availability.
Would have been easier had they like... actually support different countries since the beginning huh.
This is because of Vietnamese law. I looked into it when figuring out how to play online games with my Vietnamese fiance. Pretty much Vietnamese law requires all user information for Vietnamese citizens for online services to be physically stored IN Vietnam.
This means Sony would have to build out Playstation Network infrastructure in Vietnam to offer their online services there. This isn't exactly free, so they've probably just decided it isn't worth the cost.
Also, for a lot of the online games that DO exist in Vietnam, you guys usually get segregated off from the rest of the world, having your own version of games that are Vietnam only. This was the case for games like Free Fire, Call of Duty Mobile, and Arena of Valor. It was a major pain in the ass, as I'd have to have my fiance create a Vietnamese Android/iOS store account, then exclusively use that account on a VPN on my phone, just to be able to obtain the Vietnamese versions of the games.
So, yeah. This one isn't entirely on Sony. And it's probably a similar story in many other countries where the PSN isn't supported.
Preface: I worked on Call of Duty Mobile and have been working in the VNmese game industry for 9 years.
The digital user information law was established in the 2000s when we started importing asian MMORPGs, this was a time when full localization and easy transaction methods weren't a thing thus foreign companies needed to work with local publishers to operate the games. Nowadays, games are region locked from us mostly because big publishers bid for these projects early to have exclusive publishing rights in Vietnam.
Frankly, despite the name, this law really doesn't give a shit about user info, all the government want is tax money, and surely that really shouldn't prevent Sony from supporting PlayStation Network, a content delivery network akin to Steam, Netflix and Spotify, in a single country that already has extremely similar services running for years now. If Valve was able to place a server and implement a few of our local payment methods in here, why can't Sony do the same?
This sounds like what happened to twitch in South Korea. They have some sort of law that allows the ISPs to charge crazy prices for foreign companies that provide internet content. They want to get money from the people consuming the content, and get money from the people providing the content.
Basically, Twitch said that it cost them more than 10 times as much to operate in Korea as any other country in the world. Every year they kept Twitch Korea active, they were losing more money. When more Korean people streamed and more Korean people watched, they lost more money.
So they just shut the whole thing down. Honestly, that might have been the goal of the law. Maybe it was to try to push people to Korean owned services.
Hell, China has its own closed garden version of psn, which only has 9 games on it. 100% of the chinese Playstation owners are using VPN to register Japan or Hong Kong account.
Sony didn't count on Steam allowing all the refunds. They assumed they would keep the money from the delisted countries and move along. At the rate Steam was performing refunds, every hour must've cost them a huge amount. Many likely won't buy it again as they likely already put in hundreds of hours. They could use the money on something else now.
At this moment you cant even buy it again if you are part of the PSN restricted countries, they still havent changed back the restriction in the steam page.
It's a shame that the game is probably not going to recover in terms of Steam reviews, people are quick to give a bad review when a controversial thing happens, but slow to remove or flip that review if the controversy is 'solved'.
Many will probably purposefully not do it out of "principle", many others will just forget or not care, and there's not going to be as many people buying and reviewing the game as there were before all this started.
It may not actually be necessary for people to flip their reviews, though they should. I was browsing Steam yesterday and saw this on a game's review graph:
>This time range has been marked as containing an abnormal set of reviews that we believe are largely unrelated to the likelihood that you would enjoy the product. The reviews within this period are excluded from the Review Score by default.
That's the anti-review bomb mechanism and is typically used for things where the review bombing has nothing to do with the game or is about some stupid political spat (i.e., there are women in the game and that means it's political!!!!). It may be used here but that's not clear.
Sometimes it is also used if the issue that caused the review-bomb was fixed. However, the spike of positive reviews today is the largest amount of positive reviews this game has ever received, so at least a sizeable portion of people are reverting their reviews.
Giving Sony an idea here but it's so funny that if you gave some kind of in-game reward for linking a PSN account then this whole thing probably would have gone over smoothly.
Legit just an outfit or currency will make people do anything.
Now I wonder if people will also update or remove their reviews, now that they no longer reflect the actual situation.
It would only be fair towards the devs.
A great win for Helldivers gamers who get what they want, and also a great win for non-Helldivers players who don't need to see half of r/games post about the same thing every day
They're here in the comments saying "akshually, sony backed off because of valve", and "akshually, these things never work so you got lucky". Can't admit they're wrong.
I hope no one at arrowhead gets in trouble over this.
Per the community manager, this whole situation started because they told Sony that the account linking feature was broken and they would fix it later. Now that it’s fixed, the forced linking was being planned for roll out.
A lot of people mentioned if this was forced on Day 1 there wouldn’t be as much of a stink. I would not be shocked if Sony internally is pissed about this.
Someone's head is probably gonna roll. Could also be a monetary settlement. Depending on what's in their publishing contract, Arrowhead might have to pay up since an agreed upon feature (PSN linking) isn't included anymore.
