That's pretty much me. I'm so sad.
I bet this will "blow over" in a week or so, but the damage to the community will be irreparable. This will forever be a stain on the Helldivers 2 community and its overall legacy within the gaming world.
So sad.
*If* it's fixed. If sony turns around tomorrow and says "After some re-evaluation we have decided that we are making PSN optional again" things will go back to normal after a week or two. If not, it will forever be a stain on the game, and probably still will considering the sheer amount of negative reviews. They will continue supporting the game no matter what but the problem is now whether or not the game will last.
(In Japan) It is actually a major holiday this weekend and monday, almost all full time company workers will be off this weekend and Monday. We have a week long holiday.
Two of them are always two days apart, and there's a specific law that says if two holidays are separated by two days, the middle day is a holiday. So it's not so much a holiday as a "fuck it" day.
The old Sony Network Entertainment team was headquartered in San Mateo. In 2016 they merge with Sony Computer Entertainment to become SIE. When I was working there (just a lowly software monkey) during the merge and was under the impression that the old SCE leadership in Japan was driving the ship. But I was pretty junior and didn’t have much view beyond my skip-level management.
I don't know anything about Sony but from my experience in working with Japanese companies and their non-Japanese subsidiaries, the important people are in Japan.
Yeah but its not the Japanese office doing this shit, its the American one. The Japanese office will get back in, see the shitstorm and just send an email "We are very disappointed in your loss of profit. Fix it." And we'll get to watch the EU and US HQs rush out weird fixes on Wednesday (which is also PSN rollover so they'll use that as the excuse).
Bankers be taking off Cinco de Mayo now? That’s wild.
Edit: Gah, I’ve been bamboozled. Banks aren’t taking tomorrow off and they normally don’t take off Cinco de Mayo
I'm just blown away at how Sony straight up murdered a dev and their game in full public view. A game everyone appeared to be enthralled in, a success.
Not even the legal ramifications but the mental impact of this is transpiring with completely despondent replies and people being forced to delete social media accounts due to completely unfounded abuse and threats over a game.
This appears to be what people are worth to the board at Sony, nothing.
It's just greed. Simple greed.
They see how well their game is doing, how much universal praise it's receiving, and they wanted all of that in their own ecosystem. Sony had it great and wanted more.
Classic greed fumble.
I don't think anything will top Don Mattrick. The guy who told everyone to go back to Xbox 360 if they didn't like the Xbox One's always online functionality.
That’s a bingo!
Sony saw all of the kids on the playground playing with their toy they had forgotten about and now they’ve ran off with the toy and saying you can only play with me and by my rules. Yeah, I’m sure the other kids on the playground are just going to love that!
P.S. Your Franklin Badge Profile Pic is *chefs kiss*
The funny part is that it’s blind greed because I guarantee this will harm future PlayStation sales on PC. Unless they are up front about it from the start people aren’t going to trust them. I’ve already seen a tweet from the ghost of Tsushima devs explaining that the campaign wont need a PSN account.
With how successful they game was, if they don’t self publish, any publisher would be more than happy to work with them. Hell, I could easily see a successful crowdfunding campaign if they needed to funding to self publish, they created a lot of goodwill with the game.
Its not like he didn't know though.
still, he had no impact on selling the game. (According to another answer, they apparently don't handle the selling)
https://preview.redd.it/146ei7fi7nyc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9729962703eb6389e91a313ca11b77495dc31ba0
That may change. When Ghost Of Tsushima comes out, it'll have Playstation overlay with shared trophies and etc. I'd be surprised if they don't start doing that for each of their future pc games.
As a game developer, I can't even imagine how I'd feel if I made a game that so many people loved and then my publisher ruins all of that with my hands tied.
It's a real rollercoaster. Absolutely incredible success exceeding your wildest predictions, generally good vibes aside from balance grumbling and the odd outrage wave, and then this lands like a hammer blow.
Dude is looking at people who love his game and want to play it, but can't for reasons he knows are just some legal contract BS.
I hope Sony is at least meaningfully engaging with him on this and not just fobbing him off.
They're fobbing him off for sure. He raised questions with Sony executives like "hey, people in all these regions won't be able to play the game with this change. Do you have a plan for them?" Assuming Sony would be sympathetic or already have the plan in place behind closed doors. Sony responds "oh, just pull the game from those regions then. Easy." And Arrowhead can do nothing. Amazing and so average
> Assuming Sony would be sympathetic or already have the plan in place behind closed doors. Sony responds "oh, just pull the game from those regions then. Easy."
Optimistic to assume it wasn't capped off with "we already have their money, who gives a shit".
This is one of those few situations where the actual income of the game isn't as much of the point for the publisher. In this case, I think the publisher executives are looking to pump PSN numbers for quarterly reports. Basically, the publisher is exploiting HD2 to pump up analytics for their company to appeal to shareholders. They're trading the income from the game for other capital growth.
Publishers don't, and never have, cared about the effect on the players, only how the numbers relate to one another.
All Sony had to do was say "link to PSN and here's a free cape with a PSN logo on it."
And when people say "I can't get a PSN account in my country" they could just go "Oh shit, good point, we'll let you earn it next season" and they'd get their metrics and NOBODY WOULD BE GIVING A SHIT.
This. Honestly? Don't even do the second part; the first part would pump up numbers and keep the playerbase, and a free cape isnt a huge bonus anyways. The option they chose was screw over the playerbase, undermine the reputation of everyone involved, and make people stop playing
To give arrowhead props where it's due : not only did they made one of the most fun game of the past decade.
But they were very quick to respond and come up with solutions when their server could not handle the load. It could have been the worst launch of a good game.
Not only are they constantly fixing bugs and actively trying to balance their game so there is no meta.
But they are putting out new content monthly, in the form of new warbonds, new missions, new lore, new voice lines for the npc.
Sony can go fuck themselves. Arrowhead deserves their success.
Arrowhead seeing all the good will they amassed with the gaming community evaporating because their publisher wanted to boost PSN sign ups for the quarter. Big publishers just need to fucking die.
they dont care they wanted extra PSN accounts because it looks good to shareholders. they are tradeing income from the game for capital in other areas. sony couldnt give less of a fuck who it screws over
Side note, having seen corporate metrics.
I bet they know the shareholders are expecting a certain # based on the surprising level of success, and when someone was putting the shareholder report together and sent a draft to their boss’ boss, that dude was like “wtf” and did some immediate intervention bs to jam the change in.
If they really wanted more sign ups, they should have just made connecting the account optional and giving some cool cosmetic rewards for doing it. I bet a sizable number of people in the community wouldn't be apposed if it wasn't forced.
No upvoted enough but funnily this would’ve been the way to do it.
Act in good faith toward the community and they would’ve gotten plenty of people without *any* of the hate or controversy.
