Sony is barreling forward with its horribly-received plan to force all Helldivers 2 PC players to link a PSN account, lest they be prevented from playing. While some may simply not want to do that for their own reasons, the main issue is that there are a large amount of countries and regions where it’s not even possible to make a PSN account.
Sony’s current plan? Stop selling the game in those regions, which has just happened. 177 regions around the world no longer are able to buy Helldivers 2 ahead of a deadline tomorrow where new players must link a PSN account. In a month, everyone currently playing the game will need one, and it seems the players in those regions may lose access to the game they paid for and have sunk dozens or hundreds of hours into.
The wildest part of this is how it has pit Sony and Arrowhead against each other, with community managers telling players to review bomb the game to send a message to Sony (and they have, with several hundred thousand negative reviews), and the CEO, Johan Pilestedt, responding to basic questions like “will I lose access to the game?” with “I don’t know.”
While Arrowhead has now made it clear this is a Sony mandate, not anything they want to demand, they also admit that they are culpable to at least some extent. Pilestedt says he was the one who disabled account linking at launch since it was preventing players from playing due to technical issues, but he didn’t make people aware of the requirement and they knew six months before the game launched it would be mandatory.
Both Sony and Arrowhead should have been communicating about this well ahead of this announcement, which clearly they were not. Arrowhead has no idea what’s about to happen to their own players in 177 regions, and now it’s confirmed that at least for now, no new copies can be sold in those places. Pilestedt says they are working with Sony on “solutions” for this, saying “your voice has been heard.” But he says he doesn’t have the final say in the matter.
The vast majority of the blowback has been on Sony, where this is being viewed as a massive fumble for their hugely successful live game, an own-goal that simply did not need to happen. Sony says that this PSN linking is to help detect and ban cheaters, though conspiracies have arisen they’re using it to juice PSN account numbers and collect data from Steam Helldivers players. Regardless of the reason, it’s very clear that they should have foreseen the reaction to this and especially after that reaction, just let it go, rather than actively remove the game from sale from those non-PSN regions, which has just happened.
I have to believe that some sort of solution will eventually come to fruition here, and players in those countries will not lose access to the game. But this is moving too fast and it’s only getting worse by the day, and in many ways the damage has already been done. It’s stunning how poorly this has been handled by Sony, and how open Arrowhead is being about how chaotic this is and how much they’re against it. Stay tuned, as things are changing by the hour.
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