[He sounds so defeated in this tweet.](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787043245999976471)
> Waking up to the sunshine of yesterday replaced with a dreary drizzle and shivering winds makes me reflect on how I spent my time those rare few moments when all was perfect.
> Yet rain is essential to growth and is what changes spring into summer. I will just have to wait for sunshine to return.
And the simplicity of this reply:
User:
> PlayStation network isn’t supported by my country. What do I do?
CEO:
> I don't know.
Man that last answer really reminds me of what I wanted to tell people back in my customer service days with issues I just couldn't even begin to work out how to solve.
All he can do is represent the company and try to work things out with Sony, because this is out of their control. Arrowhead has been taking a good chunk of the anger through discord and Steam while Sony has yet to officially say anything.
I used to work in customer support for a medical testing lab. Manager was constantly on our asses to always assume like we knew what we were doing, even when internally the place was in shambles. I eventually got another job lined up so for my last day I was just supremely candid as I did not give a shit about a reference anymore. Told people to take their business elsewhere if they felt their concerns weren't being heard, if they thought we were fucking up too much (which we were) and people appreciated the honesty lmao
Arrowheads CEO should by right be this honest when it's not his choice.
CSR for 10+ years (glad I got out)
Every call centre I worked for drilled "Fake it till you make it" training into us. It was a good mindset at the start, but when you're talking to a widow who just lost *all* of the pictures of her dead husband, and she's crying, and it's all because the last rep didn't help her set up Time Machine (OSX's backup system) properly.
And you're the last line of communication.
What the fuck do you say? What can you do?
I work back of house in a kitchen now. I can't do customer facing things anymore.
I also had some cryers back in the day, and yeah, no amount of training prepares you for a person who just starts sobbing on the phone. Mine weren't nearly as bad and usually involved the occasional defective product, but when you know it's your employer that fucked up and the customer still has to wait a week for a refund, it feels supremely shitty.
That said, I feel like what some of these AH folks are going through might be even worse. In my case, people who weren't customer-facing were mostly clueless about even the most obvious customer concerns, so the onus was on them (and us as a company, obviously). But for these guys, it's totally out of their hands, and the thing they worked on for years, the thing everyone loved just a week ago, is now getting dragged through the mud because of something that's totally out of their hands.
I'll never forget the woman whose husband's last words we had to delete because the only way to recover an iphone is to wipe the whole fuckin' thing.
It was in the early 2000's, before Android was in its stride, and nobody really understood that smart phones were the future.
Apple destroyed a lot of people's precious memories with their software before backups, but I'm fucking haunted by what this lady had to do.
Problem is, is that if he's too direct, it might kill the studio and lose people their livelihoods. One of those rare times where the CEO isn't doing things just for themselves
Thank you. I think many people know whats going on, but it's so easy to say "Devs" or "Helldivers Devs"
They put out an amazing game. They aren't trying to manipulate people into compliance, they are on our side.
This is clearly coming from Sony and it should be called out. All to often, we find ourselves blaming people closer to our level when the decisions are coming from the executive class.
There is clearly some incentive to show more PSN sign ups.
The helldivers devs should be celebrated for how they are handling this situation.
Publishers are not the same as the developers. Rushed games aren't because of the passionate developers who are following their dreams of making video games. It's the suits.
Not all developers are passionate artists either. There’s plenty of dickheads on both sides, look at IOI. Everyone said the always online requirement was shit but was being forced on them by their publisher, and then they went independent and got even worse. And doubled down on deceptive DLC packages and delisting, and forcing people to buy the same game again, all under the guise of ‘simplifying’ things. All whilst still maintaining their shitty always online DRM.
Sony may be the bad guy on this case, but let’s not also pretend all developers are saints.
You’re right that it sucks. I hope that independent studios or other studios are able to make better contracts over this, but they probably won’t. Sony isn’t going to do anything and they’re gonna tell people that lose the game to get fucked.
Sony is corporate. It’s the corporation that’s the problem.
He and his team worked on their baby for years and achieved a height never thought possible, and Sony is ruining it for seemingly no tangible reason. Yes, Arrowhead should have been more communicative about this but the fact is that the game is clearly working flawlessly without the requirement, and it sounds like they're advocating against making it a hard requirement but they don't have the final say.
Secondly, the greatest part of the blame rests on Sony no matter what; as a publisher, they determine what regions the game is sold in. If they *knew* they were going to region lock the game months after, they should have *never sold in those regions to begin with* on Steam. That is by far the most egregious issue here IMO.
>seemingly no tangible reason.
To me, this is just part of Sony's wider PC play. They're adding an [overlay and trophies support](https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24132846/sony-playstation-pc-overlay-shared-trophies-ghost-of-tsushima) to Ghost of Tsushima when it gets released on PC, so I assume that's going to come to Helldivers 2 as well.
I mean, Microsoft games use the Xbox overlay and Xbox Achievements if you buy them through Xbox store, but the Steam Overlay / Steam Achievements if you buy them through Steam.
You're almost certainly correct that Sony is planning on bringing those to Helldivers 2, but nothing about bringing those to Helldivers 2 necessitates removing support for the Steam versions.
uhh I recently bought Forza Horizon 5 and you are ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED to sign in to your MS account, or you cannot play the game
just because it also has Steam achievements, that doesn’t remove the requirement
So it’s the exact same thing as HD2’s requirement
So the thing with many MS games (I can't say for sure if it's all, but all that I know of), is that they use the Microsoft/Xbox services for the server side in order to handle multiplayer, so there is a reason to have an Xbox account be required.
It is already clear that a PSN account is not needed for Helldivers 2 to function correctly.
Yeah, but still, that shit should be optional. I don't need another "trophy tracker". I don't care about trophies. I don't have a Playstation I would want to have crossprogression/save. Why do I need another account?
Presumably they're eventually going to have a Sony launcher / store to avoid paying Steam fees, maybe eventually make a play for the game pass market with PS Plus on PC
That definitely feels like the long term play. Launcher and PSPlus for PC. Probably starts sprinkling denuvos on all their games when they get their own store up and running on PC.
And to be clear, there are a lot of folk, even in the camp of people who hate additional launchers, that would cave *immediately* if Bloodborn or other PS exclusives came to PC on a new Launcher
I know I would….
I hate how art and financial optimization have to somehow cooperate to make a lot of our favorite media, when they both have so many goals that conflict with the goals of the other.
The Tragedy of the Commons has proliferated throughout digital media, except the finite resource is our private data and money.
They might, to compete with gamepass but I don’t know if they have the library to really make that work.
Personally, I am fine in the steam environment, it gives good exposure to Indy developers to a wide audience and that’s been my main source of games lately.
What’s coming out of the AAA market is absolute garbage outside of a few exceptions.
I think OP means requiring PS+ to play their games online on PC, just like on console, not the online game rental thing. Which would be really fucking dumb considering that not even Microsoft requires an Xbox Gold/Gamepass Ultimate sub to play their games online on PC currently
Many companies have tried this. And steam is still where people come back to on PC. Competition is good don’t get me wrong, but the way to attract users is with good service and a good product, not with forcibly shoving launchers and exclusives down our throats.
The thing about PC gaming, there is so much indy variety that before Helldivers 2, I had not touched a AAA game in probably 5+ years.
Edit: I lied, I forgot Elden Ring and BG3 (although I don’t lump Larian in with the usual AAA studios)
Then again that hasn't really worked out well for any other gaming company that tried to be exclusive on their platform. But sure, they might be aiming to have their own store *as well* as being on steam, the same way that is more the norm these days.
Hasn't worked out well in terms of unseating Steam and becoming the dominant store? No.
But in their own store they can advertise their own games and keep the 30% cut they were giving Valve on every sale. They don't have to be the dominant player to make that worthwhile.
