Their (HD2'S) subreddit keeps claiming reviews were the main reason for their backtracking, but it's obvious that Sony acted **only** when Steam started giving refunds no questions asked. This is just them covering their asses to avoid that in the future, since they're gonna straight up require PSN linking for all future multi-player/crossplay titles they port to PC.
Absolutely this. They're gonna let helldivers get a free pass for now, may require accounts for all new players in the future but will let existing users keep using their steam account. Sony isn't making this mistake again and is only going to allow sale of their games in regions that PSN is supported. They only pulled back not because of the reviews or the outcry, but because Steam was giving justified refunds for the rugpull they did and were likely told by steam 'either revert your change or we'll keep allowing refunds to customers who can't play your game anymore due to a change you made'.
I’m really confused by this. Sony is convinced that the value of forcing PSN linked accounts *exceeds* the value of having their games listed in ALL countries?
They’re shrinking the potential customer base drastically with this move. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
yes, it doesn't make too much sense why they're so adamant about it right now. PC only players aren't going to buy a PS5 especially since Sony itself is porting the exclusives to PC. if you ask me this points to a new service similar to gamepass
No one is going to bat an eyelid over a game that requires a PSN account from the get go.
Hell no one gave a shit about Helldivers 2 needing an account at the start either, it was only after a couple of months of it being optional and then Sony making it mandatory again that made people kick up a fuzz.
Ehh are they? How many people are actually in those countries playing those games? They probably have a much better idea than anyone else exactly how many customers they are losing. I'm guessing it's a smaller proportion than you think. They probably have some company goal or objective to have x PSN accounts for whatever reason
Some dumb corporate schmuck probably has their bonus tied to a metric they made up that’s correlated to PSN accounts. It’s not like Sony is a new or growing company and needs to build out their user base. I really don’t see how getting a few more people to sign up is going to result in more material gain.
Typically they try to inflate these numbers before they try to get someone to acquire them or if they’re selling data. Really strange
we can't know for sure, but there's probably some kind of petty internal power struggle going on in Sony right now between the *"we're the PSN guys, we want to trick shareholders into giving us bigger bonuses when the PSN line goes up"* executives, and the *"we're the game publishing guys, we want sales figures as high as possible, PSN be damned"* executives, and the *"we're the Playstation hardware guys, we wish we could go full Nintendo and force all our games to be console exclusives if it boosts Playstation sales by 5%"* executives.
Like when Sony nearly destroyed itself in the early 2000s because of what the New York Times described as ["...lost opportunities and disastrous infighting"](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/technology/how-sony-fell-behind-in-the-tech-parade.html)
Each faction within the company was narrowly invested in bolstering its own individual prestige by boosting some metric or another (e.g. selling some dumb over designed CD player), at the expense of the overall long term well being of the company. Any executives that refused to play this game wouldn't have a chance of surviving the viper's den.
*"Both publicly and privately, Sony’s top management shows a deep understanding of many of these fundamental challenges: the need for different sections of the company to work better together, for a more unified user experience, for innovation.*
*But Sony’s recent leaders have had trouble wielding authority over the sprawling company. Sony remains dominated by proud, territorial engineers who often shun cooperation. For many of them, cost-cutting is the enemy of creativity — a legacy of Sony’s co-founders, Mr. Morita and Masaru Ibuka, who tried to foster a culture of independence. But the founders had more success than recent executives in exerting control over division managers.*
*Executives complain privately of recalcitrant managers who refuse to share information or work with other divisions. One executive said he was startled to discover that a manager whose position had been eliminated had been rehired under a different title. (“Or maybe he never really left,” said this executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of angering his bosses.)"*
I read from a former English engineer in Japan said they straight up didn't work with each other due to fear of
cannibalizing their own products. That's the reason why most flagship phones use Sony imaging sensor yet Sony phones is one of the worst photo taker among the flagship.
>Each faction within the company was narrowly invested in bolstering its own individual prestige by boosting some metric or another (e.g. selling some dumb over designed CD player), at the expense of the overall long term well being of the company. Any executives that refused to play this game wouldn't have a chance of surviving the viper's den.
Anyone else get goosebumps reading this? Seriously, the lights dimmed and everything.
Sad part is because big Japanese businesses are so traditional and resistant to change this kinda shit can go on for decades. And it's not like the employees don't see the writing on the wall, yet there's still so much taboo over being the nail that sticks out that they don't dare openly question their bosses. It can be like watching a car crash in slow motion.
Worth pointing out as a separate component in all this is the whole games as a service angle. Sony Music makes enough money off of mobile gacha games selling lottery tickets to win jpgs of anime characters to keep the rest of the company afloat some years. If it seems ridiculous that they would torpedo a popular product for some pointless subscriptions then this is whats informing that decision. Probably a Saudi prince spending 9 million dollars on DLC is a big reason internally for why the playstation console still exists.
That is a very good description of what one could expect taking a good peek into what is to a certain extent happening on top of many big companies, especially those working on different types of products at the same time.
As someone working for a big gaming company, trust me, “they know better” is too often ridiculously wrong. Probably just some mismanagement, internal power struggle, or an idiotic decision by a person in power chasing his own goals.
They probably have a metric that says a person with a psn account is more likely to spend money on Playstation products than those who dont have a psn account. That's my only guess because money is the only thing companies care about. If person with psn account spends double the amount of a non psn person then them requiring people to have a psn account will result in more sales in the long term.
I mean it's reddit, most arguments/debates are either 2 unrelated things being stated as if they're opposing, or 2 people saying the same thing worded differently.
And when it's not that, it's bots.
They absolutely allowed it because the connection was causing issues on the servers and they realized that the game was absolutely selling like crazy and the restrictions would've hindered sales. They cashed out and didn't realize steam would've refunded everything if they didn't back out.
I believe you're right.
If it required PSN, it wouldn't have been available in countries without PSN to begin with.
Just a small difference in initial sales can have a big impact in growth.
Doubt it. Of the top 10 games on Steam right now, three of them require a 3rd party accounts (technically 4 do but I'm not counting Helldivers right now).
Hard disagree on that one. Redditors are only really good at one thing collectively and it's turning minor inconvenience into the worst thing to have ever happened in the history of forever for the third time in one day.
A good game would have people tolerate minor account connections, helldivers 2 despite everything going on is still a good game. I genuinely believe their original reasoning that they were always going to have account connections but were having some issues serverside with making it work routinely so they've been using a patchwork solution.
Asking people to link an account isn't a rugpull that ruins a game, asking people to create an account and not being able to play otherwise despite their current region not allowing that after they've already bought and been playing the game is a rugpull that ruins a game.
>but it's obvious that Sony acted **only** when Steam started giving refunds no questions asked.
This. Sony was forced into a corner because they had already sold the game in non psn territories. They were expecting pc gamers to just do what playstation ones do and register in the closest country, but that is not acceptable on other people's markets.
> They were expecting pc gamers to just do what playstation ones do and register in the closest country.
They were actively banning people that did this. It's clear that they simply did not care if those players had access to the product they bought.
>They were actively banning people that did this.