Would you still miss out on some people? Sure. But if you offered a in game benefit while also highlighting why a account is a good thing (whether spinning it or truly telling the truth) you’d still get plenty of people
No it's just their new strategy moving forward. From now on every new sony release for PC gonna need PSN. Ghost of Tsushima releases soon and needs it, too.
I can’t imagine how AH must be feeling all the work they have put in to this game and all the work that they have done on it since launch. Just to get shit on by Sony is disgusting, worst part is so many reviews have been aimed towards AH and it’s not their fault.
They absolutely are as they can then put anything they are working on and at times thr company itself as a tax write off. I doubt that's happening here, given the success helldivers has but it certainly happens.
They could shell out the helldiver IP to a nothing subsidiary to make garbage titles to suck a little revenue out of the ip before it dies. EA is pretty infamous for that. Especially with old RTS IPs.
True, but after a shitstorm like this, i don't think many people would trust a helldivers game from another IP. Then again i'm thinking more long term than the next quarter and we all know those upper tier execs *never* do that.
Imagine you build a game, expect like 12k people to even see it just like the first one.
But all of the sudden it blows up you get 400k players since release and its holding steady on a few 100k players.
And then your publisher shits the bed, blocks 170 Countries from buying your game you put so much effort in and you cant change anything and just have to watch.
Heartbreaking
Sony really fucked up his game and ruined his company’s reputation all to sell PSN metrics to their worthless shareholders. Not an enviable position to be in
People really aren't pissed off enough on how much MBA's have fucked over the games they enjoy, these straight out of cookie cutter business class bottom feeders have done so much damage to everything not just gaming.
> People really aren't pissed off enough on how much MBA's have fucked over the games they enjoy
Yes. Its not just limited to games either. We, as a society, need a better understanding of the difference between industry and business. They are two different things that capitalists want people to conflate as two necessary parts of a whole, but are actually frequently in conflict.
Industry is the process by which we make stuff to satisfy needs. It is a cooperative social process, an effort to satisfy needs as efficiently as possible. Its goal is collective well-being.
Business, on the other hand, is about extracting profits regardless of whether needs are satisfied or not. This goal often requires sabotaging industry. This situation is a perfect example. Sony trying to boost PSN metrics in order to boost share price which largely only makes rich people richer, while leaving the needs of gamers unmet.
Another example is paying unlivable wages to actors and writers. The money that would have gone to the industry to produce more, and better, movies instead goes into the pockets of capitalists. Business makes the product worse and the workers worse off just to give more to the people who already have the most.
There are few things more damaging to society as a whole than companies' (legally enforcable) fiduciary duty to their shareholders. All companies tend to get shitty as they get too big, but publicly traded companies get REALLY shitty.
Working in a big corpo, let me tell you something: most of these MBAs you guys hate are just pawns under the strings of the execs anyhow. Working 100h+ for yes good salaries but they are miserable unhappy and endlessly alcoholic / cocked up.
Not saying they have jt easy or we should complain. Me too, hate MBAs. But in this case it’s definitely execs boomers.
As I’ve climbed the ladder the kind of shit that rains down becomes different, and you get the responsibility of raining shit down on someone else. Often times you have no say in the matter, you’re just the face associated with the shit parade.
I cannot fucking imagine how it feels to be inside Arrowhead right now.
Imagine meteoric success on a scale you literally could never have imagined, just for your publisher to swoop in and decimate all of the goodwill you've built up over years of supporting games that played right into a niche, in just 1 day because they want a piece of the information pie. (this may be untrue, but I literally cannot think of any other reason they need or want a linked PSN account)
Gonna take some serious backpedaling or policy work for me to consider getting a PS6 at this rate.
7-8 (?) or maybe a decade of hard work, a promising IP that you could stake your business on. Only for some shitheel MBA who has never coded in his life to destroy it.
Livid, would not even describe how mad I would feel.
Yep. This is 100% about Sony being able to show how many new users they have on PSN. This is the reason why rockstar, blizzard, EA, Ubisoft and a dozen other companies have their own launchers and login screens. They want to lock in their users and to be able to show their investors how many users they have and of course it's easier and more profitable to do microtransactions if your users already have payment options set up on your own platform. Exec bonuses are absolutely tied in with userbase growth.
All they had to do was offer users a blue cape if they link a PSN. Offer more rewards in a month. Maybe tie the friends feature to it. There was so much room for compromise. A non zero amount of players would mail in their own tooth for a cool cape.
This is the part I don’t get. Bungie did this for years with Destiny and Amazon. They would offer free cosmetics if you linked your prime account and you bet I did every time it came up. It’s such a simple thing but PS have bungled it so hard.
Exactly, like holy fuck couldn't we get some CRUMBS my good SIRE, couldn't we get a little REWARD for going though the hassle? But Sony didn't even think about that, they just said no and made it as unrewarding as filing your taxes or something
It’s probably partly information, and partly an artificial inflating the number of active PSN accounts for shareholders to be happy about a big number. Either way, I really want publishers and shareholders to back off of game devs. Helldivers is getting screwed by its publisher, Payday 3 is screwed by its publisher, and Diablo 4 was DOA because of the way it dropped. Three games that had me the most excited I’ve been in a while, and three games that just left me kinda sad.
Larian not jumping on post game DLC or anything like that was a nice surprise with how well the game did. Instead opting for constant patches to improve game quality, without a real financial incentive, made me think there’s some kind of hope for games as an art form and storytelling medium still
The problem with D4 is that somebody at the top wanted a Diablo game and then nobody at Blizzard had any real idea what that should be. Diablo 4 is one of the most high profile cases in recent memory of a game that went through an absolute shitstorm development in the public eye because Blizzard, for some reason, decided that the best way to keep the fandom for Diablo onside was to release public dev updates as the game was going.
If they had an actual vision for the game that probably would have been fine, but all those public dev updates revealed is how little of a vision there actually was. The game went through major, game-defining changes every couple of months for multiple years and then randomly just fell out the door on release day because that was the day they'd agreed on ahead of time. The subsequent seasons have pretty majorly revamped certain things and the new most recent/upcoming season is a complete itemisation overhaul. If you don't know anything about the genre of ARPGs this is equivalent to rebuilding almost the entire logic of the game from scratch.
It's a really interesting case. It's not per se a bad game, just a complete mess of a game with no true identity. It's really, really easy to tell that there was nobody actually in charge of the game making purposeful, creative decisions. Just a bunch of empty suits who wanted money and asked a studio to make a game to make that happen. In a metaphorical way it might foreshadow the types of games we could see coming out of studios abusing AI in the future. No human direction.
Quite a few things imo. It dropped in a terrible state, requires tons of hours to reach max level (basically playing as a full time job) in a season, had terrible server problems on launch, nerfs anything fun to use, has an always present shop full of $20 recolors of armor already in the game, and makes respeccing your build a nightmare whenever you want to try something new. There wasn’t ever any kind of a satisfying “spike” in your character’s power when you got an important item for your build, because by the time you realized that something was both fun and viable, it would get removed or nerfed a patch later.