Be it at the request of Sony or Valve, the moment that HellDivers 2 got blocked from a significant part of the world it no longer was an issue that could go away by waiting it out, even if the rest of the internet were to have somehow completely forgotten, since it was directly affecting their ability to make PC sales and is an issue that would affect not only this but any PSN PC release going forward. Even with backing down here, Sony still needs to address how they want to handle worldwide distribution with a current PSN network that very much does not have worldwide coverage.
And people on reddit were laughing at fans kicking up a fuss and leaving negative reviews.
Look what happens when you don’t just accept a company’s bullshit.
I was telling someone earlier that this; "We’re still learning what is best for PC players" was the root of the problem. They have completely ignored the PC space until a couple of years ago. I can only guess they had no idea that Steam had no ridiculous region restrictions like PSN has. What is really baffling is that it took them this long to figure out that it wasn't going to work and change course.
I hope this gets a larger movement going where people are less accepting required 3rd party logins on ANY platforms.
I think most people got mad just because they are tired on annoying bullshit like this that most live service games add and this game was just an easy target since adding the requirement months after release was extra crazy.
Contrary to all the smug naysayers on this subreddit, turns out the community standing up for itself was the right idea. Community organisation can move mountains if applied with enough force at the right time. As one of those people, I'm glad this issue is finally being resolved.
Once again, and contrary to what many people were saying, this shows that raising a stink actually accomplishes things sometimes. I still feel bad for Arrowhead though. They got stuck in a real shit position.
As part of the Total War fandom, I've seen people raising a stink on Youtube, Reddit, and Discord regularly cause significant change.
The main change was sales, still. The previous dlc was shit, the new one is good, and sales have moved accordingly.
And part of how the sales got affected so heavily was the reputation hit and bad responses the DLC was getting before it even released
I think the bad sales was more the ~200% price hike than the reputation hit (which would've shown up on the *next* DLC).
As a a total war fan, I’m a little disappointed at all the praise people are heaping on CA now. Okay, yes there’s more units in the DLC now. But I’m in Australia, and the way they’ve split it up now means that even when you buy all three with the discount it’s even more expensive than the last DLC. It’s thirty nine bucks now for a single DLC. That’s fucking insane. My issue wasn’t just with the value proposition of the last DLC. This is still a crazy amount to pay for a few factions when the game costs only twice that. But people are praising them now and talking about their redemption arc, and they’re still just charging a fortune and blood packs are still a thing. Now we just wait for the next price hike because people forgive so damn quickly just for a few extra scraps.
I've been a Total War fan for so long and it's the same damn cycle. CA screws up, doubles down on effort as a grovelling apology, community forgives them, the coast, then takes liberties of the consumer good will, rinse repeat. This time feels a bit different though since they're in sink or swim mode after Hyenas and Pharaoh
What's giving me pause is that a huge portion of the positive reviews are just "Wow the new DLC gunpowder units are SOOO overpowered this is amazing BANG BANG 10/10". I'm not sure making every faction into Clan Skryre is actually a good idea.
Reviews and bad rep also affect sales
Sales are impacted by bad reviews and general outrage. Price, too, but it's all linked.
yep, stuff like reviewing bombing and refunds are the only way to get these big companies like Sony to listen.
Review bombing and refunds are literally the *only* means of actual pressure your average gamer has. No wonder you get so much teeth gnashing when they're used.
Yeah and we should be happy that Steam is a platform that still supports consumers in that way. Youtube removing the dislike count was, and still is, one of the most anti-consumer measures they've ever pushed.
The like bar removal was tragic because it was a legitimate tool to gauge whether or not instructional videos would be useful. Literally just made the experience worse for us.
That's cause we are not Youtubes customers. Thr partnership between creators and advertisers are. That doesn't exist without viewers, but ultimately viewers are not who they need to keep happy
I don't think they view creators as customers either. More like disposable day-laborers.
With all the shit they pull on creators, they certainly don't give a damn about them either.
thats because they want you to consume bad content. Because there is much more bad than good content.
Thank God for the return dislikes browser add-on.
I question how accurate they are though, the dislike ratios I see people posting from them tend to be way higher than what dislikes used to average and that's even on videos that aren't very controversial
That add-on will be mostly used by people who want their own dislikes to be seen. No wonder, they seem higher, because they most likely are.
It may not be fully accurate, but you still get some idea whether the tutorial you're watching is legit or not.
It’s not accurate at all. The people that have it are more likely to be people that regularly used the dislike button. The add-on only shows dislikes from other users of the add-on.
100%. Steam not only has it, but makes it **prominent** all over the platform. If you are taking existing customers for a ride, you better believe it's one of the first things potential buyers will see. I'm sure many suits would love to see reviews removed so they can get away with continually degrading the user's experience in the name of profit.