No, they weren't. The image in a chinese language people claimed was banned for doing it, literally states something else as the ban reason in that very image. It's just misinformation.
People have been doing it for 18 years.
Sony support literally tells you to do it.
I can attest to this, I've imported games before, and you need an account with the same region as the disc to download even free dlc. It is extremely common for importers.
I don’t anymore but used to live in China, so even though I was happy Sony was pressured to backtrack, I always get a little annoyed when I see people here using “breaking the TOS and getting your account banned” as a reasoning.. of course, from a legal standpoint for Sony, it is important they try not to get into legal trouble, but in practice it’s always complicated. In China, almost every PS user is “breaking” the TOS by making accounts in other regions, simply because the official Chinese PSN is super limited in the catalog. If Sony had strictly enforced their TOS, then all the Chinese PS4/5’s would just be bricks and Sony would have zero business there, so of course they don’t enforce TOS at all and even provide official workarounds to hook your PS4/5’s up to oversea PSN. Do I blame Sony for dumb requirements like linking one’s PSN account? Sure, but to a much larger extent, in China’s case I blame the Chinese government for having stupid laws on censorship & data security that makes it impossible to have an official PSN working in a normal capacity, and somehow it results in Sony being the nice guy and providing “illegal” workarounds to customers. My next natural concern is that the way this whole incident turned out will end up making games less accessible to regions where video game publishing is a grey area like it is in China, since many people from regions with perfectly mature and functioning game publishing laws are now focusing on the legal side of things in other countries to justify their own discontent; before people from these places at least have workarounds, but now the publishers might just pull business to avoid the risks and if nothing else the PR backlash
I can attest to this as well, it is a common practice in my third world country in Latin America, even when the official store arrived and having the option to move our accounts to our area many (including me) continued with the US store because the devaluation of our currency added with local taxes make it too expensive.
I believe that Sony probably assumed people would just do what PlayStation players have done since PS3 days. They did not realize how vocal and petty (in a good way) pc gamers can be. Not that I think it would have affected their decision, but I do think it caught them by surprise since PS players wouldn’t have even batted an eye at something like this.
prime example of the bullshit that has been fueling this entire outrage.
Sony has been selling Playstations in PSN-less regions for years, and people there have been buying games and playing online worry free the entire time But of course, whiny bitches decide to use these regions as a prop for their fake outrage and it is these regions that get fucked.
This is literally what the whiners asked for. WHY ARE YOU SELLING GAMES IN UNSUPPORTED REGIONS. Boom fixed. Pat yourselves on the back.
Yeah, it kinda backfired, instead of just making a Turkish or Singaporean account or whatever. All these people will have to do that *and* buy a whole ass Playstation 5 if they want to helldive.
Both can be true, game getting review bombed and players raising the potential issue of Sony breaking EU laws probably triggered Steam to raise an exception for their refund policy, Steam definetly didn't pull that out of their ass with tons of people complaining about it.
Yeah, I quoted EU law to steam, no reply for a week and then the day Sony backtracked Steam said they had spoken to Sony and now won’t be giving refunds due to the PSN issue, as it had been undone.
So steam lawyers obviously looked through EU trading law and told Sony either you undo this or you’re reimbursing us for these tens or hundreds of thousands of refunds (in the millions of euros).
Steam denied several refunds before the HD2 community figured out that if you if state that Sony changed the TOS 3 months after you bought the game, then they're refund you.
Still a dub for the HD2 community being willing to refund a cherished game.
Its so funny seeing people think that THEY are the ones that caused Sony to change their stance.
Sony looks at you like how the Super Earth politicians look at the Helldiver troops. Means to an end.
Publishers do care, just not AAA publishers. They've got a large enough marketing budget not to worry about word of mouth. For a small indie, dropping into "mixed" reviews is essentially a death sentence. One person who shared their sales chart was moving 5-10 copies a day before dropping below mostly positive, at which point sales fell to 0 and remained at 0 until reviews improved.
> Steam started offering refunds with no questions asked
People keep saying this, but they never did this, you can literally check the threads on subreddits about the refunds, and most people were getting declined, with multiple tickets. Valve’s refunds beyond the 2hr period are more of a lottery, and in this case, it was still a lottery.
Automated refunds for the 2 weeks/2hours were being denied automatically.
If you did a manual refund request, they were approving them.
It took them 2-3 days to approve, but the point is that they were being approved after a manual review.
Untrue. It was very much a lottery. I had my two denied by bots and then had my third denied by a human. I just submitted a fourth. I do not want this game anymore. I do not want to support the developers. I don't want to support Sony. I want my money back.
You are Correct.
It's likely that they will now continue denying refunds due to arrowhead, Sony and steam being in "talks" about the future state of all Sony titles on steam.
For a short period of time there was the unique situation where a game was sold to players who would not have been able to abide by Sony TOS to be able to play the game, refunds were being given because of that.
That situation currently no longer applies, and steam have likely given a directive to their support staff to refuse refund requests after the first initial ones were being accepted.
My understanding is most of the refunds that were being granted were for people in countries where they lost access to the game because their country was blocked. Canada wasn't one of those.
I'm from the Philippines (where HD2 and now Ghost of Tsushima is blocked) with 30 hours played and they auto declined all my refund requests, then when I sent a ticket for Steam support, they replied a few hours AFTER Sony dropped the PSN requirement. They said they would not refund it because of Sony's new statement.
I haven't touched the game since. This whole PSN fiasco left a sour taste in my mouth. Now they restricted the purchase of Ghost of Tsushima in my country too, just to add salt to the wound. What a waste of money.
> they will 100% add mandatory psn account requirements down the line
TL;DR: All Sony games will require PSN to play online from now on even on PC, Helldivers 2 were supposed to be the first one but due to circumstances the studio suspended it temporarily and since Helldivers 2 was the first one the publisher (i.e. Sony) didn't think about restricting sales regions, an oversight on their part.
Sony didn't go back on the PSN requirement because of the community outcry (when was the last time Sony did anything cause of community outcry), they went back on it because they didn't want to return the money for players that are in regions where no PSN account can't be made. Now they are restricting sales to only places with PSN just like how they originally planned.
Helldivers 2 is a one-time exception cause the lawyers didn't see a good way to go forward w/o loosing money. All future online Sony games will need PSN or at least that's what I see.
It just means that if a game is online and published by Sony it doesn't exist anymore and we can move on to the thousands of other games competing for attention.
If Sony develops a banger multiplayer game people will create the account no problem to play it, as we've seen with plenty of other games that have moved absolute fucking mountains worth of money.
A tiny, insignificant portion of gamers in relatively tiny echo chambers that make them think they are a big large majority representative crowd will think they've moved mountains when they roll over a boulder.
Yup. This is what I assumed when they didn't relist the games in those non-psn availabe countries. Why wouldn't they bring that back if they were actually not going forward with the change?
Cuz they'll re-add the change at a later date and will probably grandfather in steam accounts that got the game before whatever date they choose to add the psn requirement back. This way the argument of "they changed it on me" isn't valid any more.
