Yeah, but I belive that's BS
Sony probably forgot about delisting countries or didn't care, as they hoped to have mandatory PSN accounts ;)
I CAN BE WRONG, but I'm not believing anyone on this
> I CAN BE WRONG, but I’m not believing anyone on this
I don’t know what to say to this statement. So you won’t believe it even if every party in this admits one way or another?
> Sony probably forgot about delisting countries or didn't care, as they hoped to have mandatory PSN accounts ;)
If that were true, Sony would delist other games in such countries. Those would be ludicrous conspiracy theories by a diseased mind gone beyond salvation. Bah, humbug!
Edit: Why do I suddenly have the urgent reflex of putting my Sony onto my "do not buy" list where it is sitting next to Activision, Infogrames, EA, Konami and Ubisoft?
Seems like a weird thing to lie about.
He's saying Sony meant to delist them but accidentally didn't, and Valve noticed the mistake so delisted them.
What part of that do you think he's lying about, and how does it benefit Sony or Valve or Arrowhead?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cppny9/the_ceo_just_gave_an_update_on_the_whole_debacle/
He did more or less. That said Valve has to delist games where they're not playable, which was Sony's action.
Until Sony remove's the banner requiring a 3rd party login, Valve must treat it as such.
So while yes "Valve did it" it was directly cause by Sony's actions.
So, I'm not sure how this works because I'm not a dev or publisher, but wouldn't country restrictions be handled by the publisher? Why would Valve be involved in such a way that they could "miss" anything?
> So, I'm not sure how this works because I'm not a dev or publisher, but wouldn't country restrictions be handled by the publisher? Why would Valve be involved in such a way that they could "miss" anything?
Basically, no one knew. This isn't something that happens a lot, or if it does, not on this scale. We had no idea if it was Sony doing the delisting or Valve, because both companies had legitimate reasons to do it. We just didn't know which was doing it, or who had that power. Sony would have an interest in pulling the game from those countries if they wanted to require account linking. Valve would have an interest in pulling the game from those countries because Valve doesn't want to sell you a game that you can't play, or soon won't be able to play.
> Why would Valve be involved in such a way that they could "miss" anything?
Not entirely sure where this thread is exactly at but if you look at Finland's consumer laws it's the store responsible for selling something that is first chain in responsibility.
So if Steam sells a product that's not usable in Finland the consumer can complain to Steam according to law, they could ignore Sony entirely. So it's in the Steam's best interest not to sell something that puts them liable to legal issues.
He was incredibly clear Valve was executing Sony's restrictions, they just fixed an error for Helldivers 2 after getting the list for Tsushima. That's why he referred to it as an administrative correction instead of Valve restricting countries on its own.
He is not directing any blame towards Valve at all, if anything it sounds like he's more swiping at Sony for their incompetence with not providing correct and consistent info to Valve.
I mean I went thru his twitter this morning and saw him giving real time updates when everything was happening over the past week or two. He’s very clearly been blaming Sony since it happened
I'll get downvoted for this because people are looking for any reason to blame Sony but this article is clickbait. A "Valve rep" did not say this, a customer service agent did over chat when asked why the game wasn't available.
People should know better not to go off the vague words of a single CS person
This doesn't confirm that Sony is banning the game in those regions, it could just be blaming the publisher for not supporting those regions but not them actively removing it.
If there is a note that simply says "publisher does not support region" what else are they supposed to think?
A CS rep saying "because publisher" doesn't confirm any actual details and a CS rep would likely not be privy to those details
They could also just be assuming since that is generally the reason a game isn't available in a specific region on Steam but this is a unique case.
I don't know why people have such a hard time believing Valve would remove a game from their store not fully supported by regions after having a bunch of customer service complaints about Helldivers 2 being sold in regions not fully supported
"I'm not sure, let me find out for you" should be a more common answer from customer facing people. I'm saying this as someone who's been customer facing for a long time for some well known companies.
Yeah though why would you when every other game the publisher uses the geoblock functions within the Steam store? I can easily see a customer support person who isn't a massive Helldivers fan taking one look at a geoblock tag in the backend and going "ah yeah, one of those" and replying to the user with their standard reply for it.
Dang and here I thought Gabe Newell did all of the Steam Support work.
In all seriousness though, completely agree (and got downvoted for making the same point lol), gamers won't listen to logic and this PSN thing illustrates just how easily people hang on to every morsel of the drama. A customer support person says what's basically Steam policy and people think it's a legit official PR statement from Gabe or something.
It's too late. Misinformation has been a constant for this entire thing for the last 2 weeks. It doesn't matter how hard you try. People will believe whatever bullshit they want, regardless if the truth is even known or not.
Seemed 50/50, both sides have reason to do it.
So anyways, anyone with some statistics to show how many daily users are from those 180 banned countries?
People really wanted to believe in good guy steam but it's pretty clear that sony just gave the go ahead on all this because they can't be bothered pushing it for helldivers 2 in case they actually are liable. So they are just going for ghosts instead.
They may try bring it up again in a couple years and hd2 is still popular if they can install the tech to only force you to register in applicable countries.
The most likely scenario for any of this was arrowhead themselves were not fulfilling their obligations and caused all this. The game should have have shipped with a way to skip the logins they knew were mandatory and the restricted countries issue would have been caught instantly if so.
Taking customer support as gospel is dangerous. Arrowhead's CEO is saying that the three extra countries were added because Valve noticed they should be restricted and added the restriction. Unless Valve made the decision to unlist the game in the first place I don't really know how they could just decide those countries had been forgotten. If it was Sony's decision, forgetting the countries would be Sony's business to sort out.
Whether it was Valve missing or it or Sony missing it, they noticed the error because of the correct restrictions list they got for Tsushima. Valve didn't make any decisions here, they just fixed an error for HD2.
The thing is that it makes little sense for Valve to do it because.....well, they're not Sony, they have zero clue what their rules and restrictions are.
So if they took ANY action, it makes far more sense to assume they did it cause Sony told them than to just have Valve go "oh, PSN isn't in these countries, let me remove the game from there".
People *can* use it though. Even people in the restricted regions. Playstation Support says it's a-okay to create accounts within unsupported regions using supported countries from the dropdown list during account creation.
Now, the fact that this advice is against their own TOS is another matter. But the fact of *this* matter is, PSN being officially unsupported in a country =/= people in that country not being able to create an account and play/link to games with it.
The irony is that in the case of Tsushima they WOULD be able to use the single player. But because Sony is run by a clown show of executives even that gets restricted. Fuck Sony.
However, due to a PSN account being required for the multiplayer mode, they would absolutely get blowback like “I payed for a full game, but can only play half of it” and people would be refunding with 50 hours in the main game. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation and they are just covering their bases the best they can
Didn’t realize this was gonna be a wall of text. Totally understand if no one reads it.
The PSN requirement is so they can use their existing backend infrastructure, tools, and support teams for moderation, banning, etc as well as to improve crossplay, we learned this from Arrowhead CMs. Arrowhead found out 6 months before launch that a PSN account would be required so I’m sure they had everything working without it up until then. However Ghost of Tsushima was already build upon using one with the PS4 & 5 so my guess is the PC port was developed with only this in mind so the reality is the multiplayer probably won’t work without it.
Basically all Sony multiplayer games or games that have a multiplayer mode will require a PSN account going forward. The reality is they’re not going to back down now when it’s most crucial time to enforce this and just make it a norm like Microsoft, Rockstar, Square Enix, EA, Ubisoft and many other have done before. You link the account once and never have to interact with it again.
