I'm getting a lot of mixed information right now so take what I say now as rumours until there's official news:
There is theory this actually Steam flexing their muscles essentially taking the game off the countries where PSN aren't available to ensure THEY aren't legally responsible in any way if any lawsuits happen because of this (Sony can say ToS but that means shit in an actual court case) and keep the hate directed at Sony. Supporting this is rumours that Steam is offering refunds for ALL affected players of PSN denied countries.
I've also heard that apparently they may be no longer making it a requirement for PSN to play Helldivers 2 in those countries, but if they don't need to do it because they CAN'T get PSN, why enforce this at all?
A lot of the information coming out suggests this was at least 90% Sony because guess what's coming up later this month? The investor calls about how the company is doing so my guess, some over zealous executives tried to strong arm the Helldiver players to join PSN to pad their numbers before the call, not expecting or caring for this reaction.
If that's the case it pisses me off more as ANOTHER example of Sony mismanagement when you could've simply offered a 'PlayStation exclusive cosmetic bundle if you join and link for free with PSN' with ZERO backlash, this might have shaken trust so much that you killed a cash cow game.
True but if the removal WAS done by Steam, this could be not just protecting themselves legally but also opportunistic retaliation and setting a line in the sand.
In the past, I don't think Steam had the leverage or power to tell publishers not to do that for fear of losing games being published on their site.
Current day, we see how MASSIVELY bad all game studios and publishers are doing financially thanks to both ideological decisions and mismanagement. Might be the perfect opportunity to do this now right when Sony made the biggest blunder with a once praised game when they have the maximum leverage and Sony have little to retaliate against since their other games have been suffering thanks to their mismanagement.
If the removal was done by Steam, it opens Steam up to a lawsuit from the publisher. For a non-valid reason, they restricted it to a number of countries for their own business gain at the cost of the second party's income. That is a form of tortuous interference, and Steam would be liable for all the refunds and all the lost potential sales.
Steam is stupid, and has more than a few danger-hair DIE types, but I don't think they're quite so terminally stupid as to do that.
Not that I know the finer points of business or contract law—or whatever contract Steam may have in place specifically—but I would think "you made it so that the people here literally cannot use this product, we cannot sell it to them because of that" should be a valid reason.
"We aren't obligated to continue to sell a non-functioning product that could open us up to legal liabilities" should be somewhere in Steam's contract, one would think.
It's a Sony published game but Steam is just too big a market anymore so they thought they'd use it to try to drive traffic back to psn and whoops it backfired.
You underestimate the blindness in the exec and exec ass-licking class at all the tech companies.
I guarantee that some internal pitch said, we can get everyone signed in, and then use 'AI' with their info to.... $$$$
The execs across the board are chasing always online data slurping to get in on AI, and damned be choice or privacy or legality because we have fuck you money.
Totally agree. Microsoft is trying to force you to use a Microsoft account to sign in. Everybody wants you to sign in. Their shit services competing to sell our info. I can't even adjust my headphones' settings without logging in to some craptastic Arctis account.
I was seeing that opposite. Threads posted less than 30 minutes after it was removed from those countries lead everyone to believe that Sony had manually done so after it was pointed out to them that it was a problem with possible legal ramifications.
Also games that are removed from Steam entirely often get "refund guaranteed" status for people who bought them, so that's likely why all those countries are getting that shit instantly.
'PlayStation exclusive cosmetic bundle if you join and link for free with PSN' with ZERO backlash
Considering they did that with Spiderman already and it did in fact have zero backlash, I'm guessing the numbers who did it weren't enough for them.
Considering they did that with Spiderman already and it did in fact have zero backlash, I'm guessing the numbers who did it weren't enough for them.
Which Spiderman game as if it was the first one then I'd be surprised if they didn't get at least 10% getting PSN accounts unless thanks to their security being shit their reputation is too bad.
If it's the second where we had butterface MJ and more push on Miles, yeah I can see less joining off that.
The premise of your argument is that investors are bumbling morons who have no idea how things work and if you just wiggle big numbers in front of them then they will go "oooh ahhh" and just keep pouring in money.
I would imagine a single investor have enough grey matter to stand up and ask:
"You wiggle the surge of new PSN accounts but I also noticed you forced PSN requirement in place that didn't need it before. Am I supposed to interpret that as some promise of future PS+ subscriptions?"
People still invest in Disney 'subverting' old established franchises when they actually list recently to a re-release of the Phantom Menace to celebrate 25 years since it released....
There ARE a lot of investors who don't fully understand the industries they invest in only 'want number go up', it's why we constantly have bubbles from the live streaming bubble to in gaming everyone rushing for a live service despite them having the highest failure rates.