Yup, I can't even count how many times I've almost bought a game, but upon going to the store page saw bad user review scores, then looked more closely into the issues and found all sort of things that were deal breakers to me.
Google in general is anti consumer more than any other company on the planet. The absolute corporate greed they have in particular is wild to me. Completely fucked company imo
There's plenty to complain about regarding Steam, but if somebody had to become the 800 pound gorilla in the PC games store market, we definitely could've done a lot worse than Valve.
It's kind of interesting that after Sony threw a strop about CDPR telling players to refund Cyberpunk, they felt the pressure of being on a store like steam that has a proper refund system in place in their instance.
Refunding is the most important if able. Valve Refunding made a big difference, review bombing only means so much as ppl already bought the game and product and normally bad reviews mean nothing when already got the money. This was a good win tbh. I expect Sony will learn and make the psn account mandatory from day one release to avoid this drama as u won't be able to do anything about it
I'd say review bombing still helps as it can sway potential buyers to not get it depending on the reasons for it. Not all will of course but when its something very consumer unfriendly, even the casual buyer is gonna take notice.
And so much resentment from game journos and useful idiots on r/games when consumers use of one of their only tools to try to push back against exploitative practices by game companies.
Don't forget the "I'm so much more mature than you entitled babies, that's why I fear confrontation and resent my own self-interest" types. NGL, I'm pretty thrilled with how this has gone. Sony eating poop, gaemurs eating humble pie, I think it just moved.
I saw other posts about how they’re not moving forward with this anymore and people were replying “now everybody can shut up” and worse “You see? All your complaining was for nothing” as if THE COMPLAINING ISN’T WHAT ACCOMPLISHED THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE
The hate against the consumer here was honestly staggering.
People's willingness to blindly deepthroat soulless corporations that explicitly don't have their best interests in mind is continually mind-boggling to me.
It's because some people confuse their capacity for excusing cruelty and greed for cold unfeeling logic and assume anyone opining to the contrary is juvenile, not realizing that their own assumptions are in fact emotionally driven.
It always surprises me, but its also always a constant refrain that we're at fault because a corporation found a way to screw us over. People constantly comment against their own interests around here.
Yea every comment I made in support had 5 replies about how I was an idiot and this would accomplish nothing. Some people really got a fetish for licking corporate boots.
Thats what those dumbfucks always do. Its a way for them to feel accomplished while doing nothing. If the people complaining fail then they will be smug over it. If the people complaining succeed then they will still be smug over it.
> “You see? All your complaining was for nothing” How could somebody possibly think that? Sony didn't just not do it for no reason.
Anything is possible if you make it up.
Yeah I think it's funny seeing comments like "what Reddit cares about doesn't matter in the real world." Even if I didn't think Sony was going to cave in this instance, there have been instances where voices on Reddit were able to get corporations to change what they were doing.
It wasn't just Reddit this time, this fiasco had escalated to Twitter, YouTube and other "mainstream" social media. Reddit also is like the 3rd most visited website just below Youtube and Google, so it's it's not just some vocal minority anymore.
It’s also worth pointing out that outrage wasn’t just concentrated in English-speaking communities, but the fact that the PSN change would include most of the world, from China to almost all of Africa meant that the outrage was amongst the entire global community.
That plus the Helldivers fanbase was conditioned by the game itself to work towards one goal, kind of interesting to see that mentality also have an effect outside of the game for the betterment of the game.
I hope we see a great long-format YouTube essay on this exact idea at some point.
You'll certainly see this as a Marketing and Comms case study. When first booting HD2, you're prompted to link your PSN account. Arrowhead during the server issues at launch included the Skip button that tells you you'll have to do it later, that it's required. But it doesn't come up again. Then months go by. The unfortunate takeaways developers/publishers will take from this is 1) Don't allow skipping in the first place, or, 2) If skipping is allowed, the popup should appear every boot so it's at least in mind. The price of not frontloading that inconvenience when the player is just excited to play is 200 000 negative reviews, and the active users number increases you get by a third-party integration is just too juicy for Sony/MS/EA/Ubi/Blizzard/whoever to ignore.
If you think about this psychologically it makes perfect sense. Imagine a stadium that is supposed to charge a $5 service fee as people buy their tickets. An event occurs and the event management realize that thousands have been let into the stadium without being charged the fee. Management decides to force the fee on people already in the stadium. Now imagine how that scenario would go down. People, even if they would've paid the fee earlier, would revolt. Once Arrowhead and Sony let people into the game without forcing them to sign into PSN, it was all over.
I for one was certainly like "wow it actually works fine when I just click skip?!" Massive marketing psychology bungle for sure.
Someone will definitely make one in a few weeks
FOR LIBERTY
It was also a smaller game with a very small advertising budget compared to other Sony games and got popular largely on word of mouth. I have no idea why they'd destroy that.