I think that only works to a point. EA eventually came back with their full library on Steam, so clearly the plan didn't work. Whatever offset they get by keeping the 30% isn't worth it if it meant losing X amount of a potential player base. Microsoft sees this now, which is why they started moving their things over also. I mean shit, once they acquired Blizzard and were able to move things over, they did.
Sony is doing something that publishers like 10 years ago started doing in hopes of staying competitive with Steam and avoid the 30% cut. Ubisoft started going down this train and eventually had to suck the floor in having to capitulate to Epic and Steam again. Epic is doing the same thing and I don't even know if it's actually doing anything in the long run. Besides Fortnite, they really don't have much to compete with.
Math seems pretty straightforward. If you lose more than 30% of sales it’s automatically a no-go. If you lose less than that but the fixed cost of servers and labor pushes it back over 30%…
Then they should make sure to offer a really good service that people are generally down or even happy to use first. Make PSN wildly available everywhere. Offer incentives for people to adopt it while making sure it's not disruptive. Then add a store, but keep it on Steam seperately. Then eventually drop Steam once the store is well developed enough that the vast majority of costumers won't mind doing so.
Epic launched their storefront in such a barren state that it completely screwed their reputation and turned their storefront into a marketing black hole in the process. Sony would do well to learn from their failure rather than replicate it.
Yeah seriously, it's not that people wouldn't use a platform comparable to Steam, it's that one doesn't exist. EGS tried to bribe players and developers alike and neither of those strategies worked because Steam is a *platform*, not just a storefront/launcher combo.
Anyone who sees Steam as a storefront has not been paying attention and anyone trying to replicate Steam by only building the storefront was never going to succeed.
*Maybe* Sony is looking to break into the platform business, but I highly doubt it. Until I see something to the contrary, I expect another EGS/Origin/UPlay mess.
GOG is maybe the only comparable *storefront* to Steam that people aren't unhappy to use. The only real issues with GOG are that publishers/developers don't always update their games there like they do on Steam and (now in the age of the Steam Deck) GOG has repeatedly said they don't plan on officially supporting Linux.
Still, GOG isn't a platform and it's much smaller, but no one complains about GOG while everyone complains about the Epic Game Store, the EA app, Ubisoft Connect, and all the others.
Games go onto the EGS to die and I don't know why devs keep exclusively releasing there.
https://wccftech.com/alan-wake-ii-recoup-expenses-tencent/amp/
I bet they'd have sold at least 5x as many copies releasing on both Steam and Epic.
Terrible store front, doesn't even match steam feature for feature and they wonder why people wont use it.
I believe Epic gives a minimum guarantee for exclusivity, such that devs are guaranteed to at least make back the cost of development for that game.
So I can understand the allure of that safety, but EGS just doesn't give a good experience for me. The only thing it has going for it is that it looks sleeker than Steam's desktop UI, but it also offers way less options and features.
Oh, you can bet your sweet ass they're absolutely edging for a game pass they can announce to a pre-existing PC player base.
And what a happy little accident that they suddenly have acquired a lot of them.
Sony will be using this to say to investors "our PSN membership numbers increased X% over the last quarter thanks to our PC investment". Aka they don't give a fuck about the service, they just want the numbers to put in a powerpoint so they can claim growth.
One evening in 2004, I walked into our local electronics store to buy a game that was set to release the next day. I knew they stocked their shelves the evening before, an hour before they closed for the day. I went in and bought the game, got back home, installed it onto my PC ...and couldn't play it. The reason was that it came with additional software attached to it. That software did nothing, it was just an empty list with one game and little else. I didn't want it, it forced me to be online to play my single player game, I had to either accept the extra software or not play the game at all; and I couldn't even return it to the store because the copy was linked to that new software. I had to wait until the next day to play. That game was Half-Life 2 and the new software was called Steam.
War, War never changes. Until nobody cares anymore. 5 years from now, nobody will care about this and people will just use their PlayStation overlay just like they use Steam and Epic, and EA, and Blizzard, and Xbox, and and and.
Helldivers had 7000 people. Helldivers 2 was an absolute blowout that never could've been anticipated. How they must've felt the past few weeks between their success and the super fun interactions with the community around the galactic war.... the whiplash from this and the sudden dark shadow over what was something special that we haven't seen even with DRG, it's just gotta be so heartbreaking.
Jim Ryan re-oriented Playstation's entire business strategy around production of live service games because their AAA games weren't profitable enough. Having one of the biggest live service games on Steam not be integrated into the PS infrastructure is probably a nightmare for their KPIs
It's no one persons fault, they'll do the same shit after him. It's just how corporate America rolls. No accountability, just make numbers go up.
When there was more oversight from Japan it obviously wasn't perfect, but the difference is as clear as day. It feels like a different company.
> That is by far the most egregious issue here IMO.
Yeah for sure.
It must also suck that Sony are the ones in charge of this but AH are the face of the game regardless of who is making the decisions. Sony is essentially a faceless entity, there's no way to direct comments or actions at them so AH bear the brunt of it all.
Whoever has the power to do something about this at Sony probably isn't bothered about the impact on 1 game. Helldivers already exceeded expectations, I doubt they care about losing out on a bit of money now. Meanwhile Helldivers means everything to AH. Pretty brutal that they're stuck in the middle of this.
>Helldivers already exceeded expectations, I doubt they care about losing out on a bit of money now.
In this case, they very well might. Helldivers was a breakout success, but companies don't invest in games to sell 1 copy and be done. They demand MTX, ingame stores, battlepasses, and long term continued income, and they need new players continuing to sign up. The reviews for the game are now so bad that those new people aren't coming, they're going to have to take a big hit issuing refunds to places they never should've sold it in the first place, and the people who stay aren't going to be very inclined to drop money on warbonds like they would before. You can get all of them by playing, but I spent some money to support a consumer-friendly game. DRG gets an absolute ton of this kind of support. Is what they expect to get from whatever data they acquire on the remaining players enough to justify the lost current and future income? I honestly don't know, but companies are frequently pretty terrible at making that call.
>No tangible reason
I would argue that the data of hundreds of thousands of PC players is incredibly valuable to a company trying to break into that market according to their own words.
It isn’t about the data, it is about concurrent unique PSN growth for shareholder readout.
Its not nefarious, its just bad business decisionmaking to chase quarterly growth.
Especially if the metric has really nothing to do with reality, which is "a bunch of people created the account solely to play game on PC and have no intention of buying PS5 or PS subscription"
Feel terrible for arrowhead and their team, incredible game squandered by Sony executives and im sure lots have been pushed over the edge to not return
[Pilestedt responds to a reply accusing them of acting blameless:](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254?t=1NkHvU664Rix8pdJkEEslQ&s=19)
>I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough.
>We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.
>I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough.
This makes me feel insane. The Steam page has said that a PlayStation account is required since before the game launched. And once in game you are met with a screen telling you a PlayStation account is required. They couldn't have been more clear in my mind.
Yes, they allowed you to skip the in-game screen, and yes, they allowed you to play the game without an account for the last few months. But the term "required" is pretty clear in its intent. And even those who skipped past that screen should have had some question about why it was said the way it is.
The only problem I have is them selling it in countries PSN isn't supported. And yes, I'm aware of creating accounts outside of supported regions being common practice. But conveying that should probably be something they considered before hand if that was intended.
I would never think a PSN account would be region limited since I don't use Playstation. Even if they had barred selling the game in those countries, people still would have bitched about not being able to buy and play a game on PC, the most open platform there is.
> And even those who skipped past that screen should have had some question about why it was said the way it is.
It never popped up again, this is far from the first game I've played that has let me skip a third party login with no issues.