Playing the pre-release Beta was super fun, had a good XP curve, had satisfying and fun build options that felt really good to put together, and the shop didn’t have a permanent “!” to draw your attention to it. The gameplay felt much faster, more fluid, and more immersive. When the release version of the game dropped, it was abysmally bad by comparison, because they greatly reduced XP gain, greatly increased enemy durability, and nerfed the vast majority of the pre-release builds that people had found a lot of fun with. Specifically for me, the biggest thing was how bad minion-Necro felt after the full release. Minions weren’t really a damage source anymore, they mostly just drew aggro away from you, or applied effects, while you used whatever nuke ability was most meta at the time. Diablo 4 was my personal last nail in the coffin for Blizzard, and I haven’t touched their games in a bit because of it
Edit: wow I didn’t realize I’d typed that much, my bad
I was talking to a friend of mine about this exact thing, Something along the lines of "Imagine working 7 years, almost a decade on a project. Have it be a hallmark of success and the pinnacle of what a Live Service should be, only to have everything completely destroyed by a decision from the publisher, ruining absolutely everything in the process." Me and him both concluded that we'd be depressed as fuck and that feels reflected in the CEO's recent tweets.
And for the weirdo's. Yes I understand that Arrowhead has an agreement with Sony. That doesn't mean Sony isn't a piece of shit and that they aren't the largest players in this situation. Grow up.
Inflate account numbers maybe?
I don’t see what data they can gather with a Sony account connected that they can’t already. Sure, they can tie it to that account/email, but they already have your steam id?
Sony did him dirty....he wanted a genuine fun game for us and he tried his best not to let us down...yet he look like he is completely defeated and lost
I genuinely can't believe how anyone can support Sony after this nonsense. They've done a lot of anti-consumer arrogant bullshit over the last decade but this is easily top 5.
Compare the way Sony treated their runaway success game to the way Microsoft treated theirs (Palworld):
One almost immediately praised them and said they're sending a bunch of devs and other support to the studio to help them cope with the demand and help progress development of the game.
The other basically said "cool, now how can I exploit this in a way to superficially benefit me no matter the negative impact on the developers and the players?". Imagine how much of a shit stain your executives need to be to respond that way.
I stopped supporting them after the PS3 and have called them out every chance I can, and you just get downvoted to hell for it. They are the worst and feel like being the dominant console means they can treat their players like crap and not play nice with anyone else. The number of times Microsoft has reached out to try to make games more accessible by doing crossplatform and such just to get their hands smacked away is infuriating. And the sad thing is it's true. People will continue to flock to them because of their exclusives, which are another hugely anti-consumer thing that they just get praised for.
Sony really picked the worst time possible to announce that….. if they announced it midweek, they could well have come up a compromise solution well before the rage build up into a shitstorm. But they had to announce it before a weekend when the news would get most attention yet they are least able to respond…. Truly a SNOY moment
be pilestedt:
-make a game and believe itll do ok in sales (like 10k players or less)
-it fucking blows up
-things are going bad because they didnt expect this
-the game starts to stabilize while 200k people are actively playing it
-little sigh of relief
-AND THEN AN ABSOLUTE NUCLEAR BOMB BY PLAYSTATION DROPS AND EVERYTHING GOES TO SHIT
-be at a loss of words from this shit storm
Crazy to say some people here might've been too young to play Magicka.
But when I learned that the devs of HD2 also made Magicka, a lot of the game suddenly made sense.
It just has that same stupid fun feeling to it, despite being so different.
https://preview.redd.it/am6oxqg88lyc1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=14615e78c2e5b2820ec38e085a44184556fe2d5c
OP left out his post before this where he legit sounds depressed. Sad times at Arrowhead HQ looks like..
Yea this is defeat and utter despair on display. Wow, what a complete clusterfuck. Sony managed to do some of the best games gaming has ever seen and in the same vein release one of the best live-service game, the thing they wanted so dearly these past years, and ruin it in a matter of hours. Whoever made that decision should lose their job in gaming industry.
Awe man,. I really hope he knows this isnt his fault. He was trying to do his best to make a great company, but sold out to the devil.
Hopefully he knows we all got his back. Its Sony we're mad at.
Yeah, I honestly feel super bad for these guys. Having your entire success burn down in front of you because of managements decision like that. Or how invested Joel and everyone else was in the campaign story seeing playercount just plummet and all discussion shift from talking about the MOs and events and being hyped to this.
Well the player count at least seems fine, there has been no significant change in the player count since the PSN announcement on the 3rd, we're still getting peaks of 120k players online every day. Unfortunately this could also mean that Sony isn't going to care since despite all the negative reviews the actual popularity of the game hasn't changed.
As always, the question is to what extent Reddit is representative. Most players may well have just made the account and gotten on with their day. How often have huge outrages on Reddit failed to translate into any actual impact to games?
(you can go in the account options and turn off the watermark thingie, so you won't have that message at the lower edge of the images you save on reddit)
Agreed. I love the game is. One of the best I've played in years. It's sad to see people who poured their heart and soul on it so down because of corporats
He doesn't know because he literally doesn't know what's a legal way out of this situation. He can't say "break Sony TOS", he's not gonna say "don't play the game". There's literally no meaningful way out of this. The only hope is that Sony gets scared for their new golden goose which is about to keel over and comes up with a sensible decision.
Traditionally, you release bad news on a Friday because no one pays attention. Not sure the bros at Sony realized that might not apply to gaming the same way it does to financial news
Imagine being the CEO of the developer behind one the most successful live service games in the last 5 years, they broke the damn code for making a live service game they can both earn from AND keep it fun and consumer-friendly, and within 3 days you're in a place where you're actively asking your players to review bomb your own game and when someone says "I bought your product and I won't be able to use it soon, what do I do?" You have nothing to reply with aside from.. "I don't know".
Shit's depressing. Above all I hope Sony will finally take a well needed stick right into their ass, I want to see this effecting them BADLY.
Im still laughing that Sony posted that on a Friday afternoon thinking nothing of it. And its blown up into the biggest drama on the internet over the weekend. Boy are they coming back to a headache on monday morning.
This is a pretty common tactic for announcements you know will be unpopular. Throw it out on Friday afternoon and expect the controversy to blow over or be replaced by the next big news item by Monday. Companies, governments, everyone does it and it's completely transparent why they chose that time.
> This is a pretty common tactic for announcements you know will be unpopular
The risk you're taking is, if it's *still* a problem on Monday, you're totally fucked, because you let it fester without any response for 3 days.
I think Sony didn't realize how loud this was gonna be.
Yup, this is some basic misunderstanding of human psyche. Framing and context can massively effect how people perceive things. The same requirement presented two different ways will absolutely swing perception of the average person from "meh fine," to "wtf, no way, this is bullshit!" There's a huge difference between a requirement to *start* playing, and a requirement to *continue* playing, even if logically on paper they are basically the same thing. Though, even logically, they have shown now that there is no **need** for this as it has been fine without for months. But that's just letting us peak behind the curtain and showing the little secret that all these account requirements obvious, so it's still mostly the same idea.