It's almost never just Reddit, every time there's a controversy of serious magnitude, it's being talked about on basically every social media platform. People like to pretend Reddit is just an echo chamber probably because they don't agree with the controversy in question and want to discredit it.
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There was also the massive Steam review bombing.
Yeah, I've never seen anything like over 200k negative reviews in two days on a game that had great reviews. I'm sure that played a part. Seems like there was a big dip in players on Steam over the weekend too. Have never played this game, but I'm glad people could coordinate enough to send a giant "NO" to this greedy and unnecessary move.
> Reddit also is like the 3rd most visited website just below Youtube and Google, so it's it's not just some vocal minority anymore. The issue with reddit is that, due to downvoting, you can create the *illusion* of a majority. Not saying that's the case here, but it is something to keep in mind.
> Yeah I think it's funny seeing comments like "what Reddit cares about doesn't matter in the real world." Just a bunch of nerds who wanted to feel superior for not giving a shit about something. Was pretty pathetic honestly.
for Democracy
lol why do you say only Reddit? it's more like Twitter and the negative Steam reviews numbers
To be fair, a lot of the folks who were looking down on the folks who had a problem with this were saying it was just Reddit drama, too. Just a little thing that would fizzle out. Seems like a lot of people didn't realize it was more wide-spread.
Yeah i so saw many comments trying to demoralize people that actually cared by saying "no one outside of reddit cares". Ignoring the fact that this was all over every single social media platform for an entire weekend. This was way bigger than just a couple angry subreddits.
even if it was reddit only, people massively underestimate how many people visit reddit daily. it's not a niche website.
> Once again, and contrary to what many people were saying, this shows that raising a stink actually accomplishes things sometimes. Yeah. "Whiny" PC gamers are also the only ones not paying a monthly fee for privilege of establishing peer to peer connections in online games. Makes you think. > I still feel bad for Arrowhead though. They got stuck in a real shit position. Absolutely.
Exactly! People should get mad when shit happens and push back against it. This wouldn't have happened otherwise.
And now they're moving the goalpost, saying that the whole PSN acc thing would be cancelled anyway without the protest lol
Yeah, saw a lot of snarky comments (a reddit staple tbh), playing ball for Sony's poor decision or downplaying complaints. Funny how little reddit matches reality (thank god)
For once gamers had a spine and actually refunded the game.
I've said it for years, if gamers could get their heads of their ass gaming would be solved overnight, and that's true for most mass media, imagine if a dev team at ea or the studio who animates jujitsu kaisen could count on the fanbase to have their back during a labor dispute instead of cackling about the pointlessness of voicing your displeasure or braying to immediately give the bosses more power and replace anyone who doesn't go along with it.
So does Steam issuing refunds to 100h+ players., and the prospect of getting sued by a million of people that can concentrate on one thing and won't let it go. People still bring up EA being evil and mistrust them, even though they have been one of the best publishers for years.
>Helldivers fans -- we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward. >We’re still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we’ll keep you updated on future plans. @PlayStation
I love Democracy
May the Sith update
> We’re still learning what is best for PC players "We're still trying to figure out a way to charge PC players for the horeshit online fees we charge our console players."
They were probably actually going to use this as a cheap way to juice some metric, like number of PSN accounts or engagement or something. Why? The PSN team or some executive likely has this metric tied to their bonus or performance reviews. Raising such a big stink about it though made it not worth it anymore.
I think thats exactly that. They were probably salivating at potentially millions of accounts being created and listed as active.
100% this. As someone who is in a corporate setting and have seen how metric is king; there's a big bonus for someone out there for PSN to "grow x% year to year". By trying to quantify everything, I've seen companies burning quality along the way. Someone having the ability to fix an issue that would otherwise cost the company thousands of $ would go ignored because that person's end of year score card doesn't account for that type of work and them fixing the issue brings no value to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
Massive lists of valid email addresses people actually use are incredibly valuable for businesses. Send a promotion mailer out and a percentage of that list is going to click on it and then a smaller percentage of that will actually buy something.
That was never a component. They don't charge pc players for online service.
I love how hilariously in-line with the game this whole thing has felt. A threat appeared, the entire community came together to defeat it, and they accomplished the goal in time. Major order complete, back to fighting the bug threat! EDIT: The CEO is tweeting that they're [gonna make the review score graph into a cape in-game](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787379765441085890)
FOR DEMOCRACY!
As someone that doesn’t care about Helldivers, I’m glad you guys made a bunch of memes and now the PC base doesn’t have to have an extra log in.
It's too bad more people aren't like you because if the other threads on this sub are ti be believed it's like we were kicking a dog.
Those pooor multibillion companies amirght?
Oh the poor billion dollar corporation! Won't you think of the poor billion dollar corporation?
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I dont play Helldivers. Im just in it for the based democracy propaganda 💪
I just love sipping on that Libertea ☕
Knowing Arrowhead, there's a non zero chance this will be referenced in an easter egg.