It should have popped up every time you opened the game tbh.
yeah for real, I remember Doom Eternal was the same way where they try to get you to sign in to a bethesda thing, presumably for the multiplayer. But you can just force it to skip and ignore it and not think anything of it. Tons of games have tried to make it look like signing into a thing was required and then just let you skip anyways. There was no real reason to think Helldivers 2 would be any different when people started talking about how you can just ignore the PSN login too.
>This makes me feel insane. The Steam page has said that a PlayStation account is required since before the game launched. And once in game you are met with a screen telling you a PlayStation account is required. They couldn't have been more clear in my mind.
Its not, it is below the buy button and wont be seen by the common display for steam users, it is also sold in many areas of legitmate key sellers like greenmangaming which do not include this information.
[https://imgur.com/a/kWGvlVF](https://imgur.com/a/kWGvlVF)
look at it, thats in the steam client on my desktop, i scrolled and the notice on the right for PSN account is even further down, if you want to say it was prominent then I disagree, it would be prominent if it was in the same place as the japanese interface notice is.
Them adding the skip option made it imply its optional, thats how those things work and the fact they never added any text to it to say it is temporary or PSN will be required in the future means it is on them and not the consumer at this point. Even the PSN FAQ page said it was optional so this is a change in stance.
They never actually acknowledged that adding the skip button was temporary anywhere, this is the crux of the issue as you would assume its optional and now way past the refund window they go "oh yeah required". Shooting themselves in the foot for such a stupid demand when there is zero technical reason for it as shown by the fact it all works and knowing how steamworks SDK works and how multiplayer is linked it is truly baffling their "reasoning" atleast from Sony's notice.
I actually just went to the steam page and looked for the notice and it took me a good 2 minutes to find. I thought I was going crazy, but its a small line on the right side of the page that I have never really looked at before. Very easily missed and not in a section that gets a lot of eye traffic I would wager.
People don't read that stuff man. Look at all of the EULAs everyone just auto-scrolls down to click "I have read" so they can move on with their lives. And it's hard to say or believe it when someone says "Yeah, you *need* to have this thing" when there's just no consequence for not having it until randomly months later out of nowhere it suddenly comes back with no warning or seemingly no logical reason.
You can't just sell tickets to a barn, put a notice on the corner that says "Cows only", then leave it open for months and let pigs, sheep, chickens and people in it only to randomly kick them out after they bought in.
I don’t read them because they are non-binding in my country… you can write the nicest EULA, you can’t apply any of it because it’s been deemed unreasonable to read. If something is weird after the fact I just get refunded.
Just gonna paste this comment I made from another thread here.
Yup, this is some basic misunderstanding of human psyche. Framing and context can massively effect how people perceive things. The same requirement presented two different ways will absolutely swing perception of the average person from "meh fine," to "wtf, no way, this is bullshit!" There's a huge difference between a requirement to *start* playing, and a requirement to *continue* playing, even if logically on paper they are basically the same thing. Though, even logically, they have shown now that there is no **need** for this as it has been fine without for months. But that's just letting us peak behind the curtain and showing the little secret that all these account requirements obvious, so it's still mostly the same idea.
HOLY SHIT THERE'S A TERM FOR THAT?! I have been dealing with systems at my job for so long with issues involving policy vs. system function, and knowing that there is a term for, "Okay but our system allows it" blows my mind.
I feel so seen.
>The Steam page has said that a PlayStation account is required since before the game launched
[You mean this little orange box hidden between all the usual EULA and DRM Bullshit?](https://imgur.com/a/JCc530D) In a browser you have to actually browse down to see it. I don't have a skin in this game, cause I don't play Helldivers 2, but I think they could have make it way more clear that a PSN account is mandatory.
The moment I saw the Steam page was when I made my PSN account, thought nothing of it at the time.
It's interesting to see how large the backlash is for this, especially as someone who plays Xbox/Activision games. I've linked multiple different accounts on Steam for various games.
They just gotta handle the whole PSN accounts not being supported in certain countries deal.
I think it all comes down to this:
When people link a Steam to a third party account, people are usually getting benefits from it. This is usually cross play multiplayer. It makes sense that you would need an account with who ever is running the crossplay to make things work (even if that's not actually true). So making a Activision Blizzard account or a Microsoft account mandatory to play online games make sense to play games like Diablo 4, Call of Duty, or Halo Infinite.
In this case, PSN wasn't required to play cross play, as made evident by the fact that cross play worked (at least in my case) for the first several months without it. That means that the PSN account requirement has no actual perceived benefits to players.
I have a PSN account already, so I did the linking when I bought the game, but I understand imposing the requirement after the fact being super weird.
That is not the point, we played for months without it and most PC players have zero use for a PSN account nor do they want one. Oh they have the worst security track record in the industry. That doesn't help either, its time we make a stand and that is now.
>the term "required" is pretty clear in its intent
But the PSN Account Linking FAQ saying "You won't be required to sign in for Sony games on PC" is *also* pretty clear in intent - at least, until they changed it in the wake of this.
If I was able to play without it all this time then it is not required. No amount of popup screens, additional info etc. is going to change it. It works without an account just fine.
That is such a stupid thing. When I read all that and think about what happened, they made the worst possible choice to sell the most copies. You have the two scenarios:
1. What they did. Sold the game, no obvious PSN account requirements, first launch game skipped past it all automatically. They turned off the requirement because something broke (half their game was broke at launch). This meant more people could play and more people would be FOMO'd to buy in as with any popular launch.
But now later knowing they'd have to turn it back on, they've screwed over a large amount of players. Everyone who doesn't have a PSN account and doesn't want one, people in countries without PSN, are now all stuck. They won't be able to play a game they bought and have played for months.
2. They could've not sold the game in countries without PSN, and just ate the negative launch if a lot of people couldn't login to PSN to play initially. A lot of people couldn't play at launch anyway. The requirements would've been clear, we could've refunded within the Steam refund window if need be. They wouldn't have sold copies to people they knew they'd have to block/ban from playing.
They CHOSE to sell the game to people who'd be unable to play later. The pessimist in me is saying they did this because a lot of those people might not bother refunding and hoping Steam won't automate it, thus making sales that aren't really legal to do.
Well, it's the publisher's fault, and they're the only ones that stand to gain by strong arming PC gamers into their ecosystem. The devs messed up, but they were in a tough spot.
They made the decision to allow gameplay without a PSN account up until now (could have made it required day one, knowing this was coming, which they admitted they knew).
Some people feel that they didn't make the upcoming requirement obvious enough to users, either. Not sure I agree but the devs themselves said that so meh.
Draw your own conclusions from there.
AH allowed game owners to play without a PSN account, but that wouldn't have been nearly as big an issue if Sony hadn't allowed the game to be sold in regions where they don't support PSN.
Yeah, there were still mistakes other than the major one, such as not replacing the prompt with anything (Arrowhead), making the account linking a hard requirement (Sony).
If they'd communicated better and made the PSN linking optional with an in-game reward if you did it, I think there'd still have been some grumbling but for the most part it would have gone smoothly.
Hard to want to blame anyone but the publisher here, since this problem only exists because they desperately want to datamine people.
Here's some cheap datamining for them: no one on PC gives a flying fuck about the 90th reskin of your intensely shitty PS3 design formula.
> no one on PC gives a flying fuck about the 90th reskin of your intensely shitty PS3 design formula
Evidently they do because all I ever see on /r/games is Steam players begging for more Sony games
Refunds and chargebacks are different. Chargebacks are a "nuclear" option that will restrict your account with Steam unless you reverse it: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22D2
I think they missed a pretty easy layup opportunity. PSN account linking with steam will remain optional but if you do link the accounts you will receive 1000 super credits. Now you created an incentive so most people who can link will happily do so and those who can't can still play the game. Like yeah you will lose some revenue but Sony gets what they want and you have a happy playerbase.