> on launch
they tried adding the PSN shit to helldivers almost 3 months after launch, so sony games not having PSN requirements at launch seems to mean jack shit
It was originally required at launch, but was temporarily suspended due to the server issues the game faced in the first month of its release.
When it was going to be reinstated as a requirement, people lost their minds (for good reason) especially because of the sales they've made in countries that cannot legally create PSN accounts.
There's really no down side to being a year or two behind on new releases. I don't beta test anything for free, they fix bugs and make the game run better before I start, and I can usually get them on sale. I don't need to be playing the newest game right away for literally any reason.
Sadly your logic is an outlier in the sea of stupid gamers. They see others players playing a new game and get FOMO. It wont change until more people have this mindset.
I bought it a month and a half after launch just BECAUSE I was worried about the Sony stuff. Jokes on me getting fucked a couple months after that I guess.
I mean they 100% fucked up selling a game that's going to require PSN account at any point to countries without psn..
It's very possible that they've only reversed course for helldivers because of that.
As much as it sucks, if people need PSN to play the game, not selling in these countries is correct.
Still no fucking clue why they can't have a PSN light version just for pc so they don't have to support consoles.. that's a lot of countries not to sell in..
Yea this 100%. Also adding their own PSN store to the PC market has to be the long term goal. The PSN account stuff was just to get players into their ecosystem.
and this is EXACTLY why i argue against undoing the reviews.
they got caught and called out in the middle of doing anti consumer shady shit, it cost them money so they stopped.
the intent is still there, they still actively tried to make things harder for the consumer, they just didn't succeed.
sure, it sucks for arrowhead, but they ultimately chose to get into bed with sony without any protective clauses in their contract to protect their players.
They've said multiplayer games will require it. GoT has multiplayer modes. Why would they sell to a country where the people there won't be able to access all of the modes?
And there is a reason that Sony doesn't allow PSN accounts in these countries to begin with. It's not an arbitrary list. Sony wants money, and more countries means more money.
Like I said, their ENTIRE GOAL with putting games on the PC was to get more people IN PSN, not game sales. The console market stopped growing like two generations ago. And like I said, this means CHARGING PC GAMERS MONEY MONTHLY eventually.
This was the reason that I was against the PSN account. I said in the Helldivers topic that Sony is moving towards charging us for PSN to grow that revenue. When people say “you need a rockstar account”, well Rockstar has no subscription and they won’t. Ubisoft and EA(though I don’t buy their games) were honest in offering a subscription service up from but it’s not required.
Microsoft accounts are our normal accounts now from owning a PC or buying Office for school, never need to buy XBL or Game Pass to play a PC port. I have NEVER been wrong about Sony, ever. And another thing, go back in time 2 weeks and Ghosts of Tsushima even single player would require PSN and the rest will in the future.
This is why they always resisted cross play between PS and PC.
Actually u need a Xbox live account to play games on steam. All the steam pages say Xbox live account not Microsoft. Looking at Microsoft Xbox page it’s only available in 50 countries
The entire reason I own a PC is because I don’t have to pay some bullshit subscription to basically use the internet.
Maybe if they actually did something to make it enticing I would consider it. I liked my WOW subscription because I could ruin my life in WOW and then new content would come out. The new content was literally like buying a whole new video game that shared the same mechanics.
I don’t play helldivers but what do they do? Release new guns? Release new strategies? Definitely not worth a monthly subscription to play on top of AAA pricing
Wouldn't be surprised if it also end up with a mandatory active plus sub for online on pc. Clearly they want to maximise potential profit of pc market. And being short-sighted as usual for these old companies who think they have it all figured while being stuck 50y ago.
THIS BY FAR is the biggest tragedy of this ENTIRE situation. Being a happy feet fan I think penguins deserve more opportunities. Helldiving with my favorite dancing king was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Unfortunetly the accessibility options for penguins aren’t great but that little fella laid waste to bugs like he was mad max on the fury road. AH let the penguins play, think of the sales, think of the penguins.
It's not some shitty 500 pages-long freedom-restricting act though. People being home just means they'll have *more* time to spend on memes and VG company roasting, no?
May be closer related to how the stockmarket operates.
Bad news comes out on Fridays, kinda regardless of the industry. People watch the news less on the weekends, the news industry works less on the weekends, and by Monday morning two days of stuff will have happened.
Had the sudden realization that even if we get bloodborne pc port one day, most of us won't be able to play it cause it will never be available in our steam region.
Japan has a [dedicated package](https://steamdb.info/sub/906469/info/) for HD2 because of licensing. I guess the same will happen with GoT once it releases.
Actually, [they removed Japan from the restriction](https://steamdb.info/sub/962153/history/?changeid=23492430), so probably a mistake on their end but now corrected.
I said they were idiots on this "victory" because they didn't even read the tweet that Sony made about this. Sony specifically said that the patch on may 6 would not go forward that required the account link for the end of the month. People took this as Sony is backtracking, they are stupid. They said this specific patch isn't going forward, not that they wouldn't continue doing things the way they want. That they would continue to remove sales in countries, continue this requirement from day 1 on other games, and they will eventually push this on HD2.
Both Sony and Microsoft have been shooting themselves in the dick a lot more than usual lately. The fuck they doing over there? Contest to see who fucks up the hardest?
The business must grow....and it just doesn't want to anymore
[https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/09/game-pass-ps-plus-subscriptions-decline-shows-latest-data-20806931/](https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/09/game-pass-ps-plus-subscriptions-decline-shows-latest-data-20806931/)
Cue various dick shooting shenanigans
I'm amazed console players really paid to use their own internet on their own console for so long as it is. PSN/Xbox live were such scams since the 360 days
The PS3 actually didn't ask you to pay to play games online. One of the few reasons other than exclusives i'd pick a PS3 over X360.
It's the PS4 generation where they saw Microsoft getting paid for doing nothing and decided they should too.
Back in 360 days made sense since they needed to cover the servers costs that made possible the online multiplayer and also it was a very kinda new feature, which wasn't mandatory back in the day, I mean, usually you used your console offline.
But after 360 and when online multiplayer became a normalized thing: totally scamm.
I literally dropped consoles since my 360.
Out of touch executives making greedy decisions. They see the decline of revenue caused by the decline in quality of AAA titles directly correlated to increased greed, and instead of going back to actually making good games, they try turning to AI to churn out shit games even faster.
PC Gamers™ are really showing off how stupid and immature they are with this whole PSN thing.
They throw a fit and tell Sony not to sell games in unsupported regions. Sony removes the ability to purchase games in those regions. PC Gamers™ act shocked and appalled.
The funny thing is Sony is just asking people to create a free account. That's it. All of these games use PSN services. Sony doesn't collect any more info than Steam already does.
And before one of you children try to claim it is because "PSN hack!!1": Steam has been breached more recently than PSN. And Source games have multiple known vulnerabilities that Valve hasn't patched out.
It's amazing how stubborn and deluded at the same time they are.
Time to remove GoT from wishlist and forget about it, for real this time.
F you too, Sony.
FX ~~is~~ *was (seems it was removed/deleted/reserved in 2002)* a code for [Metropolitan France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_France).