No idea. But as others have pointed out requiring psn but still selling it in countries which don't have psn service available is a huge legal fuck up. Could be either side covering their ass now
As little as I use Reddit, there have been people making posts there that they're contacting lawyers (and governmental oversight authorities in the EU) about suing Sony. Apparently the EU (in one of the rare cases that it's beneficial for the people) takes a pretty hard line stance in protecting consumers from companies that pull shit like this.
Y'know, all they had to do was disable crossplay if you don't make a PSN account.
That's it. That's all they had to do.
Instead it's now a road mapped lesson in how to fuck it up in the worst possible way over something incredibly trivial. Even if they reversed course now, there would be mass confusion over why it wasn't done the above way in the first place. It's too late.
It's like they want it to succeed, but only on their specific terms. Otherwise, fuck it who cares. And if that's their attitude, they can keep their PS games, thanks.
I'll just play one of the 2403 games that have come out on Steam since January of this year that do not require any additional account linking. Or one of the 12,068 games that released last year. And so on... ( ref: https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/ )
Sony truly doesn't understand it didn't just shoot itself in the foot, they also gave themselves a black eye.
Always online DRM, freemium cancer and nprotect outright wrecking PCs got a minor ruckus despite being objectively far worse, but a small irritation that the 70 iq fuckwits can actually see gets the backlash the game always deserved.
At least it's a small W for consumers, but goddamn I hate how much bullshit the market tolerates.
Cyberpunk 2077 was fixed up enough that by the time I tried it some months back I was satisfied with it. It was never going to live up to the overhype train, but it was a solid single player action rpg. They basically relaunched the game alongside the anime, as well.
Massive difference between that and the many problems with helldivers, multiple of which are absolutely unacceptable. Cyberpunk was a bad release that got fixed. Helldivers has fuck you peasant levels of anti-consumer shit built into it deliberately. And cyberpunk got massive backlash for it's terrible release, while HD2 rode the retard train and paid for enough streamers to drown out voices of sanity.
Freemium shit on it's own is disgusting. The always online drm is "you don't own the game" tier, when it's a 4 player coop peer to peer game. Ridiculous. And while on principle I dislike kernel level anticheat, the one they use is far worse than the usual ones. All of that should have gotten backlash. The massive viral marketing campaign drowned it all out.
If Sony is doing it they're burning down their house on this one.
If Valve is doing it to flex on Sony and not have to spend resources dealing with Sony's drama it's probably a good move. Sony has roused tehGaben. They may be well and truly fucked.
Ease and convenience are a powerful obstacle to overcome. Steam is free and user-friendly, and it's built up 21 years of consumer goodwill. Most people just want to get their games and play.
This feels like it might be a watershed moment, however. I've had a couple of normie friends I game with ask me how easy it is to switch to GOG.
But in the countries that aren't on this list, Steam users who've poured hundreds of hours into Helldivers will have to register for PSN accounts or lose access to the game they already paid for, and Steam is refusing to issue refunds. That's the real point of contention.
Yes. The only reason they even offer the blanket refund policy is because an Australian consumer agency was going to sue them for not refunding products when they should.
What's crazy to me is that even without the bait-and-switch fiasco, requiring a PSN account just doesn't seem worth it financially. Steam has a global user base, all these countries are small, but they really add up. The top 10 countries are ~58% of steam users and the rest are in "small" countries. Then you've got a percentage of people within the big countries that don't want to create a psn account, realistically probably 1%, but that's 1% right off the top for no reason. They're could easily be losing 30% of revenue on all titles just because they want to ban people and goose their account metrics.
When Helldivers 2 was released it wasn't required that you connect a PSN account to it. So a lot of people bought it through Steam, and then Sony decided later on to make PSN a requirement. PSN isn't available in a lot of countries, so people who had already put time into the game in those countries are now unable to play. Steam is offering refunds for the game because of this, but people are still pretty upset and have bombed the game with bad reviews.
I'm getting a lot of mixed information right now so take what I say now as rumours until there's official news:
There is theory this actually Steam flexing their muscles essentially taking the game off the countries where PSN aren't available to ensure THEY aren't legally responsible in any way if any lawsuits happen because of this (Sony can say ToS but that means shit in an actual court case) and keep the hate directed at Sony. Supporting this is rumours that Steam is offering refunds for ALL affected players of PSN denied countries.
I've also heard that apparently they may be no longer making it a requirement for PSN to play Helldivers 2 in those countries, but if they don't need to do it because they CAN'T get PSN, why enforce this at all?