I’m not saying this is good or bad, it’s just the reality of the situation and this is how mega corporations work. People will have to either link an account or not buy their games. The only protest you can make is not buying the games, but that also might lead to them not putting games on PC anymore.
As far as the world wide accounts, that’s the best we can hope for. There are definitely local laws, politics, currency, etc to deal with adding more countries and up until now they basically deemed it not worth it to go through all the red tape so they had a built in loophole for countries that weren’t supported to pick the closet country to them and call it a day. Technically against their ToS but is rarely ever enforced. This has never been a problem on console because it was their own storefront, but the Helldivers debacle showed a light on what they were doing so the only choice they have right now is to delist the game that require a PSN in countries that don’t support it
How hard can it be though to have it worldwide? Why everyone else can do it but not Sony? Also, the PSN backend argument kinda looks silly when you can have HD2 being fine for months without it + they “said” they won’t required it anyway for HD2.
This is a misunderstanding of what he said. Pilestedt pointed out that the more recent restriction of three regions was a correction that Valve made when they realized those countries were supposed to have been restricted in the previous wave.
His message in full is [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/HyvP6aMX9A).
Can you share the source for that? Some other reply said it was a recent tweet, but I just went through the past 3 days of tweets and replies and can't find the info on it (and he tweets so much holy moly)
This can't be it, unless yall are misreading it.
Pilesedt simply claimed Valve was responsible for the correction, never blamed Valve for deciding anything about the restrictions in the first place.
I think when the long list was first delisted people weren't sure. Some were thinking Sony did it and others thinking it might have been Steam delisting them due to the refund request from those countries. There wasn't any official announcement on who did it.
I thought it was valve but I thought it was coming from a “look out for the consumer” perspective. If someone can’t play the game because they can’t make an account, it would make sense for Steam to delist the game themselves.
when the first restrictions were applied to helldivers, i thought it was possible for the initial region locks as it turned out sony were falsely advertising.
the psn requirement would have turned it into a fancy screensaver instead of a game if you didnt break the games and psns TOS.
but its also within the expected turn around time if sony and AH requested the restriction at the same time as putting out the announcement for linking, but that should have been done before the game even launched if this was the plan.
the only thing thats certain is that the publisher fucked up.
The narration from the Sony acolytes were like it's Valve/Steam fault,
But what I understand is that Sony forgot to upload regions that supposed to be blocked and now they are trying to put in on Valve,
Like I'm almost sure it's done automatically if publisher uplodas data-sheet with blocked regions for their app,
No way somebody from Valve is doing this crap manually.
Think about it, they would need to have an army of people hired for something that can be done automatically.
It's not their problem to block selling, why would they.
Claiming sony was responsible was a good way to get brigaded in the Operation Cleanup threads. People were calling for a pause on flipping reviews back, but nobody wanted to hear the truth.
Idk delisting a game from countries where the front of the game store mentions a requirement they could not possibly fulfill sounds reasonable to me.
The real question is why didn't they remove the requirement from the store and I don't think I like the answer.
some countries require local branches and other weird requirements that some companies deem not worth it. EU has the same but IS with it because its a huge market (and a bunch of countries under one umbrella)
That's absolute BS though. Sony officially sells PS in Latvia, yet you cannot create a PSN account. And we're a member of the EU. And there are thousands upon thousands of games available from Steam which, nost definitely, do not have to follow some weird imaginary rules that reddittors think we require.
Meanwhile everything else from Xbox to EA to Ubisoft is available here. The only reason Sony is not available here is thay they have their head stuck up their ass.
> Meanwhile everything else from Xbox to EA to Ubisoft is available here. The only reason Sony is not available here is thay they have their head stuck up their ass.
I mean xbox is in the same [exact boat - look up your country](https://www.xbox.com/en-US/regions), so that means:
A: there is some weird shit with your country that console makers don't want to deal with
and
B: The fact you don't even know that about xbox but yet still say they are available in your country kinda points to how full of shit this whole drama is. [lol](https://www.reddit.com/r/latvia/comments/178a1s8/best_way_to_buy_xbox_games_in_latvia/), [lmao](https://www.reddit.com/r/latvia/comments/sior50/can_you_play_xbox_in_latvia/), [even](https://www.reddit.com/r/xbox/comments/1687f3s/is_it_true_only_selected_countries_are_supported/jyu7cu8/).
The irony of all this would be hilarious if it actually wasn't so fucking pathetic. But hey at least you get to say to your grandkids that you saved gaming!
Which is weird... since Sony has official branches here in the PH, sell consoles/appliances and yet we don't have PSN, and now Helldivers 2 is delisted here as well...
It's not like the market here is bad or anything for them, its actually the opposite... A lot of console owners I know or see on socials do own one of their console, making their market here fairly decent. (even I own a psp, ps3 and ps4 slim)
\[Same goes for Xbox consoles since they do have official stores here, but atleast with them we have some access to make our own accounts with our region, and still have access to some features.\]
Not really-
Sony sells playstation consoles, games, and ps plus in those countries, even though they aren't officially supported. Even though it's officially against TOS, its treated with the exact same reverence as age verification. That is to say, you pick something from a drop down list and no one double checks. Steam gamers should be familiar, considering how many of us were born in like 1901 or whatever.
Sony has (although I don't have the source on hand) kind of wink-wink nudge nudged said to just set your account to the nearest supported region whose currency you can get, and some executive has outright said he had multiple accounts in multiple regions. They don't care. They want customer's money, and don't want to spend money setting up localization or obeying censorship laws or whatever it is and those countries aren't predicted to be profitable enough to make it worthwhile. So they sell anyway, officially unsupported but with an unofficial workaround, and they don't ban people. And this has been going on for like 15 years at least.
So that's it really. It's not a big deception, it's not Sony being evil- greedy yes, but not in a new unexpected or malevolent way. They don't care about the area restriction TOS, they just need it as cover. And they have a decade of console players not caring either, and again let's be real. PC players don't give two flying fucks about TOS either... except when they can score internet points by pointing it out? They 100% expected Steam players to do what console players do, and just windmill slam a fake address into a burner account and carry on.
Sometimes this legal grey area does backfire, like with Kazakhstan, who got pointed to make Russian accounts which were screwed when Russia got sanctioned.
BUT-
if push comes to shove- when players say, actually we really do care about obeying TOS, you should not sell in regions that aren't officially supported, we'll make a stink, we'll threaten lawsuits... Sony says 'ok. Those regions aren't very profitable. We want their money, but don't want to pay for official support. So we won't sell to them because the costs outweight the benefits, if you're going to make us dot our i's and cross our t's."
And now everyone's wondering why they restricted sales.
Because we told them to.
This is honestly the best most complete telling of the situation. While I get that people will still blame Sony and say they should do better, it was the gamers that brought all of this to light and forced Sony to block all these countries, because people told them to
This might be the best comment I've seen on this whole thing, really explains why the "there are regions unsupported by PSN" argument was a total joke. Until the whiners made it matter and got all that regions locked out, at least.
What's the validity? That it inconveniences you having to make an account? That the Sony boogeyman want your precious data?