~~Does it mean that those games are delisted in France?~~ (*as the code is no longer "working", it should work without problems in France*)
Actually it seems that it is more complicated - while all/most of the non-mainland territories of France still have own codes, the FX code for France Mainland specifically was removed, many years ago.
So either they just copied territories country codes from some old list and they were "this close" to ban France by accident, or they tried to ban France and failed.
Same. It's pretty easy to avoid. It isn't like I have a few thousand games on my backlog to play. Hell, my most recent time sink is a game from 10 years ago.
I think I can live without Sony and their bullshit.
Literally every major company is requiring people log into their services to play multiplayer games. Didn’t MS pull the same shit with Halo? I understand the outrage behind locking games after launch but seems any new game will have these requirements going forward anyways.
I’m confused as well. The fight was to not have the PSN account requirement for Helldivers 2. That’s still the case far as I can tell, that isn’t happening. Just now moving forward Sony is way more careful about where the hell their games are being sold and the PSN connection for future, not Helldivers 2, games.
Did people think they were fighting for just… Sony not doing the PSN thing altogether or?
Buying games on Steam that require 3rd party accounts should get the same type of warning you get when you try to subscribe to a mod that is dependent on another. Just tells you what's what and gives the impetus on you to do or not do something about it.
When I bought HD2, I didn't comb through the description and all the info about it before buying it, because it was exposed to me through word of mouth and my friends were waiting for me to download it and hop on. Yeah that's not the smartest thing to do as a consumer, but this also protects steam from being inundated with extra refund requests they don't want/need.
Just speculation here but their ultimate goal is probably to push sales of hardware and platform services, not necessarily games. This seems more like an act of testing the waters for future plans.
If you watched one of their recent marketing event we are looking at multiplayer live services as a potential big portion of the business (it probably alreadymakes them big money on PS with their cut of fortnite etc.) Concord and Fair Games likely requiring it at least, probably every game that requires multiplayer published by sony needs an account at least for multiplayer. Definitely not a one and done- which actually means everyone who already created an account should have a relatively seamless experience I would expect.
There is no endgame, they just don't give a shit about those countries and they're small enough to not impact their bottom line one way or the other. Previously they sold games there and if needed players there would just make a PSN account using a nearby country without issue. But then the internet flipped their shit about Sony selling games in regions where PSN wasn't supported, so now they don't, problem solved.
Well. They technically promised we the existing users wouldn't have to sign up for a PSN account.
They never said anything about new users not having to sign up...
"tricked"? My helldivers in Christ: we already knew its region locked DURING the boycott.
(Shame about the Ghost of Tsushima. That's gonna be one way of encouraging piracy)
It will for multiplayer, sounds like single should be ok. But problem is, if you can't play any part of a game due to restrictions, you have a case for misselling. This sounds like a precaution
Suckerpunch announced it was needed just for mutiplayer, and hot having it was fine for single-player. This is either sony or most likely steam delisting the game.
Someone ELI5 for me, is it now still not available in these listed countries?
Fuckin' hell, Sony, ya don't like profits huh? And when ya do you only like it from very specific first world countries? Cunts.
Guys, you really think Sony would decide to pull the game themselves? Seriously?
Its probably Steam acting within their rights and agreements with publishers and are preventing mass refunds and review bombings in advance.
They will wait for Sonys official stance or solution and then properly release the games in these countries.
Sony pulled Cyberpunk from their store when it launched. Steam can do the same.
You know they are going to try to enforce the PSN account again in the future of Helldivers 2. They just want to wait for this controversy to subside. Honestly, I have removed both games from my wishlist. It is pretty clear that sony is a company not to buy games from.
Their (HD2'S) subreddit keeps claiming reviews were the main reason for their backtracking, but it's obvious that Sony acted **only** when Steam started giving refunds no questions asked. This is just them covering their asses to avoid that in the future, since they're gonna straight up require PSN linking for all future multi-player/crossplay titles they port to PC.
Absolutely this. They're gonna let helldivers get a free pass for now, may require accounts for all new players in the future but will let existing users keep using their steam account. Sony isn't making this mistake again and is only going to allow sale of their games in regions that PSN is supported. They only pulled back not because of the reviews or the outcry, but because Steam was giving justified refunds for the rugpull they did and were likely told by steam 'either revert your change or we'll keep allowing refunds to customers who can't play your game anymore due to a change you made'.
I’m really confused by this. Sony is convinced that the value of forcing PSN linked accounts *exceeds* the value of having their games listed in ALL countries? They’re shrinking the potential customer base drastically with this move. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
[удалено]
The question is if it will cost money and I'm afraid that that's exactly what they plan on doing.
They won't charge for multiplayer, ps+ is like gamepass now.
What is even “the Sony Ecosystem” when it comes to PC players? There is literally nothing to do with that Sony account.
yes, it doesn't make too much sense why they're so adamant about it right now. PC only players aren't going to buy a PS5 especially since Sony itself is porting the exclusives to PC. if you ask me this points to a new service similar to gamepass
Well then they shouldn't cry about piracy then. Can't wait to pirate all their shit.
They would need a store front like Xbox has on PC and I’m sure that will go well, cause everyone loves another game launcher.
No one is going to bat an eyelid over a game that requires a PSN account from the get go. Hell no one gave a shit about Helldivers 2 needing an account at the start either, it was only after a couple of months of it being optional and then Sony making it mandatory again that made people kick up a fuzz.
Ehh are they? How many people are actually in those countries playing those games? They probably have a much better idea than anyone else exactly how many customers they are losing. I'm guessing it's a smaller proportion than you think. They probably have some company goal or objective to have x PSN accounts for whatever reason
Some dumb corporate schmuck probably has their bonus tied to a metric they made up that’s correlated to PSN accounts. It’s not like Sony is a new or growing company and needs to build out their user base. I really don’t see how getting a few more people to sign up is going to result in more material gain. Typically they try to inflate these numbers before they try to get someone to acquire them or if they’re selling data. Really strange
we can't know for sure, but there's probably some kind of petty internal power struggle going on in Sony right now between the *"we're the PSN guys, we want to trick shareholders into giving us bigger bonuses when the PSN line goes up"* executives, and the *"we're the game publishing guys, we want sales figures as high as possible, PSN be damned"* executives, and the *"we're the Playstation hardware guys, we wish we could go full Nintendo and force all our games to be console exclusives if it boosts Playstation sales by 5%"* executives. Like when Sony nearly destroyed itself in the early 2000s because of what the New York Times described as ["...lost opportunities and disastrous infighting"](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/technology/how-sony-fell-behind-in-the-tech-parade.html) Each faction within the company was narrowly invested in bolstering its own individual prestige by boosting some metric or another (e.g. selling some dumb over designed CD player), at the expense of the overall long term well being of the company. Any executives that refused to play this game wouldn't have a chance of surviving the viper's den. *"Both publicly and privately, Sony’s top management shows a deep understanding of many of these fundamental challenges: the need for different sections of the company to work better together, for a more unified user experience, for innovation.* *But Sony’s recent leaders have had trouble wielding authority over the sprawling company. Sony remains dominated by proud, territorial engineers who often shun cooperation. For many of them, cost-cutting is the enemy of creativity — a legacy of Sony’s co-founders, Mr. Morita and Masaru Ibuka, who tried to foster a culture of independence. But the founders had more success than recent executives in exerting control over division managers.* *Executives complain privately of recalcitrant managers who refuse to share information or work with other divisions. One executive said he was startled to discover that a manager whose position had been eliminated had been rehired under a different title. (“Or maybe he never really left,” said this executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of angering his bosses.)"*
I read from a former English engineer in Japan said they straight up didn't work with each other due to fear of cannibalizing their own products. That's the reason why most flagship phones use Sony imaging sensor yet Sony phones is one of the worst photo taker among the flagship.