A lot of the information coming out suggests this was at least 90% Sony because guess what's coming up later this month? The investor calls about how the company is doing so my guess, some over zealous executives tried to strong arm the Helldiver players to join PSN to pad their numbers before the call, not expecting or caring for this reaction.
If that's the case it pisses me off more as ANOTHER example of Sony mismanagement when you could've simply offered a 'PlayStation exclusive cosmetic bundle if you join and link for free with PSN' with ZERO backlash, this might have shaken trust so much that you killed a cash cow game.
True but if the removal WAS done by Steam, this could be not just protecting themselves legally but also opportunistic retaliation and setting a line in the sand.
In the past, I don't think Steam had the leverage or power to tell publishers not to do that for fear of losing games being published on their site.
Current day, we see how MASSIVELY bad all game studios and publishers are doing financially thanks to both ideological decisions and mismanagement. Might be the perfect opportunity to do this now right when Sony made the biggest blunder with a once praised game when they have the maximum leverage and Sony have little to retaliate against since their other games have been suffering thanks to their mismanagement.
If the removal was done by Steam, it opens Steam up to a lawsuit from the publisher. For a non-valid reason, they restricted it to a number of countries for their own business gain at the cost of the second party's income. That is a form of tortuous interference, and Steam would be liable for all the refunds and all the lost potential sales.
Steam is stupid, and has more than a few danger-hair DIE types, but I don't think they're quite so terminally stupid as to do that.
Not that I know the finer points of business or contract law—or whatever contract Steam may have in place specifically—but I would think "you made it so that the people here literally cannot use this product, we cannot sell it to them because of that" should be a valid reason.
"We aren't obligated to continue to sell a non-functioning product that could open us up to legal liabilities" should be somewhere in Steam's contract, one would think.
It's a Sony published game but Steam is just too big a market anymore so they thought they'd use it to try to drive traffic back to psn and whoops it backfired.
You underestimate the blindness in the exec and exec ass-licking class at all the tech companies.
I guarantee that some internal pitch said, we can get everyone signed in, and then use 'AI' with their info to.... $$$$
The execs across the board are chasing always online data slurping to get in on AI, and damned be choice or privacy or legality because we have fuck you money.
Totally agree. Microsoft is trying to force you to use a Microsoft account to sign in. Everybody wants you to sign in. Their shit services competing to sell our info. I can't even adjust my headphones' settings without logging in to some craptastic Arctis account.
I was seeing that opposite. Threads posted less than 30 minutes after it was removed from those countries lead everyone to believe that Sony had manually done so after it was pointed out to them that it was a problem with possible legal ramifications.
Also games that are removed from Steam entirely often get "refund guaranteed" status for people who bought them, so that's likely why all those countries are getting that shit instantly.
Considering they did that with Spiderman already and it did in fact have zero backlash, I'm guessing the numbers who did it weren't enough for them.
Which Spiderman game as if it was the first one then I'd be surprised if they didn't get at least 10% getting PSN accounts unless thanks to their security being shit their reputation is too bad.
If it's the second where we had butterface MJ and more push on Miles, yeah I can see less joining off that.
Spider-Man 2 isn't on Steam yet.
Ah ok, so maybe Sony's security reputation is so shit it's a barrier for PC players to join PSN.
Yep. The Reddit consensus is basically Sony's security is shit + not wanting to deal with the 20 launchers bullshit.
Oh, like when Total War gives you a professional mod in exchange for your email address.
Yep. Several pieces of DLC for the Warhammer games can only be obtained through creating an account with them.
I have to say, I never had a problem with this before. I think I kind of lost the thread what we're supposed to be upset about, lol
Here's what I don't though.
The investors.
The premise of your argument is that investors are bumbling morons who have no idea how things work and if you just wiggle big numbers in front of them then they will go "oooh ahhh" and just keep pouring in money.
I would imagine a single investor have enough grey matter to stand up and ask:
"You wiggle the surge of new PSN accounts but I also noticed you forced PSN requirement in place that didn't need it before. Am I supposed to interpret that as some promise of future PS+ subscriptions?"
People still invest in Disney 'subverting' old established franchises when they actually list recently to a re-release of the Phantom Menace to celebrate 25 years since it released....
There ARE a lot of investors who don't fully understand the industries they invest in only 'want number go up', it's why we constantly have bubbles from the live streaming bubble to in gaming everyone rushing for a live service despite them having the highest failure rates.
Damn... the world really is ruled by rich morons isn't it?
It's also good entertainment for people who haven't bought the game.
just don't hire faggots or women, they cause all of these problems
Is this Sony coming in with the double down, or Steam removing the listing to prevent false advertising?
No idea. But as others have pointed out requiring psn but still selling it in countries which don't have psn service available is a huge legal fuck up. Could be either side covering their ass now
As little as I use Reddit, there have been people making posts there that they're contacting lawyers (and governmental oversight authorities in the EU) about suing Sony. Apparently the EU (in one of the rare cases that it's beneficial for the people) takes a pretty hard line stance in protecting consumers from companies that pull shit like this.
Y'know, all they had to do was disable crossplay if you don't make a PSN account.
That's it. That's all they had to do.
Instead it's now a road mapped lesson in how to fuck it up in the worst possible way over something incredibly trivial. Even if they reversed course now, there would be mass confusion over why it wasn't done the above way in the first place. It's too late.
It's like they want it to succeed, but only on their specific terms. Otherwise, fuck it who cares. And if that's their attitude, they can keep their PS games, thanks.
I'll just play one of the 2403 games that have come out on Steam since January of this year that do not require any additional account linking. Or one of the 12,068 games that released last year. And so on... ( ref: https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/ )
Sony truly doesn't understand it didn't just shoot itself in the foot, they also gave themselves a black eye.
Always online DRM, freemium cancer and nprotect outright wrecking PCs got a minor ruckus despite being objectively far worse, but a small irritation that the 70 iq fuckwits can actually see gets the backlash the game always deserved.
At least it's a small W for consumers, but goddamn I hate how much bullshit the market tolerates.
Cyberpunk 2077 was fixed up enough that by the time I tried it some months back I was satisfied with it. It was never going to live up to the overhype train, but it was a solid single player action rpg. They basically relaunched the game alongside the anime, as well.
Massive difference between that and the many problems with helldivers, multiple of which are absolutely unacceptable. Cyberpunk was a bad release that got fixed. Helldivers has fuck you peasant levels of anti-consumer shit built into it deliberately. And cyberpunk got massive backlash for it's terrible release, while HD2 rode the retard train and paid for enough streamers to drown out voices of sanity.
Freemium shit on it's own is disgusting. The always online drm is "you don't own the game" tier, when it's a 4 player coop peer to peer game. Ridiculous. And while on principle I dislike kernel level anticheat, the one they use is far worse than the usual ones. All of that should have gotten backlash. The massive viral marketing campaign drowned it all out.
If Sony is doing it they're burning down their house on this one.
If Valve is doing it to flex on Sony and not have to spend resources dealing with Sony's drama it's probably a good move. Sony has roused tehGaben. They may be well and truly fucked.
Steam allowed game publishers/devs to do this and many other harms but consumers still lick it's balls.
Ease and convenience are a powerful obstacle to overcome. Steam is free and user-friendly, and it's built up 21 years of consumer goodwill. Most people just want to get their games and play.
This feels like it might be a watershed moment, however. I've had a couple of normie friends I game with ask me how easy it is to switch to GOG.
Is it though? Those are all economically irrelevant countries that for the most part most people wouldn't even be able to find on a map.
Japans on that list
According to the replies on twitter they have their own regional version. That's fairly common.
But in the countries that aren't on this list, Steam users who've poured hundreds of hours into Helldivers will have to register for PSN accounts or lose access to the game they already paid for, and Steam is refusing to issue refunds. That's the real point of contention.
GOG is just as woke and their interface is garbage.
Yes. The only reason they even offer the blanket refund policy is because an Australian consumer agency was going to sue them for not refunding products when they should.
When I heard PSN wasn't available in some countries, I didn't expect it to be over 177, what a shit show.
I thought the same thing. The vast majority of countries have zero access apparently.
I'm sure EDF5 is still available for all those countries.
And EDF6 in July.
You mean the Helldivers-like EDF games?
Because those articles are already out and painful to read.
What's crazy to me is that even without the bait-and-switch fiasco, requiring a PSN account just doesn't seem worth it financially. Steam has a global user base, all these countries are small, but they really add up. The top 10 countries are ~58% of steam users and the rest are in "small" countries. Then you've got a percentage of people within the big countries that don't want to create a psn account, realistically probably 1%, but that's 1% right off the top for no reason. They're could easily be losing 30% of revenue on all titles just because they want to ban people and goose their account metrics.
i wonder if anyone's going to be made to commit sudoku over this colossal fuckup.
It's like they killed it BECAUSE it was doing well
Can anyone fill me in on the story? I don't use Steam for games nor have I played Helldivers 2.
When Helldivers 2 was released it wasn't required that you connect a PSN account to it. So a lot of people bought it through Steam, and then Sony decided later on to make PSN a requirement. PSN isn't available in a lot of countries, so people who had already put time into the game in those countries are now unable to play. Steam is offering refunds for the game because of this, but people are still pretty upset and have bombed the game with bad reviews.