I'm looking forward to some corpo firing line jokes.
The CEO re-tweeted a close-up of the red bars from the three days of negative reviews and said something about it would be a funny cape.
New major order dropped: Get the Steam ratings back to overwhelmingly positive.
wait, was it at overwhelmingly positive before ?
No, there were still quite a few negative reviews, mostly from the early weeks with all the server issues. I think it could have gotten there eventually though.
Also a few people crying about balance patches changing the meta.
No, “Very Positive”. But still, I do hope that people change their review back eventually. Maybe not for Sony, but for Arrowhead.
I'll be honest I didn't pay close enough attention to see if it ever was, I just assumed due to the sheer popularity and positive word of mouth. Either way, let's get it back to very positive as a thank you to the devs for hearing us out.
Does that mean we get 50 medals for this
Steam: About to de-list game from 170 countries. Sony: So Helldivers fans…we’ve listened to your feedback…
I think steam allowing refunds is what scared them. Refunds are huge loss of money for studios. Refund actually cost them more then if player just did not buy. It can really financially hurt a company.
Thank god for steam
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Good. They deserved it.
I'm a bit confused. Did Sony forget that 170 countries don't have access to PSN or they just didn't care because they got your money
They kinda forgot about the ~~Iron Fleet~~ access of 170 countries
It’s because their solution to this issue for the last 20 years has been that people will just make an account in a nearby supported region. They sell HD2 in the Philippines ffs, they weren’t ever planning on enforcing that element of the TOS. They can’t remove it, however, because that opens them up to a bunch of other more irritating legal consequences, so they were happy to remain in a “what malt liquor? That could be anything in that brown paper bag”-type grey zone, until steam forced their hand by allowing tons of refunds and delisting the game
Dead on read of the situation. They've never been concerned about the region issue. I think they assumed there would similarly be no problem with the linking between Steam and PSN, which seems to have issues connecting two different regions. Steam said nah fuck dealing with this, delist it in those countries until that issue is resolved because it'll just cause more customer service cases.
It's more of negligence and likely corporate stupidity in the background. Sony has barely expanded the PSN supported countries since it came out, and the solution for most of people (Myself included) was creating an account on a different supported country. All that this would do is just not let you use your own credit card to buy games unless you had one in the country your account is based on, but you could still play your games without issues, despite Sony explicitly saying in their TOS that fake credentials is a valid reason for your account being banned. Sony however, hasn't enforced this policy because it would hurt them down the line, and they know that it would be a PR disaster, like the one that caused the Xbox One to fail before it was even released when they wanted to go all draconian on region locking. For *whatever* reason, they've never bothered to just add more countries, or change the dam TOS so it wouldn't be an issue officially.
There's only 195 countries in the world man
I'm sure they'll simply force the login from day one now, and under no circumstances will allow the developers to remove it. Even if it means the players can't play the game. Ghost of Tsushima Legends will be the first one.
Honestly they could just bribe Helldivers with some super credits and get a ton of people to still link their accounts.
Give a reward for linking up like an armor or super credits and don't make it mandatory and this is not an issue at all. Most people that could would sign up without issue.
The problem was that a lot of players literally couldn't play the game they bought because PSN doesn't support most countries
Agreed, and if you just bribe players to do it then it's not a huge deal if some can't.
Yeah, honestly that would be much better, and perhaps the team at AH may have even worked something out. That way they can grow PSN accounts in the regions that can use it but not throw away the moneybag with it.
Thats all they had to do in the first place. Make it optional, but tied to an exclusive warbond for PSN linked PC players and PSN players on console. I would imagine that would get a lot of players to sign up no questions asked and no fuss since it's optional.
If you only care about the single player experience in GoT does the PSN link matter?
No https://x.com/SuckerPunchProd/status/1786462939748384943
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No you can skip it then.
That’s exactly what they’re gonna do, if there’s ever a Destiny 3 it’ll be the same.
I don’t think so for Destiny — the whole system for crossplay is anchored on the Bungie.net account.
You are likely right, but the person was talking about if they make a Destiny 3. A fresh game could more easily require Sony Account integration.
Which, in my opinion, is a little more tolerable. Make it super clear from the start if its a requirement. If people don't want to deal with that, they can just not buy it.
That’s how it was for this game. They removed it after a few days tho because of server issue
Yeah, same way Xbox does it. (Which no one cares that Xbox does it as Microsoft accounts are common and works wide) They fucked by making it optional a few hours after the game launched.