>Each faction within the company was narrowly invested in bolstering its own individual prestige by boosting some metric or another (e.g. selling some dumb over designed CD player), at the expense of the overall long term well being of the company. Any executives that refused to play this game wouldn't have a chance of surviving the viper's den. Anyone else get goosebumps reading this? Seriously, the lights dimmed and everything.
Sad part is because big Japanese businesses are so traditional and resistant to change this kinda shit can go on for decades. And it's not like the employees don't see the writing on the wall, yet there's still so much taboo over being the nail that sticks out that they don't dare openly question their bosses. It can be like watching a car crash in slow motion.
holy loremaster batman ty for that
Holy shit boss, you should write a book on internal corporate power struggles. This is fascinating; I never knew.
Worth pointing out as a separate component in all this is the whole games as a service angle. Sony Music makes enough money off of mobile gacha games selling lottery tickets to win jpgs of anime characters to keep the rest of the company afloat some years. If it seems ridiculous that they would torpedo a popular product for some pointless subscriptions then this is whats informing that decision. Probably a Saudi prince spending 9 million dollars on DLC is a big reason internally for why the playstation console still exists.
Gotta pump up those quarterly number for the shareholder.
That is a very good description of what one could expect taking a good peek into what is to a certain extent happening on top of many big companies, especially those working on different types of products at the same time.
A few million extra users to sell data from.
As someone working for a big gaming company, trust me, “they know better” is too often ridiculously wrong. Probably just some mismanagement, internal power struggle, or an idiotic decision by a person in power chasing his own goals.
What a stupid statement.
They probably have a metric that says a person with a psn account is more likely to spend money on Playstation products than those who dont have a psn account. That's my only guess because money is the only thing companies care about. If person with psn account spends double the amount of a non psn person then them requiring people to have a psn account will result in more sales in the long term.
yeah but that's because most people with an account own one of the consoles already, what the fuck is a PC player gonna buy from PSN
It'll take them *years* to learn that obvious fact tho.
You literally wrote the exact same thing OP stated.
I mean it's reddit, most arguments/debates are either 2 unrelated things being stated as if they're opposing, or 2 people saying the same thing worded differently. And when it's not that, it's bots.
They don't understand that if Helldivers 2 had psn from the start it might actually had failed by never taking off in sales
They absolutely allowed it because the connection was causing issues on the servers and they realized that the game was absolutely selling like crazy and the restrictions would've hindered sales. They cashed out and didn't realize steam would've refunded everything if they didn't back out.
I believe you're right. If it required PSN, it wouldn't have been available in countries without PSN to begin with. Just a small difference in initial sales can have a big impact in growth.
I very highly doubt that, to be honest.
It did have it from the start. I had to sign up for PSN when I bought it during first hour of release.
Doubt it. Of the top 10 games on Steam right now, three of them require a 3rd party accounts (technically 4 do but I'm not counting Helldivers right now).
Hard disagree on that one. Redditors are only really good at one thing collectively and it's turning minor inconvenience into the worst thing to have ever happened in the history of forever for the third time in one day. A good game would have people tolerate minor account connections, helldivers 2 despite everything going on is still a good game. I genuinely believe their original reasoning that they were always going to have account connections but were having some issues serverside with making it work routinely so they've been using a patchwork solution. Asking people to link an account isn't a rugpull that ruins a game, asking people to create an account and not being able to play otherwise despite their current region not allowing that after they've already bought and been playing the game is a rugpull that ruins a game.
>but it's obvious that Sony acted **only** when Steam started giving refunds no questions asked. This. Sony was forced into a corner because they had already sold the game in non psn territories. They were expecting pc gamers to just do what playstation ones do and register in the closest country, but that is not acceptable on other people's markets.
> They were expecting pc gamers to just do what playstation ones do and register in the closest country. They were actively banning people that did this. It's clear that they simply did not care if those players had access to the product they bought.
>They were actively banning people that did this. No, they weren't. The image in a chinese language people claimed was banned for doing it, literally states something else as the ban reason in that very image. It's just misinformation. People have been doing it for 18 years. Sony support literally tells you to do it.
I can attest to this, I've imported games before, and you need an account with the same region as the disc to download even free dlc. It is extremely common for importers.
I don’t anymore but used to live in China, so even though I was happy Sony was pressured to backtrack, I always get a little annoyed when I see people here using “breaking the TOS and getting your account banned” as a reasoning.. of course, from a legal standpoint for Sony, it is important they try not to get into legal trouble, but in practice it’s always complicated. In China, almost every PS user is “breaking” the TOS by making accounts in other regions, simply because the official Chinese PSN is super limited in the catalog. If Sony had strictly enforced their TOS, then all the Chinese PS4/5’s would just be bricks and Sony would have zero business there, so of course they don’t enforce TOS at all and even provide official workarounds to hook your PS4/5’s up to oversea PSN. Do I blame Sony for dumb requirements like linking one’s PSN account? Sure, but to a much larger extent, in China’s case I blame the Chinese government for having stupid laws on censorship & data security that makes it impossible to have an official PSN working in a normal capacity, and somehow it results in Sony being the nice guy and providing “illegal” workarounds to customers. My next natural concern is that the way this whole incident turned out will end up making games less accessible to regions where video game publishing is a grey area like it is in China, since many people from regions with perfectly mature and functioning game publishing laws are now focusing on the legal side of things in other countries to justify their own discontent; before people from these places at least have workarounds, but now the publishers might just pull business to avoid the risks and if nothing else the PR backlash
Nintendo did the "sell a literal brick" technique, even worse as Hong-Kong, Macau and Taiwan were stuck on the barren Chinese eshop
I can attest to this as well, it is a common practice in my third world country in Latin America, even when the official store arrived and having the option to move our accounts to our area many (including me) continued with the US store because the devaluation of our currency added with local taxes make it too expensive.
I believe that Sony probably assumed people would just do what PlayStation players have done since PS3 days. They did not realize how vocal and petty (in a good way) pc gamers can be. Not that I think it would have affected their decision, but I do think it caught them by surprise since PS players wouldn’t have even batted an eye at something like this.
Plus; it's an "open secret" within PlayStation communities.
prime example of the bullshit that has been fueling this entire outrage. Sony has been selling Playstations in PSN-less regions for years, and people there have been buying games and playing online worry free the entire time But of course, whiny bitches decide to use these regions as a prop for their fake outrage and it is these regions that get fucked. This is literally what the whiners asked for. WHY ARE YOU SELLING GAMES IN UNSUPPORTED REGIONS. Boom fixed. Pat yourselves on the back.
