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Sony backed down from the PSN requirement to play Helldivers 2. How will this change how the community reacts to game changes?
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- Title
- Sony backs down on demand that Helldivers 2 players log into a PSN account
- Authors
- Jody Macgregor
- Published
- May 6 2024
- Word count
- 342 words
I attribute Sony's defeat more to Steam's delisting of the game and their refunding. I'm sure Steam was not happy to be refunding so many players for a mistake that Sony made (removing the PSN requirement temporarily without stating it was temporary). Sony also would have had to face headaches from players that purchased the game in countries where PSN isn't offered. Fake reviews you can suffer through, but the largest store blackballing your game is a whole nother tier of hurt.
Afaik, it was stated somewhere on the Steam page (in a small but not invisible print) that they'll be requiring PSN accounts in the future.
That being said, what a dumb ass move to release the game in unsupported countries. Also dumb to bait and switch the account requirement, they should've pushed the release if it was that important.
A smarter move would've been to offer some incentives to link your PSN account voluntarily, like an item or maybe monthly payment of in-game currency. They still should do that and probably give a little little to everyone as an apology.
That isn't really what happened. The game launched with the requirement in place, and it was only lifted a couple weeks later when the game went viral on TikTok and their servers melted.
They built out their infrastructure to support tens of thousands of players, because the previous game only peaked at 6,000 concurrent users. They never expected to hit 450,000 players.
I see, thanks for the correction.
From what I heard, it was only delisted in areas that didn't support PSN, right? Seemed like a decision a global company can push through if they really wanted that subscription boost.
I'm guessing the decision was more on the economic market than anything. Subscribers are great at long term funding, the market is in full short term money mode. Same reason why they rushed a fix for Helldivers 2 when they saw the popularity of it. They could have stuck with it, but Sony needs more short term wins right now, especially in the GaaS market they are floundering on. There will be other schemes later for the long term
They had a second game that was supposed to be The Big Hit. It wasn't.
Then HD2 skyrocketed and now some middle-manager's KPIs are determined by "PSN account number growth" and they had this great growth hack idea of forcing people to make accounts with a stick.
With a carrot approach this all would've been avoided.
Hit the nail on the head, as an avid Helldiver myself.
This is one of the very few games to come out in the last 10 years that was just done right, and wasn't clearly just a fucking cash grab -- they have the only acceptable microtransation monetization scheme, namely that while you can buy premium currency to get each new 'Warbond' (monthly battle pass lite, basically) for $10, you can also very easily obtain that currency just by playing the game. I bought the passes myself because I like supporting games I play a lot (already at 150hours played), but the rest of the squad I play with all haven't spent a dime past the initial purchase and they still have been able to get most or all of the warbonds, already, depending on playtime.
And then out of nowhere, they tried to force PSN down our throats as a 'requirement', when the game had been out for like 3 months. So everyone just said "no, fuck that!" and it worked, thank god.
What game are you referring to as the Big Hit?
The game doesn't require any kind of subscription on PC though, just a PSN account.
Do we know for certain who delisted the game in the affected regions? Valve or Sony?
According to Arrowhead, Sony as the publisher made the call of releasing the game in non-PSN regions in the first place.
I think they are the ones that made the call to delist. It's not up to Valve to enforce stuff like that.
I don't know the details here. But if it really wasn't possible to play the game in those non-PSN regions, I can see Steam wanting to delist the game. Steam sells games that work. If a game that is not playable (for whatever reason) is available for sale, that delegitimizes their platform.
It is still possible to play, the switchover would've been on the 30th of this month IIRC.
Why would've Valve jumped the gun and delist a game from a HUGE publisher a month in advance based on a possibility of some people not being able to play?
Because people might buy the game in the meantime, and then Valve has to process even more refunds. I think Valve delisted it to put more pressure on Sony to change track due to the ongoing mass refunds. There's a chance Valve also could have been subjected to lawsuits for allowing the game to be sold in countries it couldn't be played in, which would be an unnecessary hassle no matter how such a case could have turned out.