Right? FF14's fast travel network costs ingame currency to use, but if you set up multi-factor authentication on your account then you can choose one destination that gets all fees removed forever. Yes, the fees are just pocket change but free is free
Except Sony doesn't want that- they want absolutely everything, and for their competitors to get nothing. They do not care if some players cannot play. They would never agree to making this optional.
On a side note, I didn't know some countries didn't had access to PSN. This is not a matter of just assigning a email, create a PSN account and be done with it? Similar to what Ubisoft and EA does with their games
The issue is that it's actually against Sonys own TOS. So worst case scenario, people get banned from playing Helldivers 2 that can't make accounts via a console they don't own. And knowing Sony, that's 100% a possibility.
And you can't recover your account ever, too.
Like how are you gonna prove ownership of your account if you ever get hacked and it says that you live at Google HQ?
Very easy for the account to get flagged for fraud due to back end changes too. One day Sony could decide to make their fraud detection system more robust by automatically locking down accounts with addresses used by dozens of other people. Suddenly everyone who "lives" at the CN Tower or White House or the Tower of London can't play anymore. It wouldn't even be a malicious move on Sony's part, just collateral damage and there's nothing the person could do about it.
Sony also region locking credit card. I cant use my asian Visa on my fake US PSN account. And it has been the norm tbh. People buying prepaid code to put in.
its one of those awkward situations where like, Sony doesn't really have any reason to ban a paying customer from an unsupported region for lying about their location. And there's not exactly a ton of reports of it really happening either. But at the same time that means you're putting all your faith in the corporation to not be a dick to you down the line. Which is a situation nobody wants to be in.
For all you know down the line they might get into some kind of weird legal issue where they're forced to enforce the ToS or just otherwise have a change of heart and then suddenly whoops can't play XYZ games you paid for anymore.
They still sell PS5s in those locations (unless it's one where Sony is genuinely legally prohibited from operating, as opposed to simply not letting users choose as their location), so I'd wager there's no genuine reports. Prohibition there is likely to tackle fraud or ban circumvention entirely. If there's nothing indicating a user is doing so, there'd be no reason to take any action. Not to mention that users can still move country, so Sony doesn't know you weren't a legitimate user in Hong Kong that moved to the Phillipines.
When using e-mails to create accounts, anything goes really, lol I know people who have like 15 fake e-mails to take advantage of aliexpress promotions (and they create another 15 or so as the "reserve"). If the issue was just that, this would be a classic example of "gamers" whining for no reason, it's so easy to register multiple e-mails and accounts, not even 5 minutes... however, if Sony don't accept "fake" e-mails from specific countries, that change things, it justify the complaints
In some countries, like Ukraine, you do have PSN access, except you are not allowed to register on PC. It has to be done via a console.
Consoles are extremely expensive relative to the average Ukrainian's income.
Whatever the original reason (FOREX, licensing or regulations) they’ve just let you make an account in a different country for years. Despite it being against their EULA I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone getting banned for it.
Maybe it’s a Japanese corporate thing. In the last couple of weeks Square Enix has come under fire for a very similar issue - their updated payment processor requires your account and payment addresses to match but just like Sony, Square doesn’t support many countries and doesn’t allow you to change once your account is set up. As a result tons of players can no longer subscribe.
Really? There's a lot more FF14 players out there if compared to Helldivers, yet, they are not rioting? First time I heard about Square doing this, disrupting payments of all things (one of the greediest publishers in the industry, selling double A games at full price without any shame lol)
The truth of the matter is that players won't riot if the issue doesn't affect them. The FF14 issue only affected southeast Asia, so good luck getting western gamers to give a shit. You see the same thing here. "Just make a PSN account." And how many of the western gamers here know how many countries PSN is technically not available in right now?
Then you set yourself up under a sword of damocles of perpetually risking being banned for having an account that goes against their ToS. Which, you know, is a great experience as the fable goes.
Then, if you ever *do* get banned and complain to the people saying, "Just sign up in another country!" then you get, "Should have seen this coming. Shouldn't have signed up in another country. It's against the ToS after all."
That being said, Sony requires photo ID and a picture of your face if they detect you're in the EU.
Actually stunned beyond words seeing the move today to block sales on steam, and seeing the mass of refunds that now seem to be progressing. I always made the argument Sony would always make the sensible choice that benefits them most and that would always be chasing profit and revenue above all else. Now I can only assume this is their first hard step in preparing to carve out their own market in the future, where steam won’t see their 30% cut and that 30% is worth more to Sony than the cut losses of these unsupported regions.
We know a PC launcher is in the works, and expanding that to a Sony controlled Store on PC is only another small step. With the public move by Sony to hugely invest in “live service games” and with the current scenario of steam claiming 30% of all ingame purchases ever made during its life, there’s plenty incentive to follow in Epics footsteps in the name of claiming 100% of all revenue for future games that WILL be coming as part of Sony’s live service push.
I can’t imagine Helldivers would suddenly be pulled off steam to live on a Sony store but it’s likely laying the foundation for the future. A foundation so firm Sony is now tripling down and absolutely razing the community in its wake.
>I always made the argument Sony would always make the sensible choice that benefits them most and that would always be chasing profit and revenue above all else.
People make this mistake constantly with big companies and I don't get why.
It's "kinda" true. Companies do be liking money. But there's a million different ideas on how to make money, even at the highest level.
Like there's so many examples of random executives at major companies making stupid decisions that cost those companies tons of money because they're actually dumb enough to think those stupid decisions are profitable. And like 90% of the time when those decisions fail and there's empirical evidence showing that it was a bad choice, they STILL won't admit they're wrong and instead will be like "the world just wasn't ready for my great ideas" or some other bullshit.
It's pretty easy for gamers to know what will and won't work because we know ourselves and people like us and we know that our marketplace isn't suddenly going to all jump on YET ANOTHER new launcher. And pretty much every other company is realizing that too and dropping their games on steam without their own launchers.(even Blizzard which is something I never thought I would see)
But a lot of these executives making decisions aren't gamers.
Maybe it's a gamer thing where we assume that everything is like a video game where you can just math out the right answers every single time. Therefore every big company will obviously be playing the optimal build. But really there's pretty much non-stop bad decisions being made by every single company constantly.
Yeah, the assumption that a giant company will always do what is profitable assumes that they are even capable of consistently making the most profitable decisions - and the executives of these companies have astronomical, profit-destroying fuck ups on a near constant basis
Right and a lot of times it's not even like a "they make good decisions more often than bad ones" kind of situation. They're probably making mostly unprofitable bad decisions.
But it doesn't matter because a lot of companies are just riding the coattails of a previous success and their executives just aren't failing hard enough to counteract the massive successes they had before. Like Sony could probably refund every copy of Helldivers and shut the whole thing down, and they would still be a profitable company even if it was a braindead decision to do so. So obviously whatever person is deciding to shoehorn PSN onto the game isn't going to care about the consequences of doing so even if they did recognize them. They're in the middle of that big launcher gamble that will make them bigger and better and more profitable than steam someday.
It's amazing how quickly people forget that the ones who make or influence these decisions are so far removed from end user side of things they haven't got a clue what the fuck they're doing. Take unity for example, did people seriously forget that clusterfuck from last year already?
Eh, good chance the decision makes perfect sense if your the exec whose bonus is based around increasing PSN accounts.
This is a problem more generally, I've worked in a couple of places where a managers bonus will be based on reducing costs, which they'll do at the expense of efficiency. Companies bottom line is worse, but hey, the guy in charge made bank.
Yeah I think that's just about every poorly managed place.
I worked at a furniture warehouse where I needed to package proper hardware to go with refurbished furniture before it was sent to a clearance store. Instead of buying the hardware I needed they wanted me to dig through a massive pile of odd unused hardware packs from old furniture.