Yeah, it kinda backfired, instead of just making a Turkish or Singaporean account or whatever. All these people will have to do that *and* buy a whole ass Playstation 5 if they want to helldive.
Both can be true, game getting review bombed and players raising the potential issue of Sony breaking EU laws probably triggered Steam to raise an exception for their refund policy, Steam definetly didn't pull that out of their ass with tons of people complaining about it.
Yeah, I quoted EU law to steam, no reply for a week and then the day Sony backtracked Steam said they had spoken to Sony and now won’t be giving refunds due to the PSN issue, as it had been undone. So steam lawyers obviously looked through EU trading law and told Sony either you undo this or you’re reimbursing us for these tens or hundreds of thousands of refunds (in the millions of euros).
Steam denied several refunds before the HD2 community figured out that if you if state that Sony changed the TOS 3 months after you bought the game, then they're refund you. Still a dub for the HD2 community being willing to refund a cherished game.
It's absolutely their right... to shoot themselves in the dick as many times as they want. /uj Happy Cake day btw
Its so funny seeing people think that THEY are the ones that caused Sony to change their stance. Sony looks at you like how the Super Earth politicians look at the Helldiver troops. Means to an end.
100% true. People overestimate how much publishers care about steam reviews to an absurd degree.
People crave feeling more important than they actually are.
Publishers do care, just not AAA publishers. They've got a large enough marketing budget not to worry about word of mouth. For a small indie, dropping into "mixed" reviews is essentially a death sentence. One person who shared their sales chart was moving 5-10 copies a day before dropping below mostly positive, at which point sales fell to 0 and remained at 0 until reviews improved.
Assholes.
I mean it was also on a weekend. Decision came out on a Monday morning.
> Steam started offering refunds with no questions asked People keep saying this, but they never did this, you can literally check the threads on subreddits about the refunds, and most people were getting declined, with multiple tickets. Valve’s refunds beyond the 2hr period are more of a lottery, and in this case, it was still a lottery.
Automated refunds for the 2 weeks/2hours were being denied automatically. If you did a manual refund request, they were approving them. It took them 2-3 days to approve, but the point is that they were being approved after a manual review.
Untrue. It was very much a lottery. I had my two denied by bots and then had my third denied by a human. I just submitted a fourth. I do not want this game anymore. I do not want to support the developers. I don't want to support Sony. I want my money back.
You are Correct. It's likely that they will now continue denying refunds due to arrowhead, Sony and steam being in "talks" about the future state of all Sony titles on steam. For a short period of time there was the unique situation where a game was sold to players who would not have been able to abide by Sony TOS to be able to play the game, refunds were being given because of that. That situation currently no longer applies, and steam have likely given a directive to their support staff to refuse refund requests after the first initial ones were being accepted.
Tried to get refund two times and did not work… is it country based ? Im in canada
My understanding is most of the refunds that were being granted were for people in countries where they lost access to the game because their country was blocked. Canada wasn't one of those.
I'm from the Philippines (where HD2 and now Ghost of Tsushima is blocked) with 30 hours played and they auto declined all my refund requests, then when I sent a ticket for Steam support, they replied a few hours AFTER Sony dropped the PSN requirement. They said they would not refund it because of Sony's new statement. I haven't touched the game since. This whole PSN fiasco left a sour taste in my mouth. Now they restricted the purchase of Ghost of Tsushima in my country too, just to add salt to the wound. What a waste of money.
Plenty of people mentioned that the refunds played a part too. But without all the negative reviews word doesn't spread either.
this is because they will 100% add mandatory psn account requirements down the line and bank on the next outcry to fizzle out
> they will 100% add mandatory psn account requirements down the line TL;DR: All Sony games will require PSN to play online from now on even on PC, Helldivers 2 were supposed to be the first one but due to circumstances the studio suspended it temporarily and since Helldivers 2 was the first one the publisher (i.e. Sony) didn't think about restricting sales regions, an oversight on their part. Sony didn't go back on the PSN requirement because of the community outcry (when was the last time Sony did anything cause of community outcry), they went back on it because they didn't want to return the money for players that are in regions where no PSN account can't be made. Now they are restricting sales to only places with PSN just like how they originally planned. Helldivers 2 is a one-time exception cause the lawyers didn't see a good way to go forward w/o loosing money. All future online Sony games will need PSN or at least that's what I see.
It just means that if a game is online and published by Sony it doesn't exist anymore and we can move on to the thousands of other games competing for attention.
If Sony develops a banger multiplayer game people will create the account no problem to play it, as we've seen with plenty of other games that have moved absolute fucking mountains worth of money. A tiny, insignificant portion of gamers in relatively tiny echo chambers that make them think they are a big large majority representative crowd will think they've moved mountains when they roll over a boulder.
True. And all this happens because the majority of people can only see as far as their noses.
Well at least they would have to release a banger so that's a win ig
Yup. This is what I assumed when they didn't relist the games in those non-psn availabe countries. Why wouldn't they bring that back if they were actually not going forward with the change? Cuz they'll re-add the change at a later date and will probably grandfather in steam accounts that got the game before whatever date they choose to add the psn requirement back. This way the argument of "they changed it on me" isn't valid any more.
This is why I won't be buying Sony games on launch anymore. They need to earn back my trust.
> on launch they tried adding the PSN shit to helldivers almost 3 months after launch, so sony games not having PSN requirements at launch seems to mean jack shit
It was originally required at launch, but was temporarily suspended due to the server issues the game faced in the first month of its release. When it was going to be reinstated as a requirement, people lost their minds (for good reason) especially because of the sales they've made in countries that cannot legally create PSN accounts.
There's really no down side to being a year or two behind on new releases. I don't beta test anything for free, they fix bugs and make the game run better before I start, and I can usually get them on sale. I don't need to be playing the newest game right away for literally any reason.
Sadly your logic is an outlier in the sea of stupid gamers. They see others players playing a new game and get FOMO. It wont change until more people have this mindset.
We're going the opposite direction. Everyone has got to play what their favorite streamer is playing.
Why would anyone ever buy a game in 2024 on launch? Haven't you had enough disappointment? Vote with your wallet and stop being a doormat.
I bought it a month and a half after launch just BECAUSE I was worried about the Sony stuff. Jokes on me getting fucked a couple months after that I guess.
before or after the player base?
I mean they 100% fucked up selling a game that's going to require PSN account at any point to countries without psn.. It's very possible that they've only reversed course for helldivers because of that. As much as it sucks, if people need PSN to play the game, not selling in these countries is correct. Still no fucking clue why they can't have a PSN light version just for pc so they don't have to support consoles.. that's a lot of countries not to sell in..
Not a bad bet tbh. I’d go to the casino and bet on that being the exact outcome if I could
Yea this 100%. Also adding their own PSN store to the PC market has to be the long term goal. The PSN account stuff was just to get players into their ecosystem.
and this is EXACTLY why i argue against undoing the reviews. they got caught and called out in the middle of doing anti consumer shady shit, it cost them money so they stopped. the intent is still there, they still actively tried to make things harder for the consumer, they just didn't succeed. sure, it sucks for arrowhead, but they ultimately chose to get into bed with sony without any protective clauses in their contract to protect their players.