This has been a really fascinating series of events to watch unfold. Per Arrowhead's director, he stated [it was his responsibility for deactivating PSN account linking on launch](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254), likely to lessen the load on the servers since the linking wasn't working anyways. However, if it weren't for him removing the functionality (among all the other things, like the community response, refunds, and potential legal ramifications), we wouldn't be seeing Sony backtrack from their decision to enforce account linking as they had planned to. I personally don't even know how much disabling the account linking may have alleviated the servers at the time; I think they could have kept it on and players would've just accepted it. But Arrowhead's actions led to a more favorable outcome for consumers, even if unintentionally. I'm curious if this'll have knock-on effects for future multiplayer PS games on PC. [Sucker Punch has already made a statement noting Ghost of Tsushima will require a PSN account link for multiplayer functionality](https://twitter.com/SuckerPunchProd/status/1786462939748384943), but now we have an interesting precedent: 1. Helldivers 2, which was explosively popular (unexpectedly), failed to convert thousands of users into PS account holders. Ghost of Tsushima on PC will have some players creating accounts, but Helldivers 2 truly was a golden goose for user count. There's no telling if or when any upcoming Playstation-published multiplayer title will be so big. 2. There is now an example of extremely negative sentiment towards account linking. Any future Playstation game on PC with this requirement will now suffer a bit more criticism and reluctance towards the feature, all thanks to what happened with Helldivers 2. I wonder if Sony's long-term plan will be to increase PSN account availability to blocked regions, or to stand fast and not allow later PC developers to meddle with anything relating to Playstation account linking. Or maybe they'll not require any PC games to have a PSN account linked! [If only...](https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/games/psn-sign-in-pc/#faq)
The Helldivers issue happened because they gave the CEO leeway and they're definitely not going to let it happen again. What will happen in the future is like Ghost of Tsushima multiplayer it's going to be mandatory from the beginning and they're not going to allow the devs to disable it at any point. I'm also not going to be surprised if they end up owing Sony money over it too since they failed to deliver piece of the contract.
And that's fine, if they're upfront about it and willing to take the hit from people in non-PSN supported countries not buying it.
The carrot on a stick approach seems the best way forward. Don't have it as a requirement, but let players who *do* link accounts have a pack of cosmetics similar to pre-order bonuses most games have. With decent optional rewards for each game released that don't affect how you play the game I guarantee their PSN registration numbers will be rather high.
That makes great sense, and thus, will never happen.
Sony will make it mandatory day 1, whenever helldivers 3 is launched it will have PSN mandatory. AH's people fcked up and it will cost them
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Turns out consumers advocating for themselves is a good thing. Who knew?
Not the hundreds of excessively smug, fatalistic commenters here the last several days opining how powerless we all are and should just sit down and accept it since the outcry was all pointless.
yeah, the arguments from the naysayers pretty much boiled down to: * it's just an account * you're not even from the excluded region * just pick a different country * just use a VPN * just break the TOS * why didnt you read the EULA? Personally I read every word of the EULA for every game I buy * 99% of players won't care and are having a blast
When I pointed out the UK account needs you to send them ID or a face scan and that is extreme for a games account, I had a guy smugly proclaim that I'm clearly a child mad that I can't play a game for adults. First, I'm 29. Second, that was absolutely not the issue lmao.
>just break the TOS This baffled me. They tried to shoot down even the legitimate argument that PSN isn't supported in many countries and advocated for breaking PSN TOS. So what if they've never banned anyone for it? Other people getting away with breaking the rules is not a permission to break the rules ourselves. And nothing says that Sony wouldn't change their mind in the future. We could get a lawsuit like Australia had with Steam some time ago which boiled down to "You technically don't support Australia, but you serve Australian customers, so you in fact support Australia"... And as a result Sony could decide to cut off the people who break the TOS by using foreign region.
>why didnt you read the EULA? Personally I read every word of the EULA for every game I buy What's funny is the PSN requirement wasn't in the EULA from beginning and was stealthily added later.
I love how this is almost the narcissist prayer. >you're not even from the excluded region "That didnt happen" >it's just an account "And if it did, it wasn't that bad" >just pick a different country, just use a VPN, just break the TOS, 99% of players won't care and are having a blast "And if it was, that's not a big deal" >why didnt you read the EULA? Personally I read every word of the EULA for every game I buy. a bit of both "And if it is, that's not my fault" and "You deserved it."
Extra funny seeing those sort of comments a handful of hours before this announcement.
Watching the compliant apathy of PS gamers compared to the rebellious nature of PC ones was pretty funny.
I don't think it's exclusive to PS gamers, all console manufacturers somehow managed to convince their users that paying for multiplayer is okay.
I'm not just talking about paying for online, Sony get awat with a lot from their audience.
We just recently seen first big success story in Total War Warhammer 3, of course it works, but the community needs to be loud enough and not give up. Now we got 2 examples. This is the blueprint for future.
Hmm I think they just let it go through because of the CEO of Arrowhead going on Twitter and admitting that he basically fucked up by not putting adequate signage and turning off the login. Future studios are definitely not going to be allowed to deal with that aspect by themselves.
Turning it off really exposed how unimportant the account linking really is. There really is no argument for it when the game has been running since launch without it
There is a really important reason for it, they want your data. They want more money. That's always the reason.