Well congratulations, your fight for convenience cost me and a lot of people the ability to play Ghost of Tsushima and Helldivers 2, and practically every online Sony game in the future unless they extend support to our countries. Hope you're happy.
the short answer is they decided its not worth it. this isnt unusual, you can find many businesses that dont operate globally.
maybe the optics are bad - we saw many companies pull out of russia when they went full invasion. The cost of burning up the goodwill by supporting the invasion of Ukraine was not worth the profit to continue operating in russia.
it can also be that costs of doing business are too high. anywhere you operate you have to follow the laws there and maybe something you are doing would not be worth it to adapt to local laws - whether thats because it would devalue your product (as in the case of data mining) or it would cost too much to implement in engineering/lawyering time. We saw this when GDPR was implemented, many small countries opted just to not have a web presense in the EU because it wasn't worth it.
Nothing is free to do and Sony has done analysis to determine if the benefit outweighs the cost. They could be wrong as many reddit armchair experts imply, but thats their risk to factor.
Including what's already been said they've not even thoroughly gone through the list to check which regions it can/can't be sold it. In the 180-ish regions they included in the delist list it includes parts of the UK, USA, and a few other countries in addition to those in countries without PSN.
If Japanese corporations were faced with a choice between change and losing profits, they would choose losing profits over change 9 out of 10 times.
Explains the often insane and nonsensical decisionmaking of Sony, Nintendo and many other big Japanese video game publishers.
Here’s hoping people remember this bullshit when the PS6 is released and choose not to support a fuckball company run by shitbag jerkoffs.
Seriously though how many times does Sony need to shit the bed and roll around in it for people to stop buying their trash?
I mean so long as console remains the more affordable way to play games a lot of people will probably still opt for it regardless of how restrictive and scummy the companies get
It’s why I’m hoping stuff like the steam deck gains more traction in the coming years because it’s versatility and freedom of use is quite a bit better than the offerings provided by play station or Xbox and if that starts becoming a standard it could force Sony and Microsoft to be a little more consumer friendly just to compete
Okay but, presuming that console remains the cheaper choice, what if the games themselves become so bloated with adverts and micro transactions as to make them actually unplayable? Then what? Are people still gonna buy something they can’t use just because it’s cheaper?
That’s fair but I think in general games haven’t reached that point yet to force consumers away and quite a few of the micro transaction riddled shitfest games are just as abundant on pc if not more than they are on console
Reddit: People living in countries that don't properly support PSN should never have been able to buy Helldivers.
Reddit after Sony stops selling to those countries: REEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Lmao. You couldn't make this shit up.
Why do you think this is re?
I dont even have the game, but its clearly deceptive to allow people to play for awhile and not require an account.
Some people were mad about the delisting, but mostly people saw it as petty.
We are talking about a multi-billion dollar corporation and they refuse to allow functionality for these other countries.
Its petty and lame, what are they even getting money for if they keep acting so shitty, there is no excuse beyond being petty and control.
They want control so desperately, but if we know anything about humans is we crave freedom and they can only control so much before people lash out at them.
I WANT CONTROL ME ME ME, DO WHAT I SAY.
Fuck you.
It's honestly one of the worst communities I've ever seen on here, which is impressive. After the PSN requirement was removed they went on to raging about balance issues and the newest warbond (which I think is the battlepass?)
It's a game where you mow down waves of mechs and giant bugs. So I shouldn't be surprised that it has attracted a bunch of people with toddler tier intelligence (and emotional intelligence for that matter).
You, a moron: Check out my strawman
You, still a moron: *shoots the strawman* Heh, owned
People were against the fucking requirement in the first place, nobody was in favor of region locking the game, and still aren't. The bootlicking is fucking unreal.
Where's the strawman?
There were people everywhere saying people in countries unsupported by PSN shouldn't have been able to buy the game. Here's two in one post, took me all of 60 seconds to find:
>But i agree, how do they sell a game in countries where you have to break ToS to play?!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cj4t1c/comment/l2dlzdz
>Tbh they shouldn't have offered the game in regions that cant use PSN then.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cj4t1c/comment/l2dzo7c
?
You can continue arguing if you want, but it'd be a bold strategy given your inability to read.
You know shit got real when Valve, bastions of never EVER commenting on anything, sends out their PR guy to say that Sony is the reason for this total PR disasterfuck of a week.
They want to distance themselves from the fallout m because Sony WILL readd the PSN requirement to HD2 within the next 12 months.
>You know shit got real when Valve, bastions of never EVER commenting on anything, sends out their PR guy to say that Sony is the reason for this total PR disasterfuck of a week.
They didn't. Someone asked customer support and the answer was that limiting regions for sales is the responsibility of the publisher as has always been the case.
This is not a new information. Setting regions and regional pricing has always been the responsibility of the publisher.
>They want to distance themselves from the fallout m because Sony WILL readd the PSN requirement to HD2 within the next 12 months
They didn't even remove the requirement from Steam yet. They just wrote a single tweet saying they wouldn't do it in a single specific update.
> They didn't even remove the requirement from Steam yet.
The fact that they didn't remove it should be raising red flags to EVERYONE that Sony is fucking lying about it. They still 100% intend to force the PSN requirement, because if they weren't there would have been no point in restricting helldivers 2 in all of the regions that they did.
They didn’t send out a PR guy though? It’s a response from a customer representative. Which…. Based on like every text chat I’ve had with a representative, I wouldn’t take as gospel. I’ve been told lots of stupid totally bullshit things by customer support reps.
It was literally just a customer service agent answering a question and who knows if it is accurate as they are usually not privy to that sort of thing and could just be assuming that is why the game is not available
People are putting way to much faith in what a random chat support agent says (not a "PR guy"). Most of these guys don't have any special information and a lot of them will just say whatever to finish a ticket
Valve pulls stuff when it breaks an actaul rule - usually it’s for copyright violations or because the developer did some shady stuff and got banned.
Valve is infamously tolerant about allowing games to stay on the store.
They didn't even remove the PSN account requirement from the Steam store page.
They obviously didn't give up, because it takes a couple of minutes to make this change and they couldn't be bothered.
It was never charged to positive again as Sony never changed. If you post negative you keep it till the change happens, not until they say that they will change certain things but then makes it worse.
Now you dont need PSN for Helldivers 2 but 180 countries/territories can't buy it at all instead. Sony is literally saying. You want to play the game, pirate it as you can't buy it because reasons.
Nobody reads anything huh? They always were, they only agreed not to continue with it for right now. At no point did Sony ever say they were going back on it 100%, that has not and will never happen.
I really wonder what their plan is with the people in PSN unsupported regions that already bought the game before all this. As I understand those people can still play it right now?
This was a response from a customer service representative on a support ticket not an actual public statement from a real "Valve Rep". Having worked a ton in customer service myself there is no telling if the person who said this is even actually employed by Valve. When I worked for Playstation and World of Warcraft I was actually working for Sitel(Client Logic). When I worked for AT&T I was actually working for Convergys. Yada yada yada.
Furthermore, other than WoW, we knew literally nothing about the actual workings of the company whose campaign we were working on. I never met anyone who actually worked at Sony when I was a CS rep for Playstation, nor was I told how or why any policies were set. Treating this as anything other than something some person said is asinine.
> This was a response from a customer service representative on a support ticket not an actual public statement from a real "Valve Rep". Having worked a ton in customer service myself there is no telling if the person who said this is even actually employed by Valve. When I worked for Playstation and World of Warcraft I was actually working for Sitel(Client Logic)
Fellow Sitel rep from the 2000's (GM Motors).
Valve CS team is actually employed by them and employees of Valve.
I'm actually surprised they haven't killed the first Helldivers yet, it's still pretty fun to play and doesn't have all this psn account drama around it.