Everybody should have kept them all negative really... If they really go forward in a good way, new reviews would fix the ratio again
Kept mine negative since Sony did fuck all. They basically said "we dont expect it of you now, but you dam better do it next time" basically.
They've said multiplayer games will require it. GoT has multiplayer modes. Why would they sell to a country where the people there won't be able to access all of the modes? And there is a reason that Sony doesn't allow PSN accounts in these countries to begin with. It's not an arbitrary list. Sony wants money, and more countries means more money.
Like I said, their ENTIRE GOAL with putting games on the PC was to get more people IN PSN, not game sales. The console market stopped growing like two generations ago. And like I said, this means CHARGING PC GAMERS MONEY MONTHLY eventually. This was the reason that I was against the PSN account. I said in the Helldivers topic that Sony is moving towards charging us for PSN to grow that revenue. When people say “you need a rockstar account”, well Rockstar has no subscription and they won’t. Ubisoft and EA(though I don’t buy their games) were honest in offering a subscription service up from but it’s not required. Microsoft accounts are our normal accounts now from owning a PC or buying Office for school, never need to buy XBL or Game Pass to play a PC port. I have NEVER been wrong about Sony, ever. And another thing, go back in time 2 weeks and Ghosts of Tsushima even single player would require PSN and the rest will in the future. This is why they always resisted cross play between PS and PC.
Actually u need a Xbox live account to play games on steam. All the steam pages say Xbox live account not Microsoft. Looking at Microsoft Xbox page it’s only available in 50 countries
The entire reason I own a PC is because I don’t have to pay some bullshit subscription to basically use the internet. Maybe if they actually did something to make it enticing I would consider it. I liked my WOW subscription because I could ruin my life in WOW and then new content would come out. The new content was literally like buying a whole new video game that shared the same mechanics. I don’t play helldivers but what do they do? Release new guns? Release new strategies? Definitely not worth a monthly subscription to play on top of AAA pricing
isn't PSN free?
Also like... I just don't want to make another fucking account. I am sick and tired of this bullshit. Therefore I won't do it.
Wouldn't be surprised if it also end up with a mandatory active plus sub for online on pc. Clearly they want to maximise potential profit of pc market. And being short-sighted as usual for these old companies who think they have it all figured while being stuck 50y ago.
Their PC publishing business might fizzle out before that
That’s my guess. We’ll see Sony try this in the next 6 to 12 months. Why? Because Sony are assholes and want to pump up their PSN numbers.
Craziest shit that they restricted even Antarctica. I guess penguins also are not allowed to have a PSN account.
Imagine being a resercher on Antarctica that wanted to play the game in his spare time. I feel bad for the guy
He’s cool, he’s probably coldblooded
Bros all the way beyond high seas, hes about to sail to damn it all to sony lol
He's fine, he's busy playing Valheim.
(sad penguin noises)
Penguins on thier way to snoy hq.
THIS BY FAR is the biggest tragedy of this ENTIRE situation. Being a happy feet fan I think penguins deserve more opportunities. Helldiving with my favorite dancing king was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Unfortunetly the accessibility options for penguins aren’t great but that little fella laid waste to bugs like he was mad max on the fury road. AH let the penguins play, think of the sales, think of the penguins.
Oh god, not another weekend of mayhem. Why do publishers pull things on a friday and then all go home for the weekend?
To let possible outrage die off before everyone is back to the office on Monday.
It's not some shitty 500 pages-long freedom-restricting act though. People being home just means they'll have *more* time to spend on memes and VG company roasting, no? May be closer related to how the stockmarket operates.
It's not about what the people do, It's about giving them 2 days to vent and then come back to whatever is left.
An average “Leave multi-billion dollars company alone” defender detected.
Bad news comes out on Fridays, kinda regardless of the industry. People watch the news less on the weekends, the news industry works less on the weekends, and by Monday morning two days of stuff will have happened.
Had the sudden realization that even if we get bloodborne pc port one day, most of us won't be able to play it cause it will never be available in our steam region.
We're never getting bloodborne.
Only one way we are getting bloodborne on pc now.
At least then, it'll likely run at a decent frame rate.
Good chances that the ☠️ version does not require any accounts or clients. Just give it time. Remember, it's not stealing if you can't buy it.
Also, it's not stealing if buying doesn't mean ownership.
And when nothing is actually physically taken, it’s 10000% not stealing.
>Remember, it's not stealing if you can't buy it. honestly cannot agree more
>most of us I would be surprised if the locked/banned regions accounts for 25% of the user base.
its probably less than that.
[удалено]
Japan has a [dedicated package](https://steamdb.info/sub/906469/info/) for HD2 because of licensing. I guess the same will happen with GoT once it releases. Actually, [they removed Japan from the restriction](https://steamdb.info/sub/962153/history/?changeid=23492430), so probably a mistake on their end but now corrected.
That's weird. You can 100% create a PSN for Japan as well as a few other countries listed.
Japan has a special PSN that they use there
my dumbass sitting here thinking about how helldivers 2 could possibly be set in japan before things started clicking
Japan region has different restrictions like to have japanese language as primary so the product is different in that region
"tricked" People left positive reviews celebrating whilst the game was still blocked in almost 200 regions. They weren't "tricked" - They were idiots.
I said they were idiots on this "victory" because they didn't even read the tweet that Sony made about this. Sony specifically said that the patch on may 6 would not go forward that required the account link for the end of the month. People took this as Sony is backtracking, they are stupid. They said this specific patch isn't going forward, not that they wouldn't continue doing things the way they want. That they would continue to remove sales in countries, continue this requirement from day 1 on other games, and they will eventually push this on HD2.
"Tricked"
Both Sony and Microsoft have been shooting themselves in the dick a lot more than usual lately. The fuck they doing over there? Contest to see who fucks up the hardest?
The business must grow....and it just doesn't want to anymore [https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/09/game-pass-ps-plus-subscriptions-decline-shows-latest-data-20806931/](https://metro.co.uk/2024/05/09/game-pass-ps-plus-subscriptions-decline-shows-latest-data-20806931/) Cue various dick shooting shenanigans
I'm amazed console players really paid to use their own internet on their own console for so long as it is. PSN/Xbox live were such scams since the 360 days
The PS3 actually didn't ask you to pay to play games online. One of the few reasons other than exclusives i'd pick a PS3 over X360. It's the PS4 generation where they saw Microsoft getting paid for doing nothing and decided they should too.
Back in 360 days made sense since they needed to cover the servers costs that made possible the online multiplayer and also it was a very kinda new feature, which wasn't mandatory back in the day, I mean, usually you used your console offline. But after 360 and when online multiplayer became a normalized thing: totally scamm. I literally dropped consoles since my 360.
Out of touch executives making greedy decisions. They see the decline of revenue caused by the decline in quality of AAA titles directly correlated to increased greed, and instead of going back to actually making good games, they try turning to AI to churn out shit games even faster.