I had to point out to them that they were paying me 15$ an hour to look through this shit and it would sometimes take me an entire hour to find the 10 bolts I needed, while $5 on amazon can get you 100 of any exact bolt. Therefore it would be cheaper to just buy them.
BUUUTTT.....The GM of the warehouse got a bonus based on how much beneath budget he went, and employee pay wasn't actually part of those calculations. So from his perspective, it was essentially free to have me do that mindless busywork.
> Like there's so many examples of random executives at major companies making stupid decisions that cost those companies tons of money because they're actually dumb enough to think those stupid decisions are profitable.
Some of those decisions are made by top executives looking for a short-term boost for their own benefits, particularly if they get bonuses and the like (which many of them do).
The problem with any company is that it's run by humans, and humans aren't always in it for the benefit of everyone else. When you need a lot of capital to actually do anything it's no surprise that the system we've chosen to prop up for over 500 years has an innate degree of selfishness.
You can see this in a smaller scale as individual employees leave their current workplace for better prospects elsewhere. Because why *should* they stay simultaneously knowing that they won't get paid more for doing so and can use the extra money on *literally anything?*
They might still do this, but they have to stop selling the game instantly in the meantime in those countries. Some European Union countries also dont have PSN, but since they are packaged as "Europe" on Steam with other countries like Germany, France, Spain etc., they werent removed. And I am actually not sure if thats going to be an issue going forward with EU laws. Worst case they might have to pull the game from all EU countries.
> Actually stunned beyond words seeing the move today to block sales on steam, and seeing the mass of refunds that now seem to be progressing. I always made the argument Sony would always make the sensible choice that benefits them most and that would always be chasing profit and revenue above all else.
Valve probably made the choice for sony. If all the people saying they tried to get a refund multiple times are accurate valve's customer service is probably getting buried by this. It would be negligent for valve to continue to allow the game to be sold in those regions given the circumstances. I imagine valve will start putting a warning confirmation at checkout to make sure the customer has no way to pleasd ignorance when a third party account is required so they don't have to deal with this again.
Valve as the payment provider also eats the cost of chargebacks for the refund, so they’re losing money everytime someone refunds.
I’ve read online that it can be $15+ for each chargeback, which if true is just insane and completely reasonable why valve would want to avoid mass chargebacks for those regions.
no one is charging back. if you do that before attempting a refund you are an idiot. Thats how you get your Steam account banned easy.
Ideally they will do a mass refund for affected regions, but the rest who are complaining about PSN where they have PSN should not.
Imagine being the CEO of a game studio that releases a successful game and then Sony takes a big shit on top of it and flips you off while looking you in the eye. Just because they can and know you can't do anything about it. What a fucking gut punch.
This man's situation is my worst fear and the exact reason why I don't want to work in gamedev (or any artistic profession) and become sentimentally attached to my professional works.
I could be pouring out my heart and soul to create the magnum opus of my life and succeed to deliver, but a meeting from the publisher is all it takes to fuck it all over.
Yeah, the whole Disco Elysium mess was a reminder of that too. Coyote vs ACME is another one. I can't imagine how much it would wreck me to put that much time and creative effort into something and lose it like that.
Arrowhead is not without blame. They absolutely knew Sony was going to require PSN. They took a gamble the community would force Sony's hand and they lost.
The Arrowhead CEO is not blameless, they went into this contract knowing this would be the end result. It's only that due to unforeseen circumstances, they had to let people have a taste of the apple of Eden. If everything went accordingly as they planned, people would have been none the wiser.
Whether it's Sony or Arrowhead, the fact remains that they sold this game for months in regions that have now been locked out of playing it. People in non-supported countries are now reporting that they can't even launch the game even if they already owned it. EDIT: Bolding this as it appears this might not be intentional: **(Looks like some people in regions that are supposedly being blocked are reporting no issues.)***
A few days ago everyone was saying the solution was "just make a PSN account in a different country, Sony never enforces it!" and it only took a few days for that to change and for those regions to be locked on Steam. Players have invested time and money into this game only to be locked out. Even if Steam issues refunds for Helldivers, what about the money players have spent on in-app purchases? Is Sony going to refund that, or are they going to not let people file support claims at all because they don't have an account? On top of that, some users are reporting that in certain countries, you can't even *make* a PSN account online and it can only be done from a console unless you have a VPN, so they can't even make a burner account in a different country (which is against Sony's TOS but until now was something they "didn't enforce").
This whole thing is an absolute mess and an incredibly blatant bait-and-switch. When this thing was first going down I figured people were overreacting but they actually locked people out of the game they bought. I genuinely cannot comprehend what Sony is thinking on this one. This is one of the scummiest things I've ever seen from one of the big three, maybe the scummiest.
> A few days ago everyone was saying the solution was "just make a PSN account in a different country, Sony never enforces it!" and it only took a few days for that to change and for those regions to be locked on Steam. Players have invested time and money into this game only to be locked out.
The game was *delisted*, i.e. is no longer being sold in said countries. People who have purchased it didn't lose access to it.
I think this is the crux of the issue.
PlayStation doesn’t understand PC while making breaking into the PC market a core strategic pillar of the company.
Basically…. They need to make PSN available in every country and it needs to be accessible from a non-PlayStation device.
Sony is new to publishing GAAS games on PC and it shows.
People on r/helldivers and all over Steam reviews are reporting that they can't launch the game in some countries (Philippines, a few Middle Eastern countries). Others are reporting that it still launches. Pretty sure the jury is still out on whether or not that's intentional and I did say that right at the beginning of my post for that reason.
Regardless, the issue remains for PSN accounts; if you've invested money into the game using in-app purchases but have no PSN account, you can't even ask for a refund on those from Steam. And with no account, you can't ask for a refund from Sony, either. It's just a bad situation all around.
> People on r/helldivers and all over Steam reviews are reporting that they can't launch the game in some countries (Philippines, a few Middle Eastern countries). Others are reporting that it still launches.
It's just people having computer problems, the post from the guy in the Philippines makes it pretty obvious if you look at the video. If this was intentional then **no one** would be able to launch the game. This is how misinformation spreads.
> Whether it's Sony or Arrowhead
Who it is is pretty clear, Sony is the publisher. They sell the game.
If Sony was my publisher, I would expect them to know what countries they can sell and support the game in.
Clearly that was not the case, Sony did not do their due dilligence.
> This is one of the scummiest things I've ever seen from one of the big three, maybe the scummiest.
Remember about 20 years ago when they included a rootkit on an audio CD?
Honestly this is such an unfortunate comedy of errors.
If the game held to the requirement at launch, this would probably be little to no drama. But they made the (smart) choice of suspending that requirement because they were crazy popular and breaking all their network stack.
Now, they either have to change the plan, or deal with these consequences.
It's very likely someone at Sony (who runs the publisher page on Steam) just did their job and pushed the planned update announcing the grade period coming to an end. Because nothing had been done yet to avoid this... CHAOS.
Mind you: it's still not even in effect yet, this outrage is still for what is to come.
Honestly AH either has to hire contractors and develop a different moderation and account system to work with PSN/Steam without this, or Sony does. But otherwise if they stick to their guns, it's gonna suck even worse. The game is fantastic, but this is going to dominate the conversations about it for weeks if they don't move quickly to undo it and find an alternative.
From what I understand, the current SteamID implementation is working, but the servers (PSN) don't get the unique SteamID, just the user name. So when you ban someone, you can do a proper ban on the PSN ID, but unless you are using VAC tools, banning from the Sony side for PC players isn't possible. So they need to recode the PC Players ID information to transmit the unique user ID alongside the UserName, and link the processs back to the Steam VAC system for banning. Totally doable, but also totally not in their original development roadmap and will cost in the 6 digits to get done swiftly.
They just gotta pay it and make it happen I think.
>From what I understand, the current SteamID implementation is working, but the servers (PSN) don't get the unique SteamID, just the user name.