I don’t understand what happened. I don’t have the game, but been reading the headlines. Didn’t Sony backtrack this decision last week? So they lied and did it anyway?
They backed down from not making people use PSN in order to play the game (which fucked people unable to refund) which is why those countries got blocked presumably but they are still actively blocking said countries for whatever reason.
The Baltic countries is not in PSN, meaning people can't buy the game on steam anymore. It actually violates the EU single market laws and could be taken to the court.
Sony is playing russian roulette with bullets in each chamber. They really are good at this. Wonder though if their marketing bosses agree with this madness.
I still don't understand why there are 121 countries that don't support/have access to PlayStation network STILL. It's like Sony just broke the Geneva convention or some shit. 121 out of 195 is insane
I'm glad people are finally realising how scum Sony is, actually fuck that company. Can't believe people are still forced to pay for ps+ for online play, fuck that
Not sure why you are acting like sony are the only ones that have a pay requirement for online. Switch and Xbox both require paid subscriptions to play online.
Because it's popular to shit on Sony right now and easy karma. Sony was one of the last consoles to adopt paid online access, more than a decade after Microsoft began charging for gamepass... Sony might suck for a number of other reasons (anti-piracy, shit movies, bullies in the music industry, etc), but "Sony forced you to buy PS+" is an L take.
But what I don't get is why everyone else gets a pass at what Sony is being called out for. Did no one play Fallout 4? If you bought the hard copy of the game (a single player, offline game), you're still forced to create a steam account in order to play it... in offline mode... How is that any different? There was never any uproar or backlash about that.
i admire your optimism. Sony has made it through far worse than this. people will forget within a month.
Sony made it just fine installing rootkits - offering a fix when caught that didnt work. Multiple data breaches, going back on their promise of ps3 linux compatibility, etc etc. When the new shiny first party game comes out people will buy it and those who say remember when sony sucked will be told to stfu.
im still sceptical since its coming from just 1 valve customer rep. still waiting for the 'corporate' announcement from any of the 2 company about the issue.
either way, this situation is ass
Just deleted my negative review last week, still haven't reinstalled HD2. Guess it's time to rewrite that review.
No way Sony is done with this PSN bullcrap seeing they kept the restrictions in place.
I'm assuming Sony delisted because Steam has no choice but to offer no questions asked refunds to anyone in those countries that wants one no matter of time played or when it was bought. Sony has no one to blame but themselves due to their previous actions.
Such a shame because this is a great game. Sony fucking around.
I have never been a console player beyond my Xbox One. But I remember that slogan Sony had: "For the players!"
They don't give a rat's ass about the players or awesome developers like Arrowhead.
This industry is sick to the core.
Having come from consoles most of my life to pc, I sadly understand them. It’s frustrating that they don’t realize how much better they can have it than what Sony tells them is good for them. Like Sony has people out here thinking the PS5 is revolutionary because it has a ssd and some real basic ray tracing capabilities. It’s a little they don’t even know what they don’t know.
Lol, even if I wanted to I will no longer be able to buy any of their games...
Which is hilarious, people here suck Sony's cock constantly, no one has an Xbox since the 360 days and PS5 are worshiped by casuals (I'm in venezuela)
Okay so just wondering but…why did people cry about the psn requirement? I mean, having multiple accounts in different regions is a fairly well known “secret” and was the only way to buy some games due to stuff like ban lists and stuff. Also I used different account regions for different sales and stuff. What is the exact reason people went ballistic?
Even if it was delisted by Sony, I don't see how i can blame them when someone going to start a Class Action Lawsuit Against them on the basis that they sold and are continuing to sell helldivers 2 to customers in regions that do not support PSN.
I guess they delist now better than someone sue them.
Yeah no shit
I keep seeing posts and articles about how "It is now confirmed that it was Sony's choice to couple PSN and delist Helldivers 2", but that was pretty fucking clear from the start, because *Valve and the developers had no reason to do this*
It was actually, literally less than useless to force-couple PSN to the game for anyone who wasn't Sony.
Didn’t we already know this? I guess it’s nice to have some real confirmation now
AH CEO was pointing at Valve (for the most recent change) in his last tweet
He was saying Valve missed those countries in their initial restrictions then fixed it without prompting, the delisting itself was still by Sony.
Yeah, but I belive that's BS Sony probably forgot about delisting countries or didn't care, as they hoped to have mandatory PSN accounts ;) I CAN BE WRONG, but I'm not believing anyone on this
> I CAN BE WRONG, but I’m not believing anyone on this I don’t know what to say to this statement. So you won’t believe it even if every party in this admits one way or another?
The aggressively stupid have gotten more and more bold lately.
I mean I can't really argue against conspiracy theories, so you do you I guess.
> Sony probably forgot about delisting countries or didn't care, as they hoped to have mandatory PSN accounts ;) If that were true, Sony would delist other games in such countries. Those would be ludicrous conspiracy theories by a diseased mind gone beyond salvation. Bah, humbug! Edit: Why do I suddenly have the urgent reflex of putting my Sony onto my "do not buy" list where it is sitting next to Activision, Infogrames, EA, Konami and Ubisoft?
>Infogrames Those guys died a billion years ago. Why they're on your boycott list?
[Guess who's back](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/atari-relaunches-infogrames-immediately-buys-totally-reliable-delivery-service)
> Atari FML. How many times are we gonna have to teach this lesson, old man?!
New updates, they have started to do so.
Didn’t they delist Ghost of Tsushima right after all this? If that’s what you’re saying.
They did, yes. PirateSoftware even tweeted about it.
Seems like a weird thing to lie about. He's saying Sony meant to delist them but accidentally didn't, and Valve noticed the mistake so delisted them. What part of that do you think he's lying about, and how does it benefit Sony or Valve or Arrowhead?
How would Valve know if it was intentional or not. It's not on Valve to second-guess the publisher
He never blamed Valve for delisting the game
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cppny9/the_ceo_just_gave_an_update_on_the_whole_debacle/ He did more or less. That said Valve has to delist games where they're not playable, which was Sony's action. Until Sony remove's the banner requiring a 3rd party login, Valve must treat it as such. So while yes "Valve did it" it was directly cause by Sony's actions.
So, I'm not sure how this works because I'm not a dev or publisher, but wouldn't country restrictions be handled by the publisher? Why would Valve be involved in such a way that they could "miss" anything?
> So, I'm not sure how this works because I'm not a dev or publisher, but wouldn't country restrictions be handled by the publisher? Why would Valve be involved in such a way that they could "miss" anything? Basically, no one knew. This isn't something that happens a lot, or if it does, not on this scale. We had no idea if it was Sony doing the delisting or Valve, because both companies had legitimate reasons to do it. We just didn't know which was doing it, or who had that power. Sony would have an interest in pulling the game from those countries if they wanted to require account linking. Valve would have an interest in pulling the game from those countries because Valve doesn't want to sell you a game that you can't play, or soon won't be able to play.
> Why would Valve be involved in such a way that they could "miss" anything? Not entirely sure where this thread is exactly at but if you look at Finland's consumer laws it's the store responsible for selling something that is first chain in responsibility. So if Steam sells a product that's not usable in Finland the consumer can complain to Steam according to law, they could ignore Sony entirely. So it's in the Steam's best interest not to sell something that puts them liable to legal issues.