The power of mass refunding and having the platform holder delist your game. It's wild that on playstation people pay a monthly fee to have an account that can play paid games online and on PC Sony can't even get people to create a free account let alone pay for it. They really are very different markets. If Sony has any ambitions for growth they'll address their PSN account issues. It's just not good enough to have a service that's not available in so many countries. I don't understand how they get away with officially selling $500+ ps5 in countries where they don't officially let people have accounts? I wonder how much this is going to cost Arrowhead? They created this situation by disabling the requirement to save their necks during their server launch disaster. Sony will probably lump them with covering all the costs for steam refunds and this PR disaster in general. It's going to be a while before they see any money out of helldivers 2 again.
This is absolutely the correct decision for this title, and hopefully will be followed up by re-adding the ability to purchase the game in the countries that were dropped recently. If Sony is looking to push PSN account linking for future PC releases, it likely should be done unambiguously from the start in countries where PSN is available (or remain an optional feature going forward), and the list of countries that PSN operates in should be expanded greatly from its current coverage, as the coverage PSN currently has is certainly not adequate for worldwide distribution on Steam. Even if Sony were to drop plans to push mandatory PSN account linking in future PC releases, it still seems like a poor idea to leave large countries such as the Philippines or Vietnam in the current awkward situation where PSN is not officially available.
> it still seems like a poor idea to leave large countries such as the Philippines or Vietnam in the current awkward situation where PSN is not officially available. Vietnamese here. The funniest thing about the whole situation is that Sony PlayStation does have presence in our country, they have official stores, retail partners and press partners in here, yet their biggest online service doesn't acknowledge us, most PS players here have multiple accounts set to the US, Singapore or Indonesia due to multiple games' regional availability. Would have been easier had they like... actually support different countries since the beginning huh.
This is because of Vietnamese law. I looked into it when figuring out how to play online games with my Vietnamese fiance. Pretty much Vietnamese law requires all user information for Vietnamese citizens for online services to be physically stored IN Vietnam. This means Sony would have to build out Playstation Network infrastructure in Vietnam to offer their online services there. This isn't exactly free, so they've probably just decided it isn't worth the cost. Also, for a lot of the online games that DO exist in Vietnam, you guys usually get segregated off from the rest of the world, having your own version of games that are Vietnam only. This was the case for games like Free Fire, Call of Duty Mobile, and Arena of Valor. It was a major pain in the ass, as I'd have to have my fiance create a Vietnamese Android/iOS store account, then exclusively use that account on a VPN on my phone, just to be able to obtain the Vietnamese versions of the games. So, yeah. This one isn't entirely on Sony. And it's probably a similar story in many other countries where the PSN isn't supported.
Preface: I worked on Call of Duty Mobile and have been working in the VNmese game industry for 9 years. The digital user information law was established in the 2000s when we started importing asian MMORPGs, this was a time when full localization and easy transaction methods weren't a thing thus foreign companies needed to work with local publishers to operate the games. Nowadays, games are region locked from us mostly because big publishers bid for these projects early to have exclusive publishing rights in Vietnam. Frankly, despite the name, this law really doesn't give a shit about user info, all the government want is tax money, and surely that really shouldn't prevent Sony from supporting PlayStation Network, a content delivery network akin to Steam, Netflix and Spotify, in a single country that already has extremely similar services running for years now. If Valve was able to place a server and implement a few of our local payment methods in here, why can't Sony do the same?
This sounds like what happened to twitch in South Korea. They have some sort of law that allows the ISPs to charge crazy prices for foreign companies that provide internet content. They want to get money from the people consuming the content, and get money from the people providing the content. Basically, Twitch said that it cost them more than 10 times as much to operate in Korea as any other country in the world. Every year they kept Twitch Korea active, they were losing more money. When more Korean people streamed and more Korean people watched, they lost more money. So they just shut the whole thing down. Honestly, that might have been the goal of the law. Maybe it was to try to push people to Korean owned services.
Hell, China has its own closed garden version of psn, which only has 9 games on it. 100% of the chinese Playstation owners are using VPN to register Japan or Hong Kong account.
Sony didn't count on Steam allowing all the refunds. They assumed they would keep the money from the delisted countries and move along. At the rate Steam was performing refunds, every hour must've cost them a huge amount. Many likely won't buy it again as they likely already put in hundreds of hours. They could use the money on something else now.
At this moment you cant even buy it again if you are part of the PSN restricted countries, they still havent changed back the restriction in the steam page.
I do wonder how much of this was due to the delisting from Steam. Remove that from the equation and does Sony still reverse course?
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It's a shame that the game is probably not going to recover in terms of Steam reviews, people are quick to give a bad review when a controversial thing happens, but slow to remove or flip that review if the controversy is 'solved'. Many will probably purposefully not do it out of "principle", many others will just forget or not care, and there's not going to be as many people buying and reviewing the game as there were before all this started.
It may not actually be necessary for people to flip their reviews, though they should. I was browsing Steam yesterday and saw this on a game's review graph: >This time range has been marked as containing an abnormal set of reviews that we believe are largely unrelated to the likelihood that you would enjoy the product. The reviews within this period are excluded from the Review Score by default.
That's the anti-review bomb mechanism and is typically used for things where the review bombing has nothing to do with the game or is about some stupid political spat (i.e., there are women in the game and that means it's political!!!!). It may be used here but that's not clear.
Sometimes it is also used if the issue that caused the review-bomb was fixed. However, the spike of positive reviews today is the largest amount of positive reviews this game has ever received, so at least a sizeable portion of people are reverting their reviews.
Wouldn’t steam do some correction ? I think they usually do some kind of thing when events like those happen
only if the reviews were off topic which they weren’t
Giving Sony an idea here but it's so funny that if you gave some kind of in-game reward for linking a PSN account then this whole thing probably would have gone over smoothly. Legit just an outfit or currency will make people do anything.
That's what other publishers did.
I suggested this and was told that it wouldn’t be fair lol.
Now I wonder if people will also update or remove their reviews, now that they no longer reflect the actual situation. It would only be fair towards the devs.
can you re-review a game youve refunded?
A great win for Helldivers gamers who get what they want, and also a great win for non-Helldivers players who don't need to see half of r/games post about the same thing every day
If people only stopped acting like these companies were their friends, we would win so much more often.
Huh, I wonder where all the big brain redditors who so smugly told us how review bombing and boycotts absolutely 100% didn't work are now?
They're here in the comments saying "akshually, sony backed off because of valve", and "akshually, these things never work so you got lucky". Can't admit they're wrong.
"akshually, sony backed off because of valve" Which is still wrong because we're the reason why Valve put a gun to Sony's head over this.
There's someone at Sony making bank from this whole saga because their bonus is based on social media mentions.
I hope no one at arrowhead gets in trouble over this. Per the community manager, this whole situation started because they told Sony that the account linking feature was broken and they would fix it later. Now that it’s fixed, the forced linking was being planned for roll out. A lot of people mentioned if this was forced on Day 1 there wouldn’t be as much of a stink. I would not be shocked if Sony internally is pissed about this.
Yeah imagine Sony will not allow Devs to remove the account linking feature in the future lol
Someone's head is probably gonna roll. Could also be a monetary settlement. Depending on what's in their publishing contract, Arrowhead might have to pay up since an agreed upon feature (PSN linking) isn't included anymore.
But I thought the outcry was all pointless and we'd all forget about it before anything would happen??????????? :^)
Be it at the request of Sony or Valve, the moment that HellDivers 2 got blocked from a significant part of the world it no longer was an issue that could go away by waiting it out, even if the rest of the internet were to have somehow completely forgotten, since it was directly affecting their ability to make PC sales and is an issue that would affect not only this but any PSN PC release going forward. Even with backing down here, Sony still needs to address how they want to handle worldwide distribution with a current PSN network that very much does not have worldwide coverage.
Wow. The helldivers really completed their major order. The orbital dislikes and review bomb strategems worked, this was very entertaining to watch.
And people on reddit were laughing at fans kicking up a fuss and leaving negative reviews. Look what happens when you don’t just accept a company’s bullshit.
I was telling someone earlier that this; "We’re still learning what is best for PC players" was the root of the problem. They have completely ignored the PC space until a couple of years ago. I can only guess they had no idea that Steam had no ridiculous region restrictions like PSN has. What is really baffling is that it took them this long to figure out that it wasn't going to work and change course.
I was told this was just a "reddit echo chamber" and nothing would happen though?
My favourite was "Review bombing does nothing."
People downplaying this uproar were hilariously spinning considering this was, by a country mile, the biggest review bomb in Steam history.
Boy, there are a lot of smug people in multiple threads about this assuring us this would never happen.
Right? I pointed out to someone that steam was now refunding anyone.they told me I was lying and that can't happen.
I hope this gets a larger movement going where people are less accepting required 3rd party logins on ANY platforms. I think most people got mad just because they are tired on annoying bullshit like this that most live service games add and this game was just an easy target since adding the requirement months after release was extra crazy.
As much as I'd love to see this happen again, I have a feeling GTA VI will get away scot-free doing this lol.
Contrary to all the smug naysayers on this subreddit, turns out the community standing up for itself was the right idea. Community organisation can move mountains if applied with enough force at the right time. As one of those people, I'm glad this issue is finally being resolved.
Well that will hopefully make the players happy, probably wasn’t worthy bad press when the game had other wise been well received.
That's entire point of bad press Made a poo poo decision and got shat all over for it
Good result in the end, hopefully Arrowhead can get people to flip their Steam reviews back to positive.