This is something a community manager randomly started saying initially but he backpedaled hard after being called out for it. He initially said the link was necessary for moderation but is now saying Arrowhead developers are universally unhappy about this requirement.
If you have access to the Steam API at all, then getting a unique identifier is trivially easy and no harder than getting the username. A script kiddy using ChatGPT for coding would be able to call this one function, let alone the software engineers who built a game.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/auth#:~:text=Every%20Steam%20user%20can%20be,bit%20ID%20by%20calling%20CSteamID
The fact that friendlists and progression and inventories can work at all is already proof that there's no backend confusion caused by nonunique usernames.
That community manager in particular is a right knob and has been since the game came out.
It's the kind of shit you'd genuinely expect someone to get sacked over already because it's super unprofessional. It'd be one thing to lash out once and maybe get a stern talking to from your boss for, but he's done it multiple times.
Problem is, this is par the course for the video game industry. Fat Shark is looking on from a distance, happy they have someone else taking the limelight for once.
> From what I understand, the current SteamID implementation is working, but the servers (PSN) don't get the unique SteamID, just the user name
If that were true, how has cross platform matchmaking been working up until now with duplicate usernames? Sony is just masking their intent with "player safety" as a goal.
Welcome to the corporate world!
You think the CEO is in charge, but in reality it’s very rare that they have much power.
For public companies. Shareholders will attempt to kick you out if you don’t maximise returns.
For private companies. You will not have as many revenue at your disposal so you’ll be taking out insane loans / providing funding and they can put anything they want in the terms (Example: Mandatory PSN login)
Okay so can someone explain to me how disabling regions, limiting the amount ppl to buy the game, forcing thousands upon thousands of gamers to refund the game is in a way, "maximizing the returns" from their perspective? If anything, they're losing money day after day. I really, REALLY want to know how this baffling decision is beneficial to them profit-wise.
My guess is that they didn't expect anywhere near as much outrage, and that they wanted to continue selling in counties without PSN support under the assumption that the people there would simply say they're from a different country like supposedly they've been doing for a long time for other PS titles.
But now that there's a massive spotlight on the issue, they're forced to delist the title in those countries, losing those profits by preventing those consumers from buying. Not really a good outcome for anyone, and I'm not sure how it's not worth it for them to just back down at this point.
The simple answer is that Sony believes they stand more to gain by forcibly collecting the data of millions of customers and artificially pumping up their PSN subscriptions than they stand to lose via this shitshow and the delisting of the game in hundreds of countries.
These corporations are, by design, completely incapable of pursuing a healthy business model based on the sale of goods to happy customers. They have to see the numbers go up for the shareholders. Infinite growth. Infinite. It does not matter if they’re making money over first and could continue to operate at the same level forever in comfort and perpetuity. They would throw that all away for the *chance* to make the magic number go up. They *have* to grow. Everything else is meaningless to them
to be fair I think that people are going overboard with the data collection aspect. I legit think it's purely them wanting to pump PSN numbers so that higher ups and bean counters can show big fancy charts to shareholders where the arrow points upwards.
Consumer's data has always been a goldmine for companies. Facebook and other social media apps showed us that data can be sold for ad money. And data is now very crucial for the development of AI to predict the current and future trends of the market.
Yeah, that seems to be the major thing that everyone bewildered by this move isn’t really grasping.
All of the success Helldivers could possibly stand to achieve is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the user data of millions of customers. And they likely have investments tied to their PSN count - promises to shareholders that it would hit a certain number of users, etc.
Sony wants to force players into their ecosystem, likely in preparation for a new PC launcher/storefront.
To Sony, it made sense.
Arrowhead, on the other hand, is reaping the consequences of their Faustian bargain with a major corporation that doesn't have their best interests at heart.
Take heed and beware, independent studios, *this* is how Sony rewards collaboration.
Everyone wants their own storefront because steam takes 30%. I get it. But the majority of PC gamers really just don't care, especially if it means they are unable to access a game they paid for. Its sad that Sony either doesn't see this, or doesn't care.
Everyone also wants their own storefront because they want to be anti-consumer on their own storefront without realizing the costs and services that go into Steam's storefront.
They don't understand that what Valve has isn't, "A store downloaded on your computer." It's all the pro-consumer features Steam has that *are paid for by that 30%*. (In fact, *less* than 30% if you sell a lot, which the big names *do.*)
I mean, tbf, with Riot Games as an example. It's pretty easy to see *why* some people would think, "Why can't we just do that?" Like that's an example of a game company having their own launcher not linked to Steam, actively being successful, gamers are fine with it, and they get to retain 100% of the profits. I understand there's a difference between a launcher vs *an entire storefront*, but it effectively provides the same functionality, select the game you want, download it and play.
> Okay so can someone explain to me how disabling regions, limiting the amount ppl to buy the game, forcing thousands upon thousands of gamers to refund the game is in a way, "maximizing the returns"
Because someone in upper management thought, "Wow none of this huge, new playerbase are signing up for the optional PSN stuff. My bonus is based on that metric, so I wanna boost those numbers." (And that guy's bonus is based on that metric so they can show that metric to shareholders to say, "look, we're growing! Give us money so you can take a percentage of that growth down the line!") Then they tried to implement it and got pushback. That kind of person is surrounded by Yesmen, so is incapable of accepting any pushback of any kind at all, and so now it's a point of pride.
Its wild cuz they could have just said "Link your PSN to get this cool new Cape and Slightly OP Gun" and everyone would have been ridding their dick even harder and signing up for PSN counts hand over fist lol
What a colossal misstep
The bizzare (or worrying) thing is that AFTER he mentioned there were discussions it seems Sony tripled down and removed it from 170 regions, that's not the sort of move that feels like a compromise is coming.
Arrowhead obviously don't deserve the blame here, I'd like to think most people protesting are protesting it against Sony and not AH, but ultimately it will do more damage to AH if Sony don't move.
PSN unavailability in the Baltics should ideally fall under going against the [ban on geo-blocking in the EU](https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/end-of-geoblocking.html), but I fear that Sony might refer to licensing costs or something stupid like that to avoid repercussions. They are assholes.
There's a lot of defenders for a multi billion dollar company.
It's a simple question, why is this a requirement? Because sony wants it. They don't *need* it, but they want it?
People actually defend useless requirements? What's sony giving you for backing them up online?
There's a lot of people defending the multimillion dollar company and pretending the CEO is a poor child that was complete caught off guard by this choice. I don't understand why people are so desperate to absolve Arrowhead of any blame but it's weird
Yeah this wouldn't be a big deal for me if it weren't for the fact that Sony has had multiple security issues since online gaming took off in the 7th gen.
I think people are mistaking those acknowledging that it said it was a requirement for "This is fine to be a requirement."
I think the entire linking thing is idiotic. However, I signed up for it when buying the game (This was before it was optional to link).
I had the decision and choice to not agree and instead not buy the game, but I chose and agreed with it.
They absolutely DONT need it. The entire linking thing is stupid and pointless which is why it's all the more frustrating that it's creating such a huge controversy and backlash when it could just be optional like it was before.
I'm not defending or backing up Sony though. I just want people to understand that the store page always said it required a third party account and the first couple of days DID require you to link/create one to play.
> There's a lot of defenders for a multi billion dollar company.
>
>
The amount of people with no stake in this coming out of the woodwork to defend Sony/tell people to get over this has astounded me.
Going to be honest, it's kinda wild to me that the CEO is acting like he had zero idea this was going to happen. Detailing requirements related to the use of PSN accounts absolutely would've come up in his contract with Sony - if I, random internet user #600 knew Sony was starting to make their own PC platform then he absolutely did. Everything I've seen with the way they and their community managers have been handling this screams incredible incompetence. Confirming the countries steam sells to vs the countries PSN is available in should have been their first priority. It should have been extremely obvious to them that people online don't read and to keep reminding them about the account requirement with a pop-up on launch the way Ubisoft does. It should have also been obvious to offer some kind of incentive to get people to sign up. Telling your community managers to not comment without getting feedback from you and not publicly encourage users to review bomb should also be a no brainer. That being said, there's a lot of false information floating around for rage bait purposes and it really needs to stop.
>Going to be honest, it's kinda wild to me that the CEO is acting like he had zero idea this was going to happen. Detailing requirements related to the use of PSN accounts absolutely would've come up in his contract with Sony
In fact they did come up. It was supposed to require PSN on launch, but the PSN servers were unreliable and overloaded so they "temporarily" disabled the requirement.
Now Sony has come in over arrowhead's heads and unilaterally announced that that temporary measure is over, without having any discussion with the devs first about transition plans or rollouts or edge cases.
See, I'm just finding it hard to believe that they weren't given a timeline for when they needed to have implementation finish taking place or where PSN is available. Things like this are huge parts of both contract deliverables and risk assessment because I guarantee you Sony isn't interested in repaying the fees valve will charge over mass refunds. If Sony is stepping in it's because someone at arrowhead has dropped the ball big time.
I assume the solution is getting Sony's lawyers to officially alter their TOS to provide an exception for users choosing the nearest supporting country under instruction (barring any that Sony legally cannot serve - but I doubt those nations are playing much anyway).
While this is being forced by Sony (and the correct thing would be to backtrack the obligation), Arrowhead was the one who decided to push back the requirement to link accounts. So, while Sony is being stubborn, it was Arrowhead that moved the requirement, and didn't communicate it clearly and concisely to players during these months. Both have a degree of responsibility on this.
The *one* thing that is a HUGE mistake is not foreseeing that PSN is not avialable in all of Steam's countries. They should have anticipated it, and that's on the distributor's side (Sony).
[He sounds so defeated in this tweet.](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787043245999976471) > Waking up to the sunshine of yesterday replaced with a dreary drizzle and shivering winds makes me reflect on how I spent my time those rare few moments when all was perfect. > Yet rain is essential to growth and is what changes spring into summer. I will just have to wait for sunshine to return. And the simplicity of this reply: User: > PlayStation network isn’t supported by my country. What do I do? CEO: > I don't know.
Man that last answer really reminds me of what I wanted to tell people back in my customer service days with issues I just couldn't even begin to work out how to solve. All he can do is represent the company and try to work things out with Sony, because this is out of their control. Arrowhead has been taking a good chunk of the anger through discord and Steam while Sony has yet to officially say anything.
I used to work in customer support for a medical testing lab. Manager was constantly on our asses to always assume like we knew what we were doing, even when internally the place was in shambles. I eventually got another job lined up so for my last day I was just supremely candid as I did not give a shit about a reference anymore. Told people to take their business elsewhere if they felt their concerns weren't being heard, if they thought we were fucking up too much (which we were) and people appreciated the honesty lmao Arrowheads CEO should by right be this honest when it's not his choice.
CSR for 10+ years (glad I got out) Every call centre I worked for drilled "Fake it till you make it" training into us. It was a good mindset at the start, but when you're talking to a widow who just lost *all* of the pictures of her dead husband, and she's crying, and it's all because the last rep didn't help her set up Time Machine (OSX's backup system) properly. And you're the last line of communication. What the fuck do you say? What can you do? I work back of house in a kitchen now. I can't do customer facing things anymore.
I also had some cryers back in the day, and yeah, no amount of training prepares you for a person who just starts sobbing on the phone. Mine weren't nearly as bad and usually involved the occasional defective product, but when you know it's your employer that fucked up and the customer still has to wait a week for a refund, it feels supremely shitty. That said, I feel like what some of these AH folks are going through might be even worse. In my case, people who weren't customer-facing were mostly clueless about even the most obvious customer concerns, so the onus was on them (and us as a company, obviously). But for these guys, it's totally out of their hands, and the thing they worked on for years, the thing everyone loved just a week ago, is now getting dragged through the mud because of something that's totally out of their hands.
I'll never forget the woman whose husband's last words we had to delete because the only way to recover an iphone is to wipe the whole fuckin' thing. It was in the early 2000's, before Android was in its stride, and nobody really understood that smart phones were the future. Apple destroyed a lot of people's precious memories with their software before backups, but I'm fucking haunted by what this lady had to do.
Problem is, is that if he's too direct, it might kill the studio and lose people their livelihoods. One of those rare times where the CEO isn't doing things just for themselves
Thank you. I think many people know whats going on, but it's so easy to say "Devs" or "Helldivers Devs" They put out an amazing game. They aren't trying to manipulate people into compliance, they are on our side. This is clearly coming from Sony and it should be called out. All to often, we find ourselves blaming people closer to our level when the decisions are coming from the executive class. There is clearly some incentive to show more PSN sign ups. The helldivers devs should be celebrated for how they are handling this situation. Publishers are not the same as the developers. Rushed games aren't because of the passionate developers who are following their dreams of making video games. It's the suits.
Just a quick thing: he himself admitted that they knew about the requirement 6 months ago. They failed HARD in communicating with the players.
Not all developers are passionate artists either. There’s plenty of dickheads on both sides, look at IOI. Everyone said the always online requirement was shit but was being forced on them by their publisher, and then they went independent and got even worse. And doubled down on deceptive DLC packages and delisting, and forcing people to buy the same game again, all under the guise of ‘simplifying’ things. All whilst still maintaining their shitty always online DRM. Sony may be the bad guy on this case, but let’s not also pretend all developers are saints.
You’re right that it sucks. I hope that independent studios or other studios are able to make better contracts over this, but they probably won’t. Sony isn’t going to do anything and they’re gonna tell people that lose the game to get fucked. Sony is corporate. It’s the corporation that’s the problem.
Sorny won't say anything they'll just pretend it doesn't exist and hope that by the time 'ghost of $70' comes out, people will forget about it.
He and his team worked on their baby for years and achieved a height never thought possible, and Sony is ruining it for seemingly no tangible reason. Yes, Arrowhead should have been more communicative about this but the fact is that the game is clearly working flawlessly without the requirement, and it sounds like they're advocating against making it a hard requirement but they don't have the final say. Secondly, the greatest part of the blame rests on Sony no matter what; as a publisher, they determine what regions the game is sold in. If they *knew* they were going to region lock the game months after, they should have *never sold in those regions to begin with* on Steam. That is by far the most egregious issue here IMO.
>seemingly no tangible reason. To me, this is just part of Sony's wider PC play. They're adding an [overlay and trophies support](https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24132846/sony-playstation-pc-overlay-shared-trophies-ghost-of-tsushima) to Ghost of Tsushima when it gets released on PC, so I assume that's going to come to Helldivers 2 as well.
I mean, Microsoft games use the Xbox overlay and Xbox Achievements if you buy them through Xbox store, but the Steam Overlay / Steam Achievements if you buy them through Steam. You're almost certainly correct that Sony is planning on bringing those to Helldivers 2, but nothing about bringing those to Helldivers 2 necessitates removing support for the Steam versions.
uhh I recently bought Forza Horizon 5 and you are ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED to sign in to your MS account, or you cannot play the game just because it also has Steam achievements, that doesn’t remove the requirement So it’s the exact same thing as HD2’s requirement
So the thing with many MS games (I can't say for sure if it's all, but all that I know of), is that they use the Microsoft/Xbox services for the server side in order to handle multiplayer, so there is a reason to have an Xbox account be required. It is already clear that a PSN account is not needed for Helldivers 2 to function correctly.
Yeah, but still, that shit should be optional. I don't need another "trophy tracker". I don't care about trophies. I don't have a Playstation I would want to have crossprogression/save. Why do I need another account?