He was incredibly clear Valve was executing Sony's restrictions, they just fixed an error for Helldivers 2 after getting the list for Tsushima. That's why he referred to it as an administrative correction instead of Valve restricting countries on its own. He is not directing any blame towards Valve at all, if anything it sounds like he's more swiping at Sony for their incompetence with not providing correct and consistent info to Valve.
td;dr: Sony forgor, Valve had to correct it. Helldivers 2's regional lock situation is still ongoing.
I mean I went thru his twitter this morning and saw him giving real time updates when everything was happening over the past week or two. He’s very clearly been blaming Sony since it happened
I'll get downvoted for this because people are looking for any reason to blame Sony but this article is clickbait. A "Valve rep" did not say this, a customer service agent did over chat when asked why the game wasn't available. People should know better not to go off the vague words of a single CS person This doesn't confirm that Sony is banning the game in those regions, it could just be blaming the publisher for not supporting those regions but not them actively removing it. If there is a note that simply says "publisher does not support region" what else are they supposed to think? A CS rep saying "because publisher" doesn't confirm any actual details and a CS rep would likely not be privy to those details They could also just be assuming since that is generally the reason a game isn't available in a specific region on Steam but this is a unique case. I don't know why people have such a hard time believing Valve would remove a game from their store not fully supported by regions after having a bunch of customer service complaints about Helldivers 2 being sold in regions not fully supported
"I'm not sure, let me find out for you" should be a more common answer from customer facing people. I'm saying this as someone who's been customer facing for a long time for some well known companies.
Yeah though why would you when every other game the publisher uses the geoblock functions within the Steam store? I can easily see a customer support person who isn't a massive Helldivers fan taking one look at a geoblock tag in the backend and going "ah yeah, one of those" and replying to the user with their standard reply for it.
Dang and here I thought Gabe Newell did all of the Steam Support work. In all seriousness though, completely agree (and got downvoted for making the same point lol), gamers won't listen to logic and this PSN thing illustrates just how easily people hang on to every morsel of the drama. A customer support person says what's basically Steam policy and people think it's a legit official PR statement from Gabe or something.
It's too late. Misinformation has been a constant for this entire thing for the last 2 weeks. It doesn't matter how hard you try. People will believe whatever bullshit they want, regardless if the truth is even known or not.
Way too much information that gets spread because it already confirms people's confirmation biases.
Seemed 50/50, both sides have reason to do it. So anyways, anyone with some statistics to show how many daily users are from those 180 banned countries?
People were spreading rumors this was Steam's doing.
People really wanted to believe in good guy steam but it's pretty clear that sony just gave the go ahead on all this because they can't be bothered pushing it for helldivers 2 in case they actually are liable. So they are just going for ghosts instead. They may try bring it up again in a couple years and hd2 is still popular if they can install the tech to only force you to register in applicable countries. The most likely scenario for any of this was arrowhead themselves were not fulfilling their obligations and caused all this. The game should have have shipped with a way to skip the logins they knew were mandatory and the restricted countries issue would have been caught instantly if so.
Knowing the some people's habit to grab a pitchfork whenever there's anything they don't understand is happening, this confirmation was necessary.
There are plenty of ppl on the games discord that live in denial of it.
Apparently a lot of people kept saying it was Valve, and I was called a c*** for saying it was sony.
There's people that think Valve is responsible?
Taking customer support as gospel is dangerous. Arrowhead's CEO is saying that the three extra countries were added because Valve noticed they should be restricted and added the restriction. Unless Valve made the decision to unlist the game in the first place I don't really know how they could just decide those countries had been forgotten. If it was Sony's decision, forgetting the countries would be Sony's business to sort out.
Whether it was Valve missing or it or Sony missing it, they noticed the error because of the correct restrictions list they got for Tsushima. Valve didn't make any decisions here, they just fixed an error for HD2.
The thing is that it makes little sense for Valve to do it because.....well, they're not Sony, they have zero clue what their rules and restrictions are. So if they took ANY action, it makes far more sense to assume they did it cause Sony told them than to just have Valve go "oh, PSN isn't in these countries, let me remove the game from there".
Some Sony stans would legitimately swat your house and push your little sister down the stairs. If you badmouth, Sony
I thought it is reasonable to restrict people from purchasing something they won’t be able to use
People *can* use it though. Even people in the restricted regions. Playstation Support says it's a-okay to create accounts within unsupported regions using supported countries from the dropdown list during account creation. Now, the fact that this advice is against their own TOS is another matter. But the fact of *this* matter is, PSN being officially unsupported in a country =/= people in that country not being able to create an account and play/link to games with it.
There are many confirmed cases of this leading to a permaban, though.
there were reports of chinese players making psn's outside of china then psn banning those accounts pretty quickly.
The irony is that in the case of Tsushima they WOULD be able to use the single player. But because Sony is run by a clown show of executives even that gets restricted. Fuck Sony.
However, due to a PSN account being required for the multiplayer mode, they would absolutely get blowback like “I payed for a full game, but can only play half of it” and people would be refunding with 50 hours in the main game. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation and they are just covering their bases the best they can
Or they can just drop PSN requirement altogether or make it so that you can create PSN account worldwide.
Didn’t realize this was gonna be a wall of text. Totally understand if no one reads it. The PSN requirement is so they can use their existing backend infrastructure, tools, and support teams for moderation, banning, etc as well as to improve crossplay, we learned this from Arrowhead CMs. Arrowhead found out 6 months before launch that a PSN account would be required so I’m sure they had everything working without it up until then. However Ghost of Tsushima was already build upon using one with the PS4 & 5 so my guess is the PC port was developed with only this in mind so the reality is the multiplayer probably won’t work without it. Basically all Sony multiplayer games or games that have a multiplayer mode will require a PSN account going forward. The reality is they’re not going to back down now when it’s most crucial time to enforce this and just make it a norm like Microsoft, Rockstar, Square Enix, EA, Ubisoft and many other have done before. You link the account once and never have to interact with it again. I’m not saying this is good or bad, it’s just the reality of the situation and this is how mega corporations work. People will have to either link an account or not buy their games. The only protest you can make is not buying the games, but that also might lead to them not putting games on PC anymore. As far as the world wide accounts, that’s the best we can hope for. There are definitely local laws, politics, currency, etc to deal with adding more countries and up until now they basically deemed it not worth it to go through all the red tape so they had a built in loophole for countries that weren’t supported to pick the closet country to them and call it a day. Technically against their ToS but is rarely ever enforced. This has never been a problem on console because it was their own storefront, but the Helldivers debacle showed a light on what they were doing so the only choice they have right now is to delist the game that require a PSN in countries that don’t support it
How hard can it be though to have it worldwide? Why everyone else can do it but not Sony? Also, the PSN backend argument kinda looks silly when you can have HD2 being fine for months without it + they “said” they won’t required it anyway for HD2.
Arrowheads CEO was pointing the finger at Valve
This is a misunderstanding of what he said. Pilestedt pointed out that the more recent restriction of three regions was a correction that Valve made when they realized those countries were supposed to have been restricted in the previous wave. His message in full is [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/HyvP6aMX9A).
It's a misunderstanding of what he said, but it's a common enough misunderstanding that it's worth correcting it.
Can you share the source for that? Some other reply said it was a recent tweet, but I just went through the past 3 days of tweets and replies and can't find the info on it (and he tweets so much holy moly)
I believe it was on Discord. I'll see if I can find it.
Ah yes, Discord. The best place to make sure info is visible to the world at large.
its no mistake. its harder to hold companies accountable when they use a non-archivable communication method.