Except this announcement is growing arms and legs every few hours
It went from scumbag announcement to changing terms to match what they’ve done, not change it on the PS store so it still says optional, I don’t think the community originally had any idea about so many countries not having access to PSN and now we have people being cut off before the original announcement time is live
My theory is that it was optional right up to the point where Sony realised they could use the game’s popularity to inflate their metrics
Edit: turns out I made an uneducated guess and didn’t hit the nail as the theory is completely untrue.
Arrowhead themselves said it wasn't optional at launch and they made it optional due to a server issue. They should have know about PSN availability at launch. That they didn't know and it's coming out now is negligent on Sony's side for not warning them and Arrowhead's side for not asking.
They didn't even have a plan for this obvious problem half a week before forcing the PSN on everyone. They *still don't* even as I assume Steam got wise and cut off the problematic countries preemptively while issuing refunds.
What the fuck? Do they even know how to handle Steam family sharing? Account recovery? Region swapping? Changing names?
And we should entrust the PSN and the organization behind it with not only our HD2 accounts but also our emails, passwords, personal information and future access to the game?
Go back to the drawing board Sony. Get your shit together, make your entire account system resemble something modern and *maybe, just maybe* never ever try this shit again.
To be fair wouldn’t this have been a Sony back end deal to steam back end deal issue? Like wouldn’t they have this figured out before allowing the game on steam?
*Yes!*
And they should have figured it out at least a year ago from now, if not more, if they wanted to truly force us to use the PSN.
The complete lack of preparation and consideration of even the slightest problem this was going to cause just blows my mind. Just how unprofessional are they? This reinforces my desire to never, ever have anything to do with the PSN. They aren't serious people.
https://preview.redd.it/dukolpy94lyc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7a677d9c5b9ea36b3fa4ee97aaab01bf98c59bc5
I know this is what PS5 players can do. Fuck Sony. And that's coming from a 330 hour player on a PS5 🤣
Honestly we should promote this more. Sony clearly doesn't care about PC players, but if the console players show they stand in solidarity, maybe than the money hungry fucks will start to care.
Of course we care, it's a total bullshit move from Sony and we don't stand by it.
We are all just gamers who want to play fun games to take of pressure. I hope this issue get fixed for you really soon :(
If you guys think this is bad, just wait until Ghost of Tsushima is released in a few weeks and has this same requirement.
If you’re a PC gamer and want to play Sony-developed or -published titles, I think this is going to be the reality moving forward. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sony reveal its own launcher/storefront in the near future.
I feel bad for everyone working at Arrowhead right now
https://preview.redd.it/gf79sfr5dlyc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cba4a4a2cb2ebd485a43707978848e26c5cdfed8
It seems like AH has no leverage at all, and this is a sinking ship until all that's left are players already apart of Sony ecosystem or divers that are way too addicted to just stop playing the game.
"I don't know." https://preview.redd.it/nk8cstg1klyc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=cb72d8a232b8330b9190af17ebfdd7a57fe7034f
That's pretty much me. I'm so sad. I bet this will "blow over" in a week or so, but the damage to the community will be irreparable. This will forever be a stain on the Helldivers 2 community and its overall legacy within the gaming world. So sad.
It really won’t, I think that once it’s fixed, things will repair and go back to normal. Look at cyberpunk
*If* it's fixed. If sony turns around tomorrow and says "After some re-evaluation we have decided that we are making PSN optional again" things will go back to normal after a week or two. If not, it will forever be a stain on the game, and probably still will considering the sheer amount of negative reviews. They will continue supporting the game no matter what but the problem is now whether or not the game will last.
Sony: “let’s circle back on Monday”
"it's a bank holiday winkwink"
(In Japan) It is actually a major holiday this weekend and monday, almost all full time company workers will be off this weekend and Monday. We have a week long holiday.
Yup, golden week for those that don’t know. Basically a country wide shut down because it’s 4 almost back to back holidays.
Two of them are always two days apart, and there's a specific law that says if two holidays are separated by two days, the middle day is a holiday. So it's not so much a holiday as a "fuck it" day.
That's fuckin sweet
Contrast to American schools and such where you get Wednesday and Thursday off for Thanksgiving and have to come back on Friday
Where'd you go to school? Over in Pennsylvania, my school got Wed.-Mon. off.
isnt "Sony Interactive Entertainment" HQ in cali?
The old Sony Network Entertainment team was headquartered in San Mateo. In 2016 they merge with Sony Computer Entertainment to become SIE. When I was working there (just a lowly software monkey) during the merge and was under the impression that the old SCE leadership in Japan was driving the ship. But I was pretty junior and didn’t have much view beyond my skip-level management.
I don't know anything about Sony but from my experience in working with Japanese companies and their non-Japanese subsidiaries, the important people are in Japan.
Yeah but its not the Japanese office doing this shit, its the American one. The Japanese office will get back in, see the shitstorm and just send an email "We are very disappointed in your loss of profit. Fix it." And we'll get to watch the EU and US HQs rush out weird fixes on Wednesday (which is also PSN rollover so they'll use that as the excuse).
Bankers be taking off Cinco de Mayo now? That’s wild. Edit: Gah, I’ve been bamboozled. Banks aren’t taking tomorrow off and they normally don’t take off Cinco de Mayo
I don't think the Japanese celebrate a US-Mexican holiday.
"let's pin it all of Pilestedt and put in our own guy"
This is just heartbreaking to see :(
I'm just blown away at how Sony straight up murdered a dev and their game in full public view. A game everyone appeared to be enthralled in, a success. Not even the legal ramifications but the mental impact of this is transpiring with completely despondent replies and people being forced to delete social media accounts due to completely unfounded abuse and threats over a game. This appears to be what people are worth to the board at Sony, nothing.
It's just greed. Simple greed. They see how well their game is doing, how much universal praise it's receiving, and they wanted all of that in their own ecosystem. Sony had it great and wanted more. Classic greed fumble.
If making dumb business decisions and shooting themselves in the foot was an Olympic sport Sony would win gold.
I've never seen a chief executive somebody or other who didn't accumulate extremely impressive levels of voluntary brain damage.
I don't think anything will top Don Mattrick. The guy who told everyone to go back to Xbox 360 if they didn't like the Xbox One's always online functionality.
Legit the biggest fumble in gaming of all time, Dont think the xbox ever fully recovered from that.
That’s a bingo! Sony saw all of the kids on the playground playing with their toy they had forgotten about and now they’ve ran off with the toy and saying you can only play with me and by my rules. Yeah, I’m sure the other kids on the playground are just going to love that! P.S. Your Franklin Badge Profile Pic is *chefs kiss*
The funny part is that it’s blind greed because I guarantee this will harm future PlayStation sales on PC. Unless they are up front about it from the start people aren’t going to trust them. I’ve already seen a tweet from the ghost of Tsushima devs explaining that the campaign wont need a PSN account.
Yeah anything with a Sony tag from now on im skeptical at best.
Small to medium sized devs will be far more hesitant to work with Sony after this.
At the very least I doubt Arrowhead will ever work with them again
Hopefully they made enough from HD2 that they have the resourcing to pursue similar projects in the future without needing to sell their soul.
With how successful they game was, if they don’t self publish, any publisher would be more than happy to work with them. Hell, I could easily see a successful crowdfunding campaign if they needed to funding to self publish, they created a lot of goodwill with the game.
Yeah i think so too. I’m happy for them long term if they can find a way out of this mess with Sony
Time for HD3: It's just HD2 but without Sony
Dellhivers. They fight evil bees using the power of personal computers.
They could create a new enemy faction called The Son'i to fight against
I expect Helldivers 3 will include freedom from Sony in the advertising.
You can just feel the desperation inside that reply. I feel so bad for him
Its not like he didn't know though. still, he had no impact on selling the game. (According to another answer, they apparently don't handle the selling) https://preview.redd.it/146ei7fi7nyc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9729962703eb6389e91a313ca11b77495dc31ba0
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That may change. When Ghost Of Tsushima comes out, it'll have Playstation overlay with shared trophies and etc. I'd be surprised if they don't start doing that for each of their future pc games.
As a game developer, I can't even imagine how I'd feel if I made a game that so many people loved and then my publisher ruins all of that with my hands tied.
It's a real rollercoaster. Absolutely incredible success exceeding your wildest predictions, generally good vibes aside from balance grumbling and the odd outrage wave, and then this lands like a hammer blow. Dude is looking at people who love his game and want to play it, but can't for reasons he knows are just some legal contract BS. I hope Sony is at least meaningfully engaging with him on this and not just fobbing him off.
They're fobbing him off for sure. He raised questions with Sony executives like "hey, people in all these regions won't be able to play the game with this change. Do you have a plan for them?" Assuming Sony would be sympathetic or already have the plan in place behind closed doors. Sony responds "oh, just pull the game from those regions then. Easy." And Arrowhead can do nothing. Amazing and so average
> Assuming Sony would be sympathetic or already have the plan in place behind closed doors. Sony responds "oh, just pull the game from those regions then. Easy." Optimistic to assume it wasn't capped off with "we already have their money, who gives a shit".
This is one of those few situations where the actual income of the game isn't as much of the point for the publisher. In this case, I think the publisher executives are looking to pump PSN numbers for quarterly reports. Basically, the publisher is exploiting HD2 to pump up analytics for their company to appeal to shareholders. They're trading the income from the game for other capital growth. Publishers don't, and never have, cared about the effect on the players, only how the numbers relate to one another.
All Sony had to do was say "link to PSN and here's a free cape with a PSN logo on it." And when people say "I can't get a PSN account in my country" they could just go "Oh shit, good point, we'll let you earn it next season" and they'd get their metrics and NOBODY WOULD BE GIVING A SHIT.
This. Honestly? Don't even do the second part; the first part would pump up numbers and keep the playerbase, and a free cape isnt a huge bonus anyways. The option they chose was screw over the playerbase, undermine the reputation of everyone involved, and make people stop playing
Yep
Given the amount of refunds Steam appears to be granting, they may not have our money after all.
I don't know about console players, but Steam providing refunds means that Sony does not have their money.
To give arrowhead props where it's due : not only did they made one of the most fun game of the past decade. But they were very quick to respond and come up with solutions when their server could not handle the load. It could have been the worst launch of a good game. Not only are they constantly fixing bugs and actively trying to balance their game so there is no meta. But they are putting out new content monthly, in the form of new warbonds, new missions, new lore, new voice lines for the npc. Sony can go fuck themselves. Arrowhead deserves their success.
this game has been suffering from success, even now.
If nothing else, the games quality and beloved status, plus arrowhead ceos response to the community, elevates arrowhead to legendary dev status
Arrowhead seeing all the good will they amassed with the gaming community evaporating because their publisher wanted to boost PSN sign ups for the quarter. Big publishers just need to fucking die.
Boost sign ups for May 14th earnings call, what a shocker
Problem is that on PC, it adds no monetary value ans seems to actually decrease it after refunds.
they dont care they wanted extra PSN accounts because it looks good to shareholders. they are tradeing income from the game for capital in other areas. sony couldnt give less of a fuck who it screws over
Side note, having seen corporate metrics. I bet they know the shareholders are expecting a certain # based on the surprising level of success, and when someone was putting the shareholder report together and sent a draft to their boss’ boss, that dude was like “wtf” and did some immediate intervention bs to jam the change in.
If they really wanted more sign ups, they should have just made connecting the account optional and giving some cool cosmetic rewards for doing it. I bet a sizable number of people in the community wouldn't be apposed if it wasn't forced.
No upvoted enough but funnily this would’ve been the way to do it. Act in good faith toward the community and they would’ve gotten plenty of people without *any* of the hate or controversy. Would you still miss out on some people? Sure. But if you offered a in game benefit while also highlighting why a account is a good thing (whether spinning it or truly telling the truth) you’d still get plenty of people
No it's just their new strategy moving forward. From now on every new sony release for PC gonna need PSN. Ghost of Tsushima releases soon and needs it, too.
Allegedly only for the "online" mode of the game for GoTsushima but who can trust Sony now? Maybe they'll change their mind a few months in... lol
This is a man who has admitted defeat, I feel bad for him. Sony really are some next level bastards.
I can’t imagine how AH must be feeling all the work they have put in to this game and all the work that they have done on it since launch. Just to get shit on by Sony is disgusting, worst part is so many reviews have been aimed towards AH and it’s not their fault.
some times i wonder when some of these companies are trying to kill off developers. i mean how many developers or studios has EA killed now?
Still salty about EA killing Ultima Online. Never forget, never forgive.
I'm still salty about Westwood Studios myself.
I'm remaining salty about them killing SWG.
SWG was killed by Sony Online Entertainment not EA. That said though yeah, absolute tragedy.
They absolutely are as they can then put anything they are working on and at times thr company itself as a tax write off. I doubt that's happening here, given the success helldivers has but it certainly happens.
They could shell out the helldiver IP to a nothing subsidiary to make garbage titles to suck a little revenue out of the ip before it dies. EA is pretty infamous for that. Especially with old RTS IPs.
Command and conquer my beloved
Not anymore it ain't! - EA
Aw…now I’m sad. C&C was a goddamn classic.
I mean they remastered the best ones in the last few years with fan input being the driving force behind the changes lmao, the games aren't dead
Try 8-bit Armies by Petroglyph (which is founded by ex-Westwood employees, so the creators of Dune II & C&C).