Valve often responds to legitimate large scale negative reviews.
Good point, I don't know that.
Agreed. Unfortunately, when a company is as large as Sony, negative reception rarely overpowers pure greed. Even with the influx of negative reviews, they'd still likely deem the data gained from PSN-linked accounts to be more valuable. The mass refunds and delisting from Steam, however, would have cut strongly into their share of the profits. Not to mention the potential legal action from players in countries without PSN, and potential further action from Steam such as delisting Helldivers 2 entirely or having more stringent requirements for future games. Everything together made it too much of a hassle.
I think something should be changed, either on Steam or Sony's end, to block future games with PSN or other external account requirements from being listed for sale in countries without access to those accounts. From what I heard Helldivers originally required a PSN account for the first week before making it optional, so they should also make it so that such a decision can't be changed from "Optional" to "Required". At the very least though, I don't think Sony will try this again (or at least not for a major game). It's just easier to try to add some other incentive for linking an account through in-game bonuses.
I believe they are doing it for Ghosts of Tsushima as we speak. But Ghosts doesn't need the online portion to play the meat of its game, so it'll be overlooked.
I think the only correction they'll make is to make sure the PSN requirements are listed upfront next time. Blizzard games don't see to have this issue.
EDIT: well, that was quick, quicker than I imagined: https://gamerant.com/ghost-of-tsushima-pc-version-delisted-psn-restrictions/
I looked it up because I remembered hearing the devs said it wouldn't be required in the wake of this controversy. I found this tweet from May 3 clarifying it won't be required for single-player, but will be needed for the Legends multi-player mode and the Playstation Overlay. So at bare minimum, it's not a full requirement right now.
Yeah, that's what I meant. Good way to sneak in the policy with a single player prominent game. But it shows that that are still adamant in putting that overlay in on future games.
I was not optimistic that the reaction of the community would change Sony's decision, but it seems that the out pour has worked. The next question is how far will people take these "review bomb" protests? I am afraid that any changes to games that some players don't like are going to turn into echo chambers and reviews are going to be unreliable. For example Star Citizen is about to implement a new flight system called Master Modes. The community is pretty split on the topic, but it is clear a large amount of players discussing the change have not played in the test servers and are just basing negative or positive comments on YouTube videos and comments others have left.
This is nothing new, they just rarely ever hit to anything of this scale or even success. Helldivers 2 was an outlier because of a few things going in the community's favor:
My guess is that most publishers will more than likely just quietly kill the game to cut their losses and move on to the next. This won't stop people from trying again, but most people are just apathetic. I've seen some campaigns work in FFXIV, but that took lots of time to wear down a dev who's generally open to ideas, but sometimes a bit too stubborn.
To put it simply, I wouldn't expect anything like this again for a long time.
It happens all the time at smaller scale for much smaller games. Not enough to get posts on social media, but enough to indeed make publishers pull out,. Most people just don't notice. Or notice and forget.
I do wish companies would do more to make sure the reviews sound the slightest be helpful to the audience, instead of just going "well it's my opinion [of a completely wrong or unrelated issue]" (as I've seen as an excuse for supporting review bombs). People talk so much about pro/anti-consumerism, but never seem to consider other consumers when they flood Steam with unhelpful reviews over their pet peeves
I will say, as to point (5) -- I fucking loved all the memes on the subreddit (which, man it was weird using Reddit again for a few days, but I couldn't not follow this fucking shitshow). My particular favorite was that the 3rd enemy type had finally been revealed (Sony/'Snoy').
I more or less said the same thing in Hacker News and got (expectedly) blasted for mentioning it. People just want to bask in their short term victory without considering the long term ramifications.
But yes, these review bombs are going to do long term weathering of the trust of user reviews for these large releases. They just become another political battleground for the issue of the most frustrated players, instead of one where people get important info on the games they are interested in. It's already abused to protest issues entierly unreleated to the game in question.