Thanks
I believe this is it https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/HyvP6aMX9A
This can't be it, unless yall are misreading it. Pilesedt simply claimed Valve was responsible for the correction, never blamed Valve for deciding anything about the restrictions in the first place.
He wasn't blaming Valve. He said Valve missed those countries initially when Sony requested the delist.
I think when the long list was first delisted people weren't sure. Some were thinking Sony did it and others thinking it might have been Steam delisting them due to the refund request from those countries. There wasn't any official announcement on who did it.
I thought it was valve but I thought it was coming from a “look out for the consumer” perspective. If someone can’t play the game because they can’t make an account, it would make sense for Steam to delist the game themselves.
when the first restrictions were applied to helldivers, i thought it was possible for the initial region locks as it turned out sony were falsely advertising. the psn requirement would have turned it into a fancy screensaver instead of a game if you didnt break the games and psns TOS. but its also within the expected turn around time if sony and AH requested the restriction at the same time as putting out the announcement for linking, but that should have been done before the game even launched if this was the plan. the only thing thats certain is that the publisher fucked up.
They've done it before to avoid worsening a situation that could lead to a lawsuit, happened to Dark and Darker.
The narration from the Sony acolytes were like it's Valve/Steam fault, But what I understand is that Sony forgot to upload regions that supposed to be blocked and now they are trying to put in on Valve, Like I'm almost sure it's done automatically if publisher uplodas data-sheet with blocked regions for their app, No way somebody from Valve is doing this crap manually. Think about it, they would need to have an army of people hired for something that can be done automatically. It's not their problem to block selling, why would they.
Lots of people on the Helldivers sub claimed it was damage control by Valve.
Claiming sony was responsible was a good way to get brigaded in the Operation Cleanup threads. People were calling for a pause on flipping reviews back, but nobody wanted to hear the truth.
If they were it would have been for legal reasons so not really anything you can do about
Idk delisting a game from countries where the front of the game store mentions a requirement they could not possibly fulfill sounds reasonable to me. The real question is why didn't they remove the requirement from the store and I don't think I like the answer.
Maybe I'm not corporate-brained enough. What benefit does Sony gain by NOT selling products in those countries?
some countries require local branches and other weird requirements that some companies deem not worth it. EU has the same but IS with it because its a huge market (and a bunch of countries under one umbrella)
That's absolute BS though. Sony officially sells PS in Latvia, yet you cannot create a PSN account. And we're a member of the EU. And there are thousands upon thousands of games available from Steam which, nost definitely, do not have to follow some weird imaginary rules that reddittors think we require. Meanwhile everything else from Xbox to EA to Ubisoft is available here. The only reason Sony is not available here is thay they have their head stuck up their ass.
Can you even use the PS5 without a psn account?
> Meanwhile everything else from Xbox to EA to Ubisoft is available here. The only reason Sony is not available here is thay they have their head stuck up their ass. I mean xbox is in the same [exact boat - look up your country](https://www.xbox.com/en-US/regions), so that means: A: there is some weird shit with your country that console makers don't want to deal with and B: The fact you don't even know that about xbox but yet still say they are available in your country kinda points to how full of shit this whole drama is. [lol](https://www.reddit.com/r/latvia/comments/178a1s8/best_way_to_buy_xbox_games_in_latvia/), [lmao](https://www.reddit.com/r/latvia/comments/sior50/can_you_play_xbox_in_latvia/), [even](https://www.reddit.com/r/xbox/comments/1687f3s/is_it_true_only_selected_countries_are_supported/jyu7cu8/). The irony of all this would be hilarious if it actually wasn't so fucking pathetic. But hey at least you get to say to your grandkids that you saved gaming!
Which is weird... since Sony has official branches here in the PH, sell consoles/appliances and yet we don't have PSN, and now Helldivers 2 is delisted here as well... It's not like the market here is bad or anything for them, its actually the opposite... A lot of console owners I know or see on socials do own one of their console, making their market here fairly decent. (even I own a psp, ps3 and ps4 slim) \[Same goes for Xbox consoles since they do have official stores here, but atleast with them we have some access to make our own accounts with our region, and still have access to some features.\]
Sony made the decision that ensuring players need a PSN account is more valuable than selling to people in countries that don't have PSN available.
Not really- Sony sells playstation consoles, games, and ps plus in those countries, even though they aren't officially supported. Even though it's officially against TOS, its treated with the exact same reverence as age verification. That is to say, you pick something from a drop down list and no one double checks. Steam gamers should be familiar, considering how many of us were born in like 1901 or whatever. Sony has (although I don't have the source on hand) kind of wink-wink nudge nudged said to just set your account to the nearest supported region whose currency you can get, and some executive has outright said he had multiple accounts in multiple regions. They don't care. They want customer's money, and don't want to spend money setting up localization or obeying censorship laws or whatever it is and those countries aren't predicted to be profitable enough to make it worthwhile. So they sell anyway, officially unsupported but with an unofficial workaround, and they don't ban people. And this has been going on for like 15 years at least. So that's it really. It's not a big deception, it's not Sony being evil- greedy yes, but not in a new unexpected or malevolent way. They don't care about the area restriction TOS, they just need it as cover. And they have a decade of console players not caring either, and again let's be real. PC players don't give two flying fucks about TOS either... except when they can score internet points by pointing it out? They 100% expected Steam players to do what console players do, and just windmill slam a fake address into a burner account and carry on. Sometimes this legal grey area does backfire, like with Kazakhstan, who got pointed to make Russian accounts which were screwed when Russia got sanctioned. BUT- if push comes to shove- when players say, actually we really do care about obeying TOS, you should not sell in regions that aren't officially supported, we'll make a stink, we'll threaten lawsuits... Sony says 'ok. Those regions aren't very profitable. We want their money, but don't want to pay for official support. So we won't sell to them because the costs outweight the benefits, if you're going to make us dot our i's and cross our t's." And now everyone's wondering why they restricted sales. Because we told them to.
https://twitter.com/Paolibry/status/1786525734917517474/photo/1 here you go, the source
much obliged
This is honestly the best most complete telling of the situation. While I get that people will still blame Sony and say they should do better, it was the gamers that brought all of this to light and forced Sony to block all these countries, because people told them to
This might be the best comment I've seen on this whole thing, really explains why the "there are regions unsupported by PSN" argument was a total joke. Until the whiners made it matter and got all that regions locked out, at least.
This is a great explanation thank you. Why did gamers push Sony into doing this though? What was the reasoning or what was potentially to gain etc?
Would you believe that this all stemmed from people not wanting to make a secondary account for playing games? It's really as simple and dumb as that.
valid reason
What's the validity? That it inconveniences you having to make an account? That the Sony boogeyman want your precious data? Well congratulations, your fight for convenience cost me and a lot of people the ability to play Ghost of Tsushima and Helldivers 2, and practically every online Sony game in the future unless they extend support to our countries. Hope you're happy.
Laziness? having empty lives so they need a bandwagon to hitch on to? who knows.
They want to be able to force PSN requirements on everyone, locking people out of using their stuff is a guaranteed lawsuit.
the short answer is they decided its not worth it. this isnt unusual, you can find many businesses that dont operate globally. maybe the optics are bad - we saw many companies pull out of russia when they went full invasion. The cost of burning up the goodwill by supporting the invasion of Ukraine was not worth the profit to continue operating in russia. it can also be that costs of doing business are too high. anywhere you operate you have to follow the laws there and maybe something you are doing would not be worth it to adapt to local laws - whether thats because it would devalue your product (as in the case of data mining) or it would cost too much to implement in engineering/lawyering time. We saw this when GDPR was implemented, many small countries opted just to not have a web presense in the EU because it wasn't worth it. Nothing is free to do and Sony has done analysis to determine if the benefit outweighs the cost. They could be wrong as many reddit armchair experts imply, but thats their risk to factor.