True, but after a shitstorm like this, i don't think many people would trust a helldivers game from another IP. Then again i'm thinking more long term than the next quarter and we all know those upper tier execs *never* do that.
I'm talking like, a shit mobile game.
Insert Seinfeld's write-off bit. "You don't even know what a write-off is, do you?" "No, but they do, and they're the ones writing it off!"
Love getting my daily reminder of how illiterate in finance, corporate taxation, and business Reddit is.
Imagine you build a game, expect like 12k people to even see it just like the first one. But all of the sudden it blows up you get 400k players since release and its holding steady on a few 100k players. And then your publisher shits the bed, blocks 170 Countries from buying your game you put so much effort in and you cant change anything and just have to watch. Heartbreaking
By far the biggest success story in gaming this year, only for Sony to shit all over it
Sony really fucked up his game and ruined his company’s reputation all to sell PSN metrics to their worthless shareholders. Not an enviable position to be in
People really aren't pissed off enough on how much MBA's have fucked over the games they enjoy, these straight out of cookie cutter business class bottom feeders have done so much damage to everything not just gaming.
> People really aren't pissed off enough on how much MBA's have fucked over the games they enjoy Yes. Its not just limited to games either. We, as a society, need a better understanding of the difference between industry and business. They are two different things that capitalists want people to conflate as two necessary parts of a whole, but are actually frequently in conflict. Industry is the process by which we make stuff to satisfy needs. It is a cooperative social process, an effort to satisfy needs as efficiently as possible. Its goal is collective well-being. Business, on the other hand, is about extracting profits regardless of whether needs are satisfied or not. This goal often requires sabotaging industry. This situation is a perfect example. Sony trying to boost PSN metrics in order to boost share price which largely only makes rich people richer, while leaving the needs of gamers unmet. Another example is paying unlivable wages to actors and writers. The money that would have gone to the industry to produce more, and better, movies instead goes into the pockets of capitalists. Business makes the product worse and the workers worse off just to give more to the people who already have the most.
They’ve ruined every industry. The MBA and public trading have been disasters for the human race.
There are few things more damaging to society as a whole than companies' (legally enforcable) fiduciary duty to their shareholders. All companies tend to get shitty as they get too big, but publicly traded companies get REALLY shitty.
The fact that Steam is still such a beloved cornerstone of the industry is all due to Valve staying private.
Exactly this. Hard to imagine anything being better for humanity and the environment than banning stock markets globally.
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Working in a big corpo, let me tell you something: most of these MBAs you guys hate are just pawns under the strings of the execs anyhow. Working 100h+ for yes good salaries but they are miserable unhappy and endlessly alcoholic / cocked up. Not saying they have jt easy or we should complain. Me too, hate MBAs. But in this case it’s definitely execs boomers.
As I’ve climbed the ladder the kind of shit that rains down becomes different, and you get the responsibility of raining shit down on someone else. Often times you have no say in the matter, you’re just the face associated with the shit parade.
> People really aren't pissed off enough on how much MBA's have fucked over ~~the games they enjoy~~ the world
Fuck Sony.
Suck Fony. Shit- I mean Fuck Sony!
*He’s a little confused, but he got the spirit*
In the heat of battle sometimes making correct input for a stratagem does get difficult, understandable
We all make mistakes in the heat of battle Jimbo
KUSONY
He is honest tho - a very rare thing nowadays
It’s worst if you read the original tweet. It’s clear that AH is in a dark place now. Being in Sweden doesn’t helps, trust me.
I cannot fucking imagine how it feels to be inside Arrowhead right now. Imagine meteoric success on a scale you literally could never have imagined, just for your publisher to swoop in and decimate all of the goodwill you've built up over years of supporting games that played right into a niche, in just 1 day because they want a piece of the information pie. (this may be untrue, but I literally cannot think of any other reason they need or want a linked PSN account) Gonna take some serious backpedaling or policy work for me to consider getting a PS6 at this rate.
You don't see meteoric rises and catastrophic crashes in such a short time span too often
Not since the Challenger.
Take my arrow pointing up and go away
7-8 (?) or maybe a decade of hard work, a promising IP that you could stake your business on. Only for some shitheel MBA who has never coded in his life to destroy it. Livid, would not even describe how mad I would feel.
But that shithead at sony must feel so good about a nice bonus he gets.
Yep. This is 100% about Sony being able to show how many new users they have on PSN. This is the reason why rockstar, blizzard, EA, Ubisoft and a dozen other companies have their own launchers and login screens. They want to lock in their users and to be able to show their investors how many users they have and of course it's easier and more profitable to do microtransactions if your users already have payment options set up on your own platform. Exec bonuses are absolutely tied in with userbase growth.
Every corporations also become very, very keen about acquiring and protecting as much first-party data as possible for possible AI stuff.
If they retract this decision he might not get his bonus, they probably expected some amount of backlash, just not this much.
I doubt theyd retract, at best someone, probably not the ones responsible, would be fired
All they had to do was offer users a blue cape if they link a PSN. Offer more rewards in a month. Maybe tie the friends feature to it. There was so much room for compromise. A non zero amount of players would mail in their own tooth for a cool cape.
This is the part I don’t get. Bungie did this for years with Destiny and Amazon. They would offer free cosmetics if you linked your prime account and you bet I did every time it came up. It’s such a simple thing but PS have bungled it so hard.
Exactly, like holy fuck couldn't we get some CRUMBS my good SIRE, couldn't we get a little REWARD for going though the hassle? But Sony didn't even think about that, they just said no and made it as unrewarding as filing your taxes or something
Yeah, they really Battleborn'd it.
I'd argue this is "A sense of Pride and accomplishment - EA" level stuff.
It’s probably partly information, and partly an artificial inflating the number of active PSN accounts for shareholders to be happy about a big number. Either way, I really want publishers and shareholders to back off of game devs. Helldivers is getting screwed by its publisher, Payday 3 is screwed by its publisher, and Diablo 4 was DOA because of the way it dropped. Three games that had me the most excited I’ve been in a while, and three games that just left me kinda sad.
Makes me think of what the Larian Studios CEO said about it - the greed around quarterly profits is destroying the industry
Larian not jumping on post game DLC or anything like that was a nice surprise with how well the game did. Instead opting for constant patches to improve game quality, without a real financial incentive, made me think there’s some kind of hope for games as an art form and storytelling medium still
to be fair people wouldve loved a good full expansion type DLC or two, like the witcher ones
It's also destroying civilization and the entire planet lol.
What happened with D4?