Helldivers has already been victim several times to the toxic spam-until-you-get-what-you-want tantrum style disagreement from the players in the prominent community spaces.
I think this speaks a lot to what we can expect in general from the community, and that there is little chance this game is going to continue as the developers envisioned since it’s being held hostage constantly.
Edit: it’s also worth mentioning this is the second review bomb this game suffered.
It's not bombing if people have legitimate grievances. Reviews are there to review the game, which sounds tautological but it needs to be said. If a developer, or in this case publisher, decides something I do not agree with, a review is a very valid method of complaint and a way for me to tell others to be wary of these practices.
I also disagree with the sneer towards the community. These changes are anti consumer and I think people in general are finding it harder and harder to swallow. You see the same responses elsewhere. Helldivers was considered the non corporate diamond in the rough so this stung just a little more than others.
The HD2 community has been pretty insufferable since the game blew up. Any time a popular weapon gets nerfed, the subreddit blows up with people complaining about it and hurling insults at the devs. The mob may have turned their attention towards a cause more just, but it's still the same mob.
Unfortunately I think this is just inevitable for any game that gets as popular as HD2. Even Deep Rock Galactic got noticeably more toxic in recent years as it gained popularity.
Reddit subreddits consistently collapse in quality as soon as they hit some arbitrarily decided critical point in subscriber count.
I wouldn't expect anything else, but that also means I do not think they're necessarily worse than others simply by virtue of most large subreddits being sort of frustrating.
The Discord (barring General Chat 1) is actually quite alright most of the time. Some whinging when weapons get the stick is to be expected but it's not insufferable.
YouTube videos are generally well considered, Twitch streamers seem to mostly behave, and the in game community has been one of the most pleasant I've been a part of in a loooong while.
Maybe I'm in too deep, or maybe I just don't see it, but none of the antics by the community at large have been excessive, or unwarranted, especially when compared to some other (mainly competitive) gaming communities.
To answer the question in the title, it won't change anything. The same shenanigans played out here as they always do over the slightest inconvenience. It just happened that this was a significant, international inconvenience. It worked this time because Sony also knew they royally fucked up with the plan, but Arrowhead also dropped the ball (by self-admission) by not making it absolutely clear that this was going to happen. This left the players justifiably mad.
I also don't think Sony will have any qualms next time around requiring players to sign up, they'll just clarify the language beforehand and not grant an exception to avoid a situation where the developer, for some reason, doesn't warn the playerbase about a coming requirement.
There's a lot of confusion going around this topic. I think that something a lot of people missed is that this whole mess is mostly on the CEO of Arrowhead.
He was well aware of the PSN requirement before launch and made the call to temporary disable it and, let be honest, hide it from Steam players.
Sony here were upfront and really did nothing wrong, they just stuck to the original agreement, infact the fact they allowed the game to slip past the PSN requirement after the fact seems like a pretty good guy Sony move.
Maybe it was a genuine mistake on the CEO's part. But it was a brilliant strategic decision on his part because he got a hell of a lot more people playing the game at launch than he would if they had PSN back then.
I mean, selling the game in countries where you can't sign up for the PSN was extremely not upfront if this was the original plan.
If we're being frank:
To add a tiny cherry on top, people were even claiming Steam supported more regions than Microsoft. Well, quick scan (and realizing than an Xbox account is a microsoft account) shows how misguided that notion is.
I promise you the number of "recognized countries" fluctuates a bit more than one solid number, but regardless I never claimed there were 190 countries not supported personally so I feel no need to support that claim. The number I've seen in news coverage is 170 countries/territories/regions, fwiw.
The fact that there were countries where the game was being sold on Steam but where the PSN isn't available is undeniable, as Valve themselves blocked the game from being sold in those countries after the backlash. And I honestly don't give a shit about what percentage of the playerbase would have come from those countries. Selling a game to people and then making it impossible for them to play it because they don't have the ability to make a PSN account in their country fucking sucks regardless of whether they're a tiny fraction of your players or not. The idea that doing this is fine because the countries without access to PSN accounts are small or poor and thus less likely to make up a large portion of the playerbase is kinda gross af.