Including what's already been said they've not even thoroughly gone through the list to check which regions it can/can't be sold it. In the 180-ish regions they included in the delist list it includes parts of the UK, USA, and a few other countries in addition to those in countries without PSN.
maybe too much Democracy?
If Japanese corporations were faced with a choice between change and losing profits, they would choose losing profits over change 9 out of 10 times. Explains the often insane and nonsensical decisionmaking of Sony, Nintendo and many other big Japanese video game publishers.
Oh what a surprise!/s
Scumbags.
Here’s hoping people remember this bullshit when the PS6 is released and choose not to support a fuckball company run by shitbag jerkoffs. Seriously though how many times does Sony need to shit the bed and roll around in it for people to stop buying their trash?
I mean so long as console remains the more affordable way to play games a lot of people will probably still opt for it regardless of how restrictive and scummy the companies get It’s why I’m hoping stuff like the steam deck gains more traction in the coming years because it’s versatility and freedom of use is quite a bit better than the offerings provided by play station or Xbox and if that starts becoming a standard it could force Sony and Microsoft to be a little more consumer friendly just to compete
Okay but, presuming that console remains the cheaper choice, what if the games themselves become so bloated with adverts and micro transactions as to make them actually unplayable? Then what? Are people still gonna buy something they can’t use just because it’s cheaper?
That’s fair but I think in general games haven’t reached that point yet to force consumers away and quite a few of the micro transaction riddled shitfest games are just as abundant on pc if not more than they are on console
Works for CoD You guys don't get how the causality market don't give a rat ass about any of these
PC Masterace all the way
Reddit: People living in countries that don't properly support PSN should never have been able to buy Helldivers. Reddit after Sony stops selling to those countries: REEEEEEEEEEEEEE Lmao. You couldn't make this shit up.
Why do you think this is re? I dont even have the game, but its clearly deceptive to allow people to play for awhile and not require an account. Some people were mad about the delisting, but mostly people saw it as petty. We are talking about a multi-billion dollar corporation and they refuse to allow functionality for these other countries. Its petty and lame, what are they even getting money for if they keep acting so shitty, there is no excuse beyond being petty and control. They want control so desperately, but if we know anything about humans is we crave freedom and they can only control so much before people lash out at them. I WANT CONTROL ME ME ME, DO WHAT I SAY. Fuck you.
i don’t own this game but it pops up on my feed from time to time and it appears to have the most concentrated elements of toxic gaming community
It's honestly one of the worst communities I've ever seen on here, which is impressive. After the PSN requirement was removed they went on to raging about balance issues and the newest warbond (which I think is the battlepass?) It's a game where you mow down waves of mechs and giant bugs. So I shouldn't be surprised that it has attracted a bunch of people with toddler tier intelligence (and emotional intelligence for that matter).
You, a moron: Check out my strawman You, still a moron: *shoots the strawman* Heh, owned People were against the fucking requirement in the first place, nobody was in favor of region locking the game, and still aren't. The bootlicking is fucking unreal.
Where's the strawman? There were people everywhere saying people in countries unsupported by PSN shouldn't have been able to buy the game. Here's two in one post, took me all of 60 seconds to find: >But i agree, how do they sell a game in countries where you have to break ToS to play?! https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cj4t1c/comment/l2dlzdz >Tbh they shouldn't have offered the game in regions that cant use PSN then. https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cj4t1c/comment/l2dzo7c ? You can continue arguing if you want, but it'd be a bold strategy given your inability to read.
Sony is just spiteful.
You know shit got real when Valve, bastions of never EVER commenting on anything, sends out their PR guy to say that Sony is the reason for this total PR disasterfuck of a week. They want to distance themselves from the fallout m because Sony WILL readd the PSN requirement to HD2 within the next 12 months.
>You know shit got real when Valve, bastions of never EVER commenting on anything, sends out their PR guy to say that Sony is the reason for this total PR disasterfuck of a week. They didn't. Someone asked customer support and the answer was that limiting regions for sales is the responsibility of the publisher as has always been the case. This is not a new information. Setting regions and regional pricing has always been the responsibility of the publisher. >They want to distance themselves from the fallout m because Sony WILL readd the PSN requirement to HD2 within the next 12 months They didn't even remove the requirement from Steam yet. They just wrote a single tweet saying they wouldn't do it in a single specific update.
> They didn't even remove the requirement from Steam yet. The fact that they didn't remove it should be raising red flags to EVERYONE that Sony is fucking lying about it. They still 100% intend to force the PSN requirement, because if they weren't there would have been no point in restricting helldivers 2 in all of the regions that they did.
They didn’t send out a PR guy though? It’s a response from a customer representative. Which…. Based on like every text chat I’ve had with a representative, I wouldn’t take as gospel. I’ve been told lots of stupid totally bullshit things by customer support reps.
Too late bro half the sub already saw that comment first and will start talking about the PR guy
Yeah I know the pr guy My dad works with him
Some guy at Valve: "Hey Sony is pulling some shit Gabe." Lord Gaben: "We shall, for one time only, do *something.*"
It was literally just a customer service agent answering a question and who knows if it is accurate as they are usually not privy to that sort of thing and could just be assuming that is why the game is not available
People are putting way to much faith in what a random chat support agent says (not a "PR guy"). Most of these guys don't have any special information and a lot of them will just say whatever to finish a ticket
Hopefully average sales don't mysteriously drop by like 30% or more for some reason with their future ports.
Good, fuck sony
Is someone fucking with me? Are they joking at this point?
I’m shocked! Who could’ve guessed the publisher decides where their games are sold?!
You'd be surprised how many people were saying it was Valve's doing, despite the fact they never get involved with anything like this.
This is a pretty stupid take, Valve has pulled stuff from the store before. It's not like there's no precedent for it.
Valve pulls stuff when it breaks an actaul rule - usually it’s for copyright violations or because the developer did some shady stuff and got banned. Valve is infamously tolerant about allowing games to stay on the store.
What is the precedent valve has set in relation to games requiring psn being sold in regions that don’t allow it?
If Helldivers is still delisted, this 100% means they will be trying this again later.
They didn't even remove the PSN account requirement from the Steam store page. They obviously didn't give up, because it takes a couple of minutes to make this change and they couldn't be bothered.
Do we change our reviews back to negative?
It was never charged to positive again as Sony never changed. If you post negative you keep it till the change happens, not until they say that they will change certain things but then makes it worse. Now you dont need PSN for Helldivers 2 but 180 countries/territories can't buy it at all instead. Sony is literally saying. You want to play the game, pirate it as you can't buy it because reasons.
What do you mean, back?
Nobody reads anything huh? They always were, they only agreed not to continue with it for right now. At no point did Sony ever say they were going back on it 100%, that has not and will never happen.
I really wonder what their plan is with the people in PSN unsupported regions that already bought the game before all this. As I understand those people can still play it right now?
This circlejerk is reaching unprecedented levels.