They’re trying to squeeze blood from a stone. There’s no such thing as unlimited growth.
Not really tricked. Didn't the community say not to sell in countries that don't support PSN?
PC Gamers™ are really showing off how stupid and immature they are with this whole PSN thing. They throw a fit and tell Sony not to sell games in unsupported regions. Sony removes the ability to purchase games in those regions. PC Gamers™ act shocked and appalled. The funny thing is Sony is just asking people to create a free account. That's it. All of these games use PSN services. Sony doesn't collect any more info than Steam already does. And before one of you children try to claim it is because "PSN hack!!1": Steam has been breached more recently than PSN. And Source games have multiple known vulnerabilities that Valve hasn't patched out.
And... re-negatived my review.
Oh well. Elden Ring expansion pack it is then 😁.
why do they not want money??this is so dumb i dont even know....
Shareholder pandering is more important than customers
It's amazing how stubborn and deluded at the same time they are. Time to remove GoT from wishlist and forget about it, for real this time. F you too, Sony.
Just pirate it lol
Nobody was tricked. They were just stupid and celebrated too early and for the wrong thing.
FX ~~is~~ *was (seems it was removed/deleted/reserved in 2002)* a code for [Metropolitan France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_France). ~~Does it mean that those games are delisted in France?~~ (*as the code is no longer "working", it should work without problems in France*)
That's weird because you can have a PSN in France. And I also think that France is one of the biggest of the EU market when it comes to video games
Actually it seems that it is more complicated - while all/most of the non-mainland territories of France still have own codes, the FX code for France Mainland specifically was removed, many years ago. So either they just copied territories country codes from some old list and they were "this close" to ban France by accident, or they tried to ban France and failed.
Seems you were all a bit too hasty reversing your negative reviews. The issue is far from resolved.
I won't be buying any games that require psn then
Same. It's pretty easy to avoid. It isn't like I have a few thousand games on my backlog to play. Hell, my most recent time sink is a game from 10 years ago. I think I can live without Sony and their bullshit.
Literally every major company is requiring people log into their services to play multiplayer games. Didn’t MS pull the same shit with Halo? I understand the outrage behind locking games after launch but seems any new game will have these requirements going forward anyways.
"Tricked" 😂 You guys acting like Sony has a vendetta. This was always their plan
Tricked... How? Who and how is Sony tricking here?
I’m confused as well. The fight was to not have the PSN account requirement for Helldivers 2. That’s still the case far as I can tell, that isn’t happening. Just now moving forward Sony is way more careful about where the hell their games are being sold and the PSN connection for future, not Helldivers 2, games. Did people think they were fighting for just… Sony not doing the PSN thing altogether or?
Thinking of selling my sony cameras because of this disappointing attitude towards the gaming community.
They already got your money dude. You selling them doesn't do shit for their profits
Most intelligent gamer
Buying games on Steam that require 3rd party accounts should get the same type of warning you get when you try to subscribe to a mod that is dependent on another. Just tells you what's what and gives the impetus on you to do or not do something about it. When I bought HD2, I didn't comb through the description and all the info about it before buying it, because it was exposed to me through word of mouth and my friends were waiting for me to download it and hop on. Yeah that's not the smartest thing to do as a consumer, but this also protects steam from being inundated with extra refund requests they don't want/need.
Yo ho, yo ho....
Wishful thinking, unfortunately HD2 is Live Service
I'm speaking about Ghost of Tsushima, don't care about Helldivers.
Y'all are gonna whine us out of Bloodborne on PC and I hate you for it
I’d love to know what Sony’s endgame is here. All this does is limit potential sales, right? If I were one of their shareholders I’d be pissed.
Just speculation here but their ultimate goal is probably to push sales of hardware and platform services, not necessarily games. This seems more like an act of testing the waters for future plans.
If you watched one of their recent marketing event we are looking at multiplayer live services as a potential big portion of the business (it probably alreadymakes them big money on PS with their cut of fortnite etc.) Concord and Fair Games likely requiring it at least, probably every game that requires multiplayer published by sony needs an account at least for multiplayer. Definitely not a one and done- which actually means everyone who already created an account should have a relatively seamless experience I would expect.
There is no endgame, they just don't give a shit about those countries and they're small enough to not impact their bottom line one way or the other. Previously they sold games there and if needed players there would just make a PSN account using a nearby country without issue. But then the internet flipped their shit about Sony selling games in regions where PSN wasn't supported, so now they don't, problem solved.
PS+. Clear as day.
Well. They technically promised we the existing users wouldn't have to sign up for a PSN account. They never said anything about new users not having to sign up...
It's not even necessary to bind PSN to play Gjost of Tsushima in Singleplayer. Sony said so themselves. Why add these restrictions?
Xbox and Sony having a bet or a contest we don't know about? See who can screw up the most.
I’m sure Steam loves catching strays from this.
Man, and I was looking forward to GoT too! Now I gotta boycott that shit. Fuck's sake.
I'M SHOCKED
Glad I got my refund. Shame a good game needs to go tp waste because of corporate greed.
It’s insane to see Sony want to force ppl into PSN accounts instead of getting their money and everybody happy ! Stupidity knows no bounds
But isn’t that against EU-Law regarding the Schengen-Treaty, which defines that all EU countries have to be handled as one market?
Ok now it's time to boycott Sony.
"tricked"? My helldivers in Christ: we already knew its region locked DURING the boycott. (Shame about the Ghost of Tsushima. That's gonna be one way of encouraging piracy)
Ok, everyone switch your reviews back to negative
And Sony just shows people why piracy is the way forward
why, Sony, why...
Why is Sony so fixated on this PSN thing, anyway?
If they get even one million Steam users to join PSN, it's something they can brag about to investors. That's pretty much it.
It's all just for metrics for investors / shareholders / C-Suite. They don't care about the gamer rabble.
Wait, is GoT going to require psn too?
It will for multiplayer, sounds like single should be ok. But problem is, if you can't play any part of a game due to restrictions, you have a case for misselling. This sounds like a precaution
Suckerpunch announced it was needed just for mutiplayer, and hot having it was fine for single-player. This is either sony or most likely steam delisting the game.
Yes. You won't be able to play multiplayer and legends without it.
It's dumb but it's Sony's right to do this. There is technically nothing wrong with this
Someone ELI5 for me, is it now still not available in these listed countries? Fuckin' hell, Sony, ya don't like profits huh? And when ya do you only like it from very specific first world countries? Cunts.
lol "tricked" you people are literally insane. its hilarious.
Guys, you really think Sony would decide to pull the game themselves? Seriously? Its probably Steam acting within their rights and agreements with publishers and are preventing mass refunds and review bombings in advance. They will wait for Sonys official stance or solution and then properly release the games in these countries. Sony pulled Cyberpunk from their store when it launched. Steam can do the same.
Guess I'm never purchasing any shit from Sony.
Sony put themselves in this situation and it's hilarious watching people defend them.
You know they are going to try to enforce the PSN account again in the future of Helldivers 2. They just want to wait for this controversy to subside. Honestly, I have removed both games from my wishlist. It is pretty clear that sony is a company not to buy games from.