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Unangbangkay
@Unangbangkay

until now the noise about Helldivers 2 retroactively enforcing its requirement to have a PSN account to play was pretty much just noise (especially once the absolute chodes started piling in for unrelated reasons like whining about Crunchyroll or stellar blade, allowing those who were uneasy about the decision but still enjoying the game to just tune out all the criticism entirely). All in all it was more or less destined to blow over

but now Sony (or possibly Valve) actively delisted the game on Steam for people in 177 different countries and territories where PSN is not officially supported, including mine, where all Philippine PSN accounts have a faked Hong Kong or Singapore address. I can still play the game on PC as I bought it, but I can't even view its steam store page now without turning on a VPN.

Were all those accounts that important to Sony that they'd willingly nuke the biggest game they've published so far this year? Companies move slow, so this was probably pre-scheduled and the company hasn't yet decided on its response, but we're talking insane levels of just, completely preventable PR disaster.

like after looking at this what still-independent developer in their right mind would allow sony to publish their next live service game or whatever? knowing that some c-suite chud would potentially sabotage all the goodwill their game can generate to juice PSN signup numbers?

all thoughts go out to arrowhead and its community team. they're probably having a really shitty week


Unangbangkay
@Unangbangkay

gamers have risen up

That this happened on Sunday at 9PM PST suggests that it was less about Sony specifically doubling down in seeming defiance but that a series of pre-scheduled actions went off before Someone In Charge was able to decide on a proper reaction to an unexpectedly insane level of backlash.

Helldivers 2 is an unusual case in the annals of modern Sony's involvement with PC so far. Everything else like Destiny and PC ports of previous PS exclusives had a sort of mandate that made things like PSN integration a non-issue.

By comparison, Helldivers 2 is a heavily PC-favored, current organic service game success, something that Sony's never really had before. Their biggest service game is Destiny 2, which they bought outright, in part for Bungie's own experience running service games. Foamstars is a Square Enix joint, and likely dead sooner rather than later. Fortnite is Fortnite, Sony just takes a cut of V-buck purchases on PS4/5 and sends other checks for the occasional PSN freebie, no lessons to learn there. So nothing like Helldivers 2, not even Helldivers 1.

I think Matt Piscatella at NPD mentioned that without the PC numbers Helldivers wouldn't even crack Sony's top 20 most sold on PS5, making it, in a sense, their most prominent PC release ever. Without diminishing the scale of "fucking up on a friday and finding out over the weekend" at work or handing them any excuses, it's not surprising to see them fumble the bag like this in retrospect. It's a new situation for them.


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in reply to @Unangbangkay's post:

"Companies move slow, so this was probably pre-scheduled and the company hasn't yet decided on its response, but we're talking insane levels of just, completely preventable PR disaster." the companies-move-slow comment here does feel like the thing.

Like I was recalling a streamer mentioning how Best Buy had planned to phase out physical games in their stores because of pandemic data that implied most people now bought games online so they made the decision based on that data but it's a process that takes time so they're only just beginning the process of phasing out..... only for post-lockdown data to show that, no, people DO prefer to buy games in store it's just that it was the lockdown(as limited as it was) happened and thus for understandable reasons of "not wanting to catch the plague" most people didn't want to go out at the time.

But now that people ARE buying in store again the process to phase physical games inventory in said store is still ongoing because the inertia of moving the ship of corporate decisions taken years ago is that slow and that dumb.

It really sucks.

Admittedly something that's technically fully digital/online like this here feels like it shouldn't be an issue because we're not talking about warehouse storage or anything like that but on the flipside I have no ideas how many layers of bureaucracy bullshit might be involved that would still prevent from reversing this stupid PSN decision promptly(if at all).

in reply to @Unangbangkay's post: