Color me impressed that the gaming community actually cares about this. Certainly more egregious abuse has been levied at them in the past and ignored.
Yeah compared to rootkits, micro transactions, unfinished games at launch, publisher launchers, seems there’s no shortage of things to whinge about in the current gaming space.
This game has a couple of those things but generally has been the best co-op shooting experience since Left for Dead 2 to me. Helldivers 1 was a blast too though.
I feel like the level of whiplash this game is getting is similar to that of Cyberpunk but I could be exaggerating. If the game wasn’t so successful at checking people’s boxes at the outset, I think we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. It being so popular is why there are a ton of people freaking out. I’m not saying it’s not warranted, just observing.
Needless to say, Sony is never going to allow an account linking grace period in any of their games going forward. It looks like they gave the kids candy and then took it away, better for them to just not give the candy in the first place.
Edit to add: I also find it hard to stomach the amount of ire to some degree because the creative devs had nothing to do with this and clearly put a ton of energy and love into the game. They even have a unique connection to the community through the bespoke game master, Joel. I’m pretty torn about it: I want the gaming industry to stop this full speed charge toward enshittification like, literally, every other aspect of life now. But I don’t want developers to have to not only worry about mass layoffs and internal industry enshittification on top of reactionary blowback from the people they make the games for.
I will say I have the luxury of living in a country that’s supported by PSN and already have an account, so it colors my opinions.
If it makes you feel any better, one of Arrowhead’s community managers specifically said to take the anger to steam. It makes it very public that people are unhappy, and it’s more likely to get Sony to change the policy. So the devs are aware of why this is happening, and it appears that to an extent at least, support the negative reviews
I’ll have you know this is oppression worse than what people of color experienced during the antebellum south. By God it might even be worse than the Holocaust.
Honestly I’m more annoyed by the rootkit “anti-cheat” the game uses, than this Sony action. It’s easy enough to make a burner email account for Sony, and for better or worse, I’m not in one of the countries impacted.
They DEFINITELY need to refund all players that are from newly blocked countries - anything short of a full refund is unacceptable, but it’s not like people have cared that PSN is unavailable in Nigeria before this point.
All that said, I love seeing the community putting Sony’s feet on the fire for implementing even mildly anti-consumer BS. I just wish the outrage was more consistent
Honestly I’m more annoyed by the rootkit “anti-cheat” the game uses, than this Sony action.
Exactly. Little/no backlash when the game was announced with these anti-features. It’s not even a competitive game. If one of my teammates was cheating I’d probably just laugh.
Not saying I don’t think they deserve to be upset, it’s just strange when and what they choose to be upset about.
It’s easy enough to make a burner email account
Except it is because you have to connect said account to your Steam account.
another one big thing is those of us who care just straight up don’t buy the game, and without buying the game we can’t leave a negative review, and we moved on and not talked about it anymore.
What happened here is affecting people who have spent money on this game, who can leave review and actually cannot just walk away without having your spent money thrown into the void.
Yeah I was actually baffled by the lack of backlash for that, as that was much worse than the PSN account requirement issue, at least data/privacy wise.
Right? This game requires users install a kernel-level anti-cheat in order to run. That’s a huge privacy and security risk just to play a non-competitive video game. Nobody seemed to care about that, but signing up for PlayStation Network? That’s where gamers draw the line!
I mean, I’m glad they’re finally pushing back against terrible corporate decisions but what set them off is puzzling.
The difference is everyone CAN install a bad anti-cheat, or decide to not do it.
But if people who bought the game suddenly CAN’T legally play it anymore, because PSN doesn’t allow accounts in their country, they don’t even have a choice.
Selling the game in those regions in the first place was deeply wrong, but then taking away the ability to play AFTER they sold it to people, that’s a bridge too far.
And we’re not just talking about most of Africa (not that that would be less bad), we’re also talking about countries like Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, those are EU members, how is there no PSN available there?
It’s not about anticheat per se but about kernel-level anticheats, which are just overkill in a PvE game. I’m not sure about the other games you mentioned, but at least Apex has no kernel-level anticheat.
For me personally, it just got to me that Sony gave negative shits while Arrowhead was fighting an uphill battle getting their game playable in the face of overnight success, and now that everything is great and the hard work is done, Sony’s seeing dollar signs and pushing their fucking corpo bullshit on a studio that sees zero benefit and suffers all the fallout. They’re all too happy to shit where Arrowhead eats and it pisses me off.
Yeah but it’s been said before: this is not the 1st or the 14th game to required 3rd party fuckin’ accounts for no reason and received very few complaints.
Usually it’s forced at launch so if people don’t like it they can refund immediately. This is an odd situation where it went from being skippable to suddenly a requirement. People got used to not needing another account for the game.9
If people could play without it then it wasn’t required. Especially if the majority of the time the game has been active it hasn’t been. So in the eyes of consumers it wasn’t required. EULAs or whatever is only something companies clutch onto.
Not everyone buys a game immediately at launch. So doesn’t matter. There were enough people that could as their first play through that game wasn’t even region blocked.
It’s no accident that many of these games are releasing their anti-features only after millions have purchased them and missed their return window.
EA did the same recently with Kernel anti-cheat in games they haven’t serviced in years, games that actively cannibalise their latest titles!
Less players means less server running costs. Helldivers 2 might turn back or end up with this disastrous policy (for consumers) but until we have regulations on this, many companies will see the benefit of rugpulling software.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game on Steam with “Overwhelmingly Negative” reviews before. Usually “Mixed” is already a good indicator to leave your hands off a game.
That’s because there’s a review count requirement for both the extremely good and the extremely negative level. So you can’t buy your own game, review it, and have it be overwhelmingly positive because the only review is positive. Thing is, bad games tend to not get bought by many people, so overwhelmingly negative is rare. So yes, mixed reviews are already damming.
It not being enforced seemed to make people think that now they have a right to be mad about it.
I just don’t see a case for this upset. What am I missing? The requirement was spelled out the whole time.
All I see is people not reading the not-fine-at-all print and then being upset when the rule starts being enforced.
I honestly don’t understand the problem here.
Now why it was offered for sale in regions that can’t use PSN is a mystery. Those accounts should definitely be refunded beyond the “normal” refund window and Steam needs to pay attention to that kind of thing a lot better than this. They wouldn’t have necessarily known that the account wasn’t possible for them, so that’s totally understandable.
But for those who are in a country that can get the account, I just don’t see a leg for them to stand on here.
If I’m missing something here please tell me. I love using my pitchfork. But I just don’t see justification here specifically.
Sony has been hacked half a million times, why should I give them more data when they’ve shown the game doesn’t need the link to function perfectly fine? This is all data collection bullshit and the more we allow it to happen, the more normalized it becomes, the more people like you “don’t see a leg to stand on here”.
I don’t understand feeling those things and then choosing to buy a Sony game that requires a Sony account, normalizing and supporting such practices. Giving people money is far more of a normalization tactic.
I didn’t, that mention said it was potential some games might have PSN linking on Sony’s side, and I didn’t see any such actual requirement on the game itself. That’s why I refunded my game when this started, this is nonsense and I won’t support it.
Right? I was too lazy to double check, but yeah, the original claim seems absurd considering it’s missing at least the top 5 most populated countries representing nearly 4 billion people.
You know your not being snarky big dev defender saying this right? You are aware the actual devs, the creators of the game have asked people to review bomb it. This is the major order right now. It’s to give the devs leverage to get Sony to back the fuck off.
Spitz is also the pos who told people to just refund and leave. Now they wre doing damage control acting like they are on the players side. The devs are not the good guys here just smart enough to act like they are
I really couldn’t care. It’s as easy as using making an account. People really have nothing else better to do with their lives. In fact, most people do, that’s why steam charts haven’t reflected any change.
You realize about 1/3 of all players physically cannot make a PSN account, right? This isn’t just ‘gamers having nothing better to do with their lives’, it’s an actual legal and economic issue.
It’s insane to me that this is a hill Sony is willing to die on. So much goodwill to throw away just to collect a bit more data on users.
Just remember, if they’re willing to enforce this nonsense, you can be sure that there will be more nonsense to come. “Sorry everyone, Sony decided we need lootboxes! But our team is on the side of the players!”
I hate modern AAA games, I’m gonna go try out that new Stardew Valley update.
Someone high up will probably lose a lot of face if it doesn’t go through. I’m assuming someone looked at numbers in a spreadsheet and asked why on earth do they have a huge pool of data they can’t legally use to enhance their ad targeting - when the developers said it might be a problem with our users they said fuck them, just ram it through. How do they backpedal without looking like out of touch idiots?
It’s not even much data at all. A game dev friend of mine took a look at what is shared through Steam’s own API, and it’s just a unique ID basically verifying that the steam account belongs to that steam user. The worst they can do with that is ask if the user already owns this or that game, likely just from the same publisher.
They probably just want the ability to better ban people if they are griefing other players (or make sure people can’t cheat their way to more super credits)
The whole thing is such a nothing burger from sony’s part, it makes it even more absurd that they’re doing this!
If I had to guess, I’m guessing it would add another layer that MOST griefers aren’t willing to go through, but let’s be honest… Look at the shit show here. No amount of ban control has to be worth getting your game delisted in 170 countries :P
Honestly I’m scared for Destiny 2. The game’s on the verge of death already and it’s just awaiting a nail in the coffin, which Sony could deliver at any time.
did you happen to miss when they made the original content and the first couple dlc’s unavailable to play and refused to give refunds for it? Bungie can fucking die in a hole and destiny 2 has been a trash fire for years already
Does goodwill even really mean anything? I keep seeing the arguments that say “X company is cashing in their goodwill” etc. But I honestly don’t think the average person who plays AAA games give a shit about a company’s track record. If that was the case Nintendo would’ve bankrupted by now. People will probably preorder the ultimate super deluxe edition of the PS6 or god of war as soon as sony announces them.
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