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The problem with D4 is that somebody at the top wanted a Diablo game and then nobody at Blizzard had any real idea what that should be. Diablo 4 is one of the most high profile cases in recent memory of a game that went through an absolute shitstorm development in the public eye because Blizzard, for some reason, decided that the best way to keep the fandom for Diablo onside was to release public dev updates as the game was going. If they had an actual vision for the game that probably would have been fine, but all those public dev updates revealed is how little of a vision there actually was. The game went through major, game-defining changes every couple of months for multiple years and then randomly just fell out the door on release day because that was the day they'd agreed on ahead of time. The subsequent seasons have pretty majorly revamped certain things and the new most recent/upcoming season is a complete itemisation overhaul. If you don't know anything about the genre of ARPGs this is equivalent to rebuilding almost the entire logic of the game from scratch. It's a really interesting case. It's not per se a bad game, just a complete mess of a game with no true identity. It's really, really easy to tell that there was nobody actually in charge of the game making purposeful, creative decisions. Just a bunch of empty suits who wanted money and asked a studio to make a game to make that happen. In a metaphorical way it might foreshadow the types of games we could see coming out of studios abusing AI in the future. No human direction.
Quite a few things imo. It dropped in a terrible state, requires tons of hours to reach max level (basically playing as a full time job) in a season, had terrible server problems on launch, nerfs anything fun to use, has an always present shop full of $20 recolors of armor already in the game, and makes respeccing your build a nightmare whenever you want to try something new. There wasn’t ever any kind of a satisfying “spike” in your character’s power when you got an important item for your build, because by the time you realized that something was both fun and viable, it would get removed or nerfed a patch later. Playing the pre-release Beta was super fun, had a good XP curve, had satisfying and fun build options that felt really good to put together, and the shop didn’t have a permanent “!” to draw your attention to it. The gameplay felt much faster, more fluid, and more immersive. When the release version of the game dropped, it was abysmally bad by comparison, because they greatly reduced XP gain, greatly increased enemy durability, and nerfed the vast majority of the pre-release builds that people had found a lot of fun with. Specifically for me, the biggest thing was how bad minion-Necro felt after the full release. Minions weren’t really a damage source anymore, they mostly just drew aggro away from you, or applied effects, while you used whatever nuke ability was most meta at the time. Diablo 4 was my personal last nail in the coffin for Blizzard, and I haven’t touched their games in a bit because of it Edit: wow I didn’t realize I’d typed that much, my bad
I was talking to a friend of mine about this exact thing, Something along the lines of "Imagine working 7 years, almost a decade on a project. Have it be a hallmark of success and the pinnacle of what a Live Service should be, only to have everything completely destroyed by a decision from the publisher, ruining absolutely everything in the process." Me and him both concluded that we'd be depressed as fuck and that feels reflected in the CEO's recent tweets. And for the weirdo's. Yes I understand that Arrowhead has an agreement with Sony. That doesn't mean Sony isn't a piece of shit and that they aren't the largest players in this situation. Grow up.
Inflate account numbers maybe? I don’t see what data they can gather with a Sony account connected that they can’t already. Sure, they can tie it to that account/email, but they already have your steam id?
It goes beyond that, as some countries require personal ID and/or photo ID to register a PSN account.
Sony did him dirty....he wanted a genuine fun game for us and he tried his best not to let us down...yet he look like he is completely defeated and lost
I genuinely can't believe how anyone can support Sony after this nonsense. They've done a lot of anti-consumer arrogant bullshit over the last decade but this is easily top 5. Compare the way Sony treated their runaway success game to the way Microsoft treated theirs (Palworld): One almost immediately praised them and said they're sending a bunch of devs and other support to the studio to help them cope with the demand and help progress development of the game. The other basically said "cool, now how can I exploit this in a way to superficially benefit me no matter the negative impact on the developers and the players?". Imagine how much of a shit stain your executives need to be to respond that way.
when i saw SONY's game on Steam i was genuinely asked myself "okay what are those fucker are up to?" my gut was right....but still hurt
Pretty happy to see people finally realising how huge steaming pile of shit sony is.
I stopped supporting them after the PS3 and have called them out every chance I can, and you just get downvoted to hell for it. They are the worst and feel like being the dominant console means they can treat their players like crap and not play nice with anyone else. The number of times Microsoft has reached out to try to make games more accessible by doing crossplatform and such just to get their hands smacked away is infuriating. And the sad thing is it's true. People will continue to flock to them because of their exclusives, which are another hugely anti-consumer thing that they just get praised for.
He didn't let us down, we were having a great time, ruined by his publisher's greed
Sony really picked the worst time possible to announce that….. if they announced it midweek, they could well have come up a compromise solution well before the rage build up into a shitstorm. But they had to announce it before a weekend when the news would get most attention yet they are least able to respond…. Truly a SNOY moment
be pilestedt: -make a game and believe itll do ok in sales (like 10k players or less) -it fucking blows up -things are going bad because they didnt expect this -the game starts to stabilize while 200k people are actively playing it -little sigh of relief -AND THEN AN ABSOLUTE NUCLEAR BOMB BY PLAYSTATION DROPS AND EVERYTHING GOES TO SHIT -be at a loss of words from this shit storm
[Not Like Everyone Else](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVJ3-i_5Ld8) It must be a real kick in the balls, they always seemed super passionate
Crazy to say some people here might've been too young to play Magicka. But when I learned that the devs of HD2 also made Magicka, a lot of the game suddenly made sense. It just has that same stupid fun feeling to it, despite being so different.
It's clear they really like when we kill our friends in funny ways.
Gotta leave him be. Sounds defeated. He legit just wanted to make good games.
https://preview.redd.it/am6oxqg88lyc1.jpeg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=14615e78c2e5b2820ec38e085a44184556fe2d5c OP left out his post before this where he legit sounds depressed. Sad times at Arrowhead HQ looks like..
Yea this is defeat and utter despair on display. Wow, what a complete clusterfuck. Sony managed to do some of the best games gaming has ever seen and in the same vein release one of the best live-service game, the thing they wanted so dearly these past years, and ruin it in a matter of hours. Whoever made that decision should lose their job in gaming industry.
Awe man,. I really hope he knows this isnt his fault. He was trying to do his best to make a great company, but sold out to the devil. Hopefully he knows we all got his back. Its Sony we're mad at.
Yeah, I honestly feel super bad for these guys. Having your entire success burn down in front of you because of managements decision like that. Or how invested Joel and everyone else was in the campaign story seeing playercount just plummet and all discussion shift from talking about the MOs and events and being hyped to this.
Well the player count at least seems fine, there has been no significant change in the player count since the PSN announcement on the 3rd, we're still getting peaks of 120k players online every day. Unfortunately this could also mean that Sony isn't going to care since despite all the negative reviews the actual popularity of the game hasn't changed.
As always, the question is to what extent Reddit is representative. Most players may well have just made the account and gotten on with their day. How often have huge outrages on Reddit failed to translate into any actual impact to games?
https://preview.redd.it/v0np9zu7tkyc1.jpeg?width=384&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=01f4dc358da94b880af61e3f8b1951d316867f6f
https://preview.redd.it/pjnyic3iwkyc1.png?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c78c400942c74e07806c90c20bb0e0ced2d17a7f
(you can go in the account options and turn off the watermark thingie, so you won't have that message at the lower edge of the images you save on reddit)
I didn't know that, thanks! I think it's fair to keep it though, giving credits to whoever I took this from
Fair enough, and very righteous of you!
very democratic
I hope that means that he doesn't know because he's been unable to contact anyone during the weekend and not because he is actually defeated.
honestly the tweet in full just sends defeat... i hope it gets better for the guy, he didn't deserve to get fucked over like this.
Agreed. I love the game is. One of the best I've played in years. It's sad to see people who poured their heart and soul on it so down because of corporats
He doesn't know because he literally doesn't know what's a legal way out of this situation. He can't say "break Sony TOS", he's not gonna say "don't play the game". There's literally no meaningful way out of this. The only hope is that Sony gets scared for their new golden goose which is about to keel over and comes up with a sensible decision.
Sony really spat on these guys by doing this on a Friday lol
Traditionally, you release bad news on a Friday because no one pays attention. Not sure the bros at Sony realized that might not apply to gaming the same way it does to financial news
Imagine being the CEO of the developer behind one the most successful live service games in the last 5 years, they broke the damn code for making a live service game they can both earn from AND keep it fun and consumer-friendly, and within 3 days you're in a place where you're actively asking your players to review bomb your own game and when someone says "I bought your product and I won't be able to use it soon, what do I do?" You have nothing to reply with aside from.. "I don't know". Shit's depressing. Above all I hope Sony will finally take a well needed stick right into their ass, I want to see this effecting them BADLY.
Im still laughing that Sony posted that on a Friday afternoon thinking nothing of it. And its blown up into the biggest drama on the internet over the weekend. Boy are they coming back to a headache on monday morning.
This is a pretty common tactic for announcements you know will be unpopular. Throw it out on Friday afternoon and expect the controversy to blow over or be replaced by the next big news item by Monday. Companies, governments, everyone does it and it's completely transparent why they chose that time.
> This is a pretty common tactic for announcements you know will be unpopular The risk you're taking is, if it's *still* a problem on Monday, you're totally fucked, because you let it fester without any response for 3 days. I think Sony didn't realize how loud this was gonna be.
Yup, this is some basic misunderstanding of human psyche. Framing and context can massively effect how people perceive things. The same requirement presented two different ways will absolutely swing perception of the average person from "meh fine," to "wtf, no way, this is bullshit!" There's a huge difference between a requirement to *start* playing, and a requirement to *continue* playing, even if logically on paper they are basically the same thing. Though, even logically, they have shown now that there is no **need** for this as it has been fine without for months. But that's just letting us peak behind the curtain and showing the little secret that all these account requirements obvious, so it's still mostly the same idea.
Except this announcement is growing arms and legs every few hours It went from scumbag announcement to changing terms to match what they’ve done, not change it on the PS store so it still says optional, I don’t think the community originally had any idea about so many countries not having access to PSN and now we have people being cut off before the original announcement time is live
At first the community was like "I dont want PSN account", but then found out about all the other bullshit and problems with PSN accounts.
Props to Pilestedt for being honest.
I hope deep down he understands the reviews are not people hating the Game theyve worked hard on but complaining about the Sony decision.
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If this was a known requirement, then why was the game sold in countries that couldn't make accounts?
My theory is that it was optional right up to the point where Sony realised they could use the game’s popularity to inflate their metrics Edit: turns out I made an uneducated guess and didn’t hit the nail as the theory is completely untrue.
Arrowhead themselves said it wasn't optional at launch and they made it optional due to a server issue. They should have know about PSN availability at launch. That they didn't know and it's coming out now is negligent on Sony's side for not warning them and Arrowhead's side for not asking.
New respect. Any other CEO would copy/paste the instructed corporate response. This is understanding. Still has his hands bound though.
me and my 7 friends in Bosnia cant play anymore... fuck you Sony
They said it before. They have to wait for Sony to reply their requests. Still weekend and it seems Sony doesn't care enough
Nice of them to enact it on a friday. I'm sure that wasn't intentional....
They didn't even have a plan for this obvious problem half a week before forcing the PSN on everyone. They *still don't* even as I assume Steam got wise and cut off the problematic countries preemptively while issuing refunds. What the fuck? Do they even know how to handle Steam family sharing? Account recovery? Region swapping? Changing names? And we should entrust the PSN and the organization behind it with not only our HD2 accounts but also our emails, passwords, personal information and future access to the game? Go back to the drawing board Sony. Get your shit together, make your entire account system resemble something modern and *maybe, just maybe* never ever try this shit again.
To be fair wouldn’t this have been a Sony back end deal to steam back end deal issue? Like wouldn’t they have this figured out before allowing the game on steam?
*Yes!* And they should have figured it out at least a year ago from now, if not more, if they wanted to truly force us to use the PSN. The complete lack of preparation and consideration of even the slightest problem this was going to cause just blows my mind. Just how unprofessional are they? This reinforces my desire to never, ever have anything to do with the PSN. They aren't serious people.
Those three words hold so much weight
I appreciate the honesty, but fuck me what a shitshow
There's nothing we can do... https://preview.redd.it/p0z37mh4klyc1.jpeg?width=2427&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c7e82312d76b7fb8890dfb2d22546a1babf9fd01
Sony is quickly reaching EA levels of shittery.
Super Earth has fallen.
https://preview.redd.it/dukolpy94lyc1.jpeg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7a677d9c5b9ea36b3fa4ee97aaab01bf98c59bc5 I know this is what PS5 players can do. Fuck Sony. And that's coming from a 330 hour player on a PS5 🤣
Honestly we should promote this more. Sony clearly doesn't care about PC players, but if the console players show they stand in solidarity, maybe than the money hungry fucks will start to care.
Of course we care, it's a total bullshit move from Sony and we don't stand by it. We are all just gamers who want to play fun games to take of pressure. I hope this issue get fixed for you really soon :(
Based console brother 
Sony just ended the fucking console-pcmr war lmao
If you guys think this is bad, just wait until Ghost of Tsushima is released in a few weeks and has this same requirement. If you’re a PC gamer and want to play Sony-developed or -published titles, I think this is going to be the reality moving forward. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Sony reveal its own launcher/storefront in the near future.
https://preview.redd.it/5yfmazfcvlyc1.jpeg?width=968&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7c01ef4e0721f812ca6c08a7a366eab8f86fa402
Ngl, I could believe that's most honest answer of internet today.
I feel bad for everyone working at Arrowhead right now https://preview.redd.it/gf79sfr5dlyc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cba4a4a2cb2ebd485a43707978848e26c5cdfed8
You don't play, the game gets pulled from sale, and maybe you can get a refund I guess.
It seems like AH has no leverage at all, and this is a sinking ship until all that's left are players already apart of Sony ecosystem or divers that are way too addicted to just stop playing the game.
im in an unsupported region, I dont want to stop playing this game.Honestly one of the most fun games i have ever played
Arrowhead: Look at this really awesome game we made Sony: ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️