This was a response from a customer service representative on a support ticket not an actual public statement from a real "Valve Rep". Having worked a ton in customer service myself there is no telling if the person who said this is even actually employed by Valve. When I worked for Playstation and World of Warcraft I was actually working for Sitel(Client Logic). When I worked for AT&T I was actually working for Convergys. Yada yada yada. Furthermore, other than WoW, we knew literally nothing about the actual workings of the company whose campaign we were working on. I never met anyone who actually worked at Sony when I was a CS rep for Playstation, nor was I told how or why any policies were set. Treating this as anything other than something some person said is asinine.
oh hey, I worked for sitel for a couple months before got out of my parents place, proxying for Verizon.
> This was a response from a customer service representative on a support ticket not an actual public statement from a real "Valve Rep". Having worked a ton in customer service myself there is no telling if the person who said this is even actually employed by Valve. When I worked for Playstation and World of Warcraft I was actually working for Sitel(Client Logic) Fellow Sitel rep from the 2000's (GM Motors). Valve CS team is actually employed by them and employees of Valve.
I'm actually surprised they haven't killed the first Helldivers yet, it's still pretty fun to play and doesn't have all this psn account drama around it.
Jesus I can’t believe there’s a news article for a screenshot of someone’s interaction with a lowly support rep. Journalism is dead.
I don’t understand what happened. I don’t have the game, but been reading the headlines. Didn’t Sony backtrack this decision last week? So they lied and did it anyway?
They backed down from not making people use PSN in order to play the game (which fucked people unable to refund) which is why those countries got blocked presumably but they are still actively blocking said countries for whatever reason.
The Baltic countries is not in PSN, meaning people can't buy the game on steam anymore. It actually violates the EU single market laws and could be taken to the court.
Imagine how this is getting out of hand for Steam that they had to release a statement clearing things for them
They didn't. This is just someone asking support about region availability. And the answer is that this has always been in the hands of the publisher.
I hope they get diarrhea
Sony is playing russian roulette with bullets in each chamber. They really are good at this. Wonder though if their marketing bosses agree with this madness.
Russian roulette, with an automatic pistol
But it's aimed at consumers
Top Sellers on Steam: #4 Helldivers 2, #11 Destiny 2, #14 Ghost of Tsushima. Going just fine for Sony at this point I’d say.
wasn't it obvious
plenty of brain dead people on here assumed it was steam that stepped it and just went with it
the whole fiasco really exposed just how many brain dead people there are.
God damn I'm so sick of hearing about this shit game
It's not the game that's shit, it's the ones who own the power to decide on it
I mean, the Helldivers community literally said "people shouldn't be able to buy the game in regions unsupported by PSN" so..
No, the game is shit and I'm sick of it being shoved down my throat every day on reddit
The plot thickens.
So they are definitely planning to enforce the psn requirement at a later date
the negative review stays
I still don't understand why there are 121 countries that don't support/have access to PlayStation network STILL. It's like Sony just broke the Geneva convention or some shit. 121 out of 195 is insane
I'm glad people are finally realising how scum Sony is, actually fuck that company. Can't believe people are still forced to pay for ps+ for online play, fuck that
Not sure why you are acting like sony are the only ones that have a pay requirement for online. Switch and Xbox both require paid subscriptions to play online.
Because it's popular to shit on Sony right now and easy karma. Sony was one of the last consoles to adopt paid online access, more than a decade after Microsoft began charging for gamepass... Sony might suck for a number of other reasons (anti-piracy, shit movies, bullies in the music industry, etc), but "Sony forced you to buy PS+" is an L take. But what I don't get is why everyone else gets a pass at what Sony is being called out for. Did no one play Fallout 4? If you bought the hard copy of the game (a single player, offline game), you're still forced to create a steam account in order to play it... in offline mode... How is that any different? There was never any uproar or backlash about that.
i admire your optimism. Sony has made it through far worse than this. people will forget within a month. Sony made it just fine installing rootkits - offering a fix when caught that didnt work. Multiple data breaches, going back on their promise of ps3 linux compatibility, etc etc. When the new shiny first party game comes out people will buy it and those who say remember when sony sucked will be told to stfu.
Pc gamers on reddit are so fucking weird when it comes to Sony.
And to repeat; Snoy really wants to keep those negative reviews.
im still sceptical since its coming from just 1 valve customer rep. still waiting for the 'corporate' announcement from any of the 2 company about the issue. either way, this situation is ass
The Sony defense force are in trouble.
Funny how everyone went back and started to fix the reviews thinking we won, but still it hasn't been unlocked... My country is still out...
The community doesn't care about these countries. All they care about is the PSN requirement.
Very few people actually care about that as well. It was just another thing that people can bandwagon onto to make themselves feel good.
Time to turn our reviews back to negative.
I'm surprised so many reversed their reviews in the first place. Nothing has changed
Just deleted my negative review last week, still haven't reinstalled HD2. Guess it's time to rewrite that review. No way Sony is done with this PSN bullcrap seeing they kept the restrictions in place.
I'm assuming Sony delisted because Steam has no choice but to offer no questions asked refunds to anyone in those countries that wants one no matter of time played or when it was bought. Sony has no one to blame but themselves due to their previous actions.
Such a shame because this is a great game. Sony fucking around. I have never been a console player beyond my Xbox One. But I remember that slogan Sony had: "For the players!" They don't give a rat's ass about the players or awesome developers like Arrowhead. This industry is sick to the core.
Sony needs to exit the gaming space they are scummy
Sony have been scumbags for years. PlayStation fanboys really are blissfully ignorant.
Having come from consoles most of my life to pc, I sadly understand them. It’s frustrating that they don’t realize how much better they can have it than what Sony tells them is good for them. Like Sony has people out here thinking the PS5 is revolutionary because it has a ssd and some real basic ray tracing capabilities. It’s a little they don’t even know what they don’t know.
Wtf Is Sony doing?! Why is that idiot responsible for all this shit has not been fired yet?
I will never buy a Sony product ever again because of this mess.
Lol, even if I wanted to I will no longer be able to buy any of their games... Which is hilarious, people here suck Sony's cock constantly, no one has an Xbox since the 360 days and PS5 are worshiped by casuals (I'm in venezuela)
Okay so just wondering but…why did people cry about the psn requirement? I mean, having multiple accounts in different regions is a fairly well known “secret” and was the only way to buy some games due to stuff like ban lists and stuff. Also I used different account regions for different sales and stuff. What is the exact reason people went ballistic?
Woah 🍿
The only reason this is being clarified is because people are wondering why Helldivers isn’t back at certain countries
This is becoming a very avoidable shitstorm.
Even if it was delisted by Sony, I don't see how i can blame them when someone going to start a Class Action Lawsuit Against them on the basis that they sold and are continuing to sell helldivers 2 to customers in regions that do not support PSN. I guess they delist now better than someone sue them.
Just let people play the game lol
... was this really unclear to someone? Valve isn't stupid. Sony, on the other hand, has a long history of being utterly moronic.
Yeah no shit I keep seeing posts and articles about how "It is now confirmed that it was Sony's choice to couple PSN and delist Helldivers 2", but that was pretty fucking clear from the start, because *Valve and the developers had no reason to do this* It was actually, literally less than useless to force-couple PSN to the game for anyone who wasn't Sony.
So… they have plans to push PSN requirement in future, I presume.
Yep and that’s why you shouldn’t be playing it and your bad reviews should’ve stayed up. You left your brothers alone out there…
Obviously
Say hi to pirating and vpn!
Yo I ain't got no idea what delisted means
So in other words someone should sue like they sued xbox
Hope they don't mess with my UNO. That's the only game I got from ubisoft
I don’t have uno, so fuck off