And I have no idea why Microsoft is relevant, since the required account is a PSN account, which has nothing to do with Microsoft or Xbox.
This is less about you and more about the general discourse around the game over the weekend. A
lie"slight exaggeration" can travel the world before the truth has a chance to put on its shoes and all that. I just think the hypocrisy behind the people accusing Sony of lying is more poignant when these kinds of issues happen in the very community .Valve doesn't support all regions either, that's simply how business works. You can't please everyone. I can assure you that "official" support is more of a CYA situation rather than an excuse to ban.
So I think your reply is s a bit of a dishonest interpretation, both in how you chose to interpret this part of my comment, and the implication that I was accusing you of saying any of the stuff personally.
And if you aren't going to support a region, you should not sell the game in that region. If a PSN account was required from the get-go, it was sketchy for the game to ever be sold in regions in which a PSN account is not available. This is what I originally said in my comment, which was just refuting the idea that Sony was "upfront" about everything since the release.
I don't play Helldivers 2 and don't ever plan on it, so I really only care about this from a consumer protection standpoint. You're the one who brought up how small the percentage of players living in these regions might be, and my point was that that's entirely irrelevant and it's gross to even consider that percentage when talking about something that's obviously misleading to do when selling a game on a storefront that allows you to limit which regions you sell the game in. Even if it affects a tiny tiny tiny percentage, it's still scummy to those consumers. Valve did the right thing by removing the game from Steam in those regions in response to the announcement.
If you want to have a discussion about the general discourse around the game that involves referring to "people in the community lying" by saying an exaggerated version of the true thing I said in my comment, that's fine, but consider that doing so directly in response to my comment carries the implication that you believe my comment is part of that in some way. I am not being dishonest in reading a reply to my comment as a reply to my comment.
Your comment prompted parts of that discourse, which is why I replied.
Specifically:
The talk about being "upfront" wasn't really an interesting part of what I wanted to talk about. It's a company, companies are rarely upfront (be it via malice
It does not mean you are all people, however. That's the power of a threaded discussion which is why I like this format; you can expand upon a topic and branch it out without derailing the entire classical forum, or getting lost in a web of wisps like Twitter.
I'll be brutally honest here:
This is an easy problem with a fix built-in: get a refund and move on in life. Its already half the price of a AAA game, barring regional pricing. You are not going to be unable to pay rent because 3 months later you were betrayed by a video game. Again, have some life perspective and stop centralizing all your energy around video games. A single video game at that. My life professionally revolves around video games and I don't do that. They are just toys (yes, the absolute worst thing to say in a gaming forum).
This discussion as a whole about "consumer protection" falls completely tone deaf on me as a dev when the very next day I see talented people get kicked out by a trillionaire company. But all the discussion in the gaming sphere is "well they are a business, they gotta make hard choices", and even detractors are like "yeah, they should backtrack like Sony", already forgetting the drama. Yeah, losing your job is comparable to being inconvenienced by playing a game made by those devs and you can just complain on the internet to get them re-hired.
So yes, call me gross if you want. Maybe I'm grosser than you think, because I'm feeling particularly bitter at all gamers right now, not just the ones in underserved areas. They pretend to support us until the slightest roadbump comes up and then we're fed to the wolves. We somehow make a good game, our reward is being fired by corporations, and we can't even get the smallest gesture from the cusomers we served. My goodwill from this drained months ago, and the discourse is entirely to blame.
We don't get to just turn on a VPN and go around getting a new job, Pirating doesn't save us from harassment. Y'all have tools to fight corporations, we don't. Use them next time when (not if) you lose.
The developers of Helldivers 2 in question publicly supported the review bombing in protest of this decision -- the game's associate community manager straight-up told fans to express their displeasure via reviews and refunds in their Discord server -- so your anger about harassment seems misplaced in this particular instance. I was a woman during Gamergate so I'm not denying harassment is a big problem in the gaming space, especially among these 'gamer bro' types, but this doesn't seem to be an example where that's been a particularly big problem. In fact, the "community" seemed remarkably good at focusing on reviews and refunds in this instance, which I suspect is a large part of why they actually accomplished anything.
I'm sorry for the shit you're apparently going through at work, but that's really not something my comments have remotely been related to. If you want to talk about wider scale issues with gamers and harassment and their affects on those working in the gaming industry, it would probably be more effective to start a new topic or at least a new thread rather than ranting in response to someone talking about a barely related issue in a situation that is not a good example of what you're talking about.
The community manager in question has paid for their efforts dearly and has been fired. He mentioned knowing speaking out against your publisher was risky and he got canned.
From what I've heard, Spitz was already on shaky ground and wasn't too well liked due to being unprofessional. When this first went down, he initially responded... Pretty badly, as shown in this screenshot on reddit.
Text for those who don't want to open reddit:
Yeah. Implying that most of the complaints are just due to people being lazy is pretty unprofessional on its own. Then there's the fact that he clearly made that statement without knowing anything about the situation, which is even worse. He backtracked pretty fast of course, but the fact he thought that was appropriate to say at all was pretty bad and unprofessional.
It's odd because he 180'd on that specific statement by straight up recommending refunding and negatively reviewing. I wonder what happened in between.
He got told the basic details of the situation, and likely got dressed down for that. While encouraging the review bomb probably played a big role in his getting fired, he showed a serious lack of professional behavior. A community manager is one of the faces of a company, so the fact he didn't even bother to look at the actual complaints before insulting players for being lazy...
It's just not a good image. Really can't get over that he didn't even look into the complaints. It feels like he just saw the headlines "Helldivers 2 players angry over needing PSN accounts" on his feed and stopped there without even opening any articles or discussions. That's like the most basic part of the job.
Oh wow this is good context, thanks for providing.
I don't think it works like this. According to the Xbox network wiki page, only 42 countries are officially supported.
It sounds like people from unsupported countries would be able to log in, but not pay for anything.
This is where the whole country/region distinction gets muddy. And I'm not 100% sure if that page Wiki links to is updated.
if you go to Xbox.com, you see there are up to 90 supported "country/regions" or so. availability will vary by hardware, but Xbox Game Pass is available everywhere except China, so 89 regions by my count. Suppoort for the Xbox console is scattered, but it makes sense on account of Xbox not being sold in all supported regions.
I was unable to find an equivalent chart for Steam.
Yeah, it really depends on the definition used as their Xbox console support seems to be really sparse, even more so than the PSN support, whereas PC support looks a bit better.
The closest thing seem to be their traffic stats. Funnily enough, until about 2018 they have claimed to support 237 countries.
Not gonna speak for who sets up the store page. Maybe Sony as the publishers control that, maybe it's the developers, but yeah I do agree that's super nasty and it's my biggest issue with the whole thing.
According to the CEO of Arrowhead, Sony decides where it sells.
It's not really the dev's job to figure out what the publisher wants to do long term, they are probably about as aware of the long term strategy of Sony as you and me. And if we're being honest, when a company sees a lot of money, they make a lot of exceptions, especially to blockers.
So I think the blame still mostly lies in Sony's court. They chased raw numbers and should have simply set this up properly if this was important to them long term. Or at least bore the inevitable controversy if it's really important. The decisions shows they still are in "short term" mode.
ehh, we've seen how other protests lasted with much more historically "bad" companies, PR-wise. If it was a requirement at launch, I'd be surprised if less than 90% of the current playerbase played. Vietnam was not going to make or break the virality of such an unexpectedly huge release.
I think the big problem here wasn't the PSN requirement, but the fact that Sony listed the game in regions where PSN is unavailable, leaving players who bought the game in those regions with an unusable product. That was outside Arrowhead's control, as Sony are the ones who control the Steam listings.
If PSN was available globally, or the game was never listed in those countries to begin with, this never would have blown up. People are used to creating accounts to play games online.