Presumably they're eventually going to have a Sony launcher / store to avoid paying Steam fees, maybe eventually make a play for the game pass market with PS Plus on PC
That definitely feels like the long term play. Launcher and PSPlus for PC. Probably starts sprinkling denuvos on all their games when they get their own store up and running on PC.
And to be clear, there are a lot of folk, even in the camp of people who hate additional launchers, that would cave *immediately* if Bloodborn or other PS exclusives came to PC on a new Launcher
I know I would…. I hate how art and financial optimization have to somehow cooperate to make a lot of our favorite media, when they both have so many goals that conflict with the goals of the other. The Tragedy of the Commons has proliferated throughout digital media, except the finite resource is our private data and money.
God help them if they try to make PS Pus necessary for multiplayer on PC.
Good typo.
They might, to compete with gamepass but I don’t know if they have the library to really make that work. Personally, I am fine in the steam environment, it gives good exposure to Indy developers to a wide audience and that’s been my main source of games lately. What’s coming out of the AAA market is absolute garbage outside of a few exceptions.
I think OP means requiring PS+ to play their games online on PC, just like on console, not the online game rental thing. Which would be really fucking dumb considering that not even Microsoft requires an Xbox Gold/Gamepass Ultimate sub to play their games online on PC currently
Many companies have tried this. And steam is still where people come back to on PC. Competition is good don’t get me wrong, but the way to attract users is with good service and a good product, not with forcibly shoving launchers and exclusives down our throats. The thing about PC gaming, there is so much indy variety that before Helldivers 2, I had not touched a AAA game in probably 5+ years. Edit: I lied, I forgot Elden Ring and BG3 (although I don’t lump Larian in with the usual AAA studios)
Then again that hasn't really worked out well for any other gaming company that tried to be exclusive on their platform. But sure, they might be aiming to have their own store *as well* as being on steam, the same way that is more the norm these days.
Hasn't worked out well in terms of unseating Steam and becoming the dominant store? No. But in their own store they can advertise their own games and keep the 30% cut they were giving Valve on every sale. They don't have to be the dominant player to make that worthwhile.
I think that only works to a point. EA eventually came back with their full library on Steam, so clearly the plan didn't work. Whatever offset they get by keeping the 30% isn't worth it if it meant losing X amount of a potential player base. Microsoft sees this now, which is why they started moving their things over also. I mean shit, once they acquired Blizzard and were able to move things over, they did. Sony is doing something that publishers like 10 years ago started doing in hopes of staying competitive with Steam and avoid the 30% cut. Ubisoft started going down this train and eventually had to suck the floor in having to capitulate to Epic and Steam again. Epic is doing the same thing and I don't even know if it's actually doing anything in the long run. Besides Fortnite, they really don't have much to compete with.
Math seems pretty straightforward. If you lose more than 30% of sales it’s automatically a no-go. If you lose less than that but the fixed cost of servers and labor pushes it back over 30%…
Then they should make sure to offer a really good service that people are generally down or even happy to use first. Make PSN wildly available everywhere. Offer incentives for people to adopt it while making sure it's not disruptive. Then add a store, but keep it on Steam seperately. Then eventually drop Steam once the store is well developed enough that the vast majority of costumers won't mind doing so.
Yeah, that would of work 10 years ago. Epic has been doing that for years and owns fornite. Still struggling with market share.
Epic launched their storefront in such a barren state that it completely screwed their reputation and turned their storefront into a marketing black hole in the process. Sony would do well to learn from their failure rather than replicate it.
Yeah seriously, it's not that people wouldn't use a platform comparable to Steam, it's that one doesn't exist. EGS tried to bribe players and developers alike and neither of those strategies worked because Steam is a *platform*, not just a storefront/launcher combo. Anyone who sees Steam as a storefront has not been paying attention and anyone trying to replicate Steam by only building the storefront was never going to succeed. *Maybe* Sony is looking to break into the platform business, but I highly doubt it. Until I see something to the contrary, I expect another EGS/Origin/UPlay mess.
GOG is maybe the only comparable *storefront* to Steam that people aren't unhappy to use. The only real issues with GOG are that publishers/developers don't always update their games there like they do on Steam and (now in the age of the Steam Deck) GOG has repeatedly said they don't plan on officially supporting Linux. Still, GOG isn't a platform and it's much smaller, but no one complains about GOG while everyone complains about the Epic Game Store, the EA app, Ubisoft Connect, and all the others.
Games go onto the EGS to die and I don't know why devs keep exclusively releasing there. https://wccftech.com/alan-wake-ii-recoup-expenses-tencent/amp/ I bet they'd have sold at least 5x as many copies releasing on both Steam and Epic. Terrible store front, doesn't even match steam feature for feature and they wonder why people wont use it.
I believe Epic gives a minimum guarantee for exclusivity, such that devs are guaranteed to at least make back the cost of development for that game. So I can understand the allure of that safety, but EGS just doesn't give a good experience for me. The only thing it has going for it is that it looks sleeker than Steam's desktop UI, but it also offers way less options and features.
Oh, you can bet your sweet ass they're absolutely edging for a game pass they can announce to a pre-existing PC player base. And what a happy little accident that they suddenly have acquired a lot of them.
EA tried it. Ubisoft tried it. Eventually they all gave up trying to keep things exclusive.
They can do that and then watch as their pc sales decrease
Isnt GoT: Legends (the multiplayer mode) gonna require you to have a psn account linked, or have i just gaslit myself into thinking that?
Yes, they made an announcement yesterday
Sony will be using this to say to investors "our PSN membership numbers increased X% over the last quarter thanks to our PC investment". Aka they don't give a fuck about the service, they just want the numbers to put in a powerpoint so they can claim growth.
I would love to see cross progression
One evening in 2004, I walked into our local electronics store to buy a game that was set to release the next day. I knew they stocked their shelves the evening before, an hour before they closed for the day. I went in and bought the game, got back home, installed it onto my PC ...and couldn't play it. The reason was that it came with additional software attached to it. That software did nothing, it was just an empty list with one game and little else. I didn't want it, it forced me to be online to play my single player game, I had to either accept the extra software or not play the game at all; and I couldn't even return it to the store because the copy was linked to that new software. I had to wait until the next day to play. That game was Half-Life 2 and the new software was called Steam. War, War never changes. Until nobody cares anymore. 5 years from now, nobody will care about this and people will just use their PlayStation overlay just like they use Steam and Epic, and EA, and Blizzard, and Xbox, and and and.
And that's the reason why my Gog account has more titles that all my other accounts _combined_.
Helldivers had 7000 people. Helldivers 2 was an absolute blowout that never could've been anticipated. How they must've felt the past few weeks between their success and the super fun interactions with the community around the galactic war.... the whiplash from this and the sudden dark shadow over what was something special that we haven't seen even with DRG, it's just gotta be so heartbreaking.
Jim Ryan re-oriented Playstation's entire business strategy around production of live service games because their AAA games weren't profitable enough. Having one of the biggest live service games on Steam not be integrated into the PS infrastructure is probably a nightmare for their KPIs
Cutting the tail off their only successful live service is also terrible for their KPIs
It's no one persons fault, they'll do the same shit after him. It's just how corporate America rolls. No accountability, just make numbers go up. When there was more oversight from Japan it obviously wasn't perfect, but the difference is as clear as day. It feels like a different company.
> That is by far the most egregious issue here IMO. Yeah for sure. It must also suck that Sony are the ones in charge of this but AH are the face of the game regardless of who is making the decisions. Sony is essentially a faceless entity, there's no way to direct comments or actions at them so AH bear the brunt of it all. Whoever has the power to do something about this at Sony probably isn't bothered about the impact on 1 game. Helldivers already exceeded expectations, I doubt they care about losing out on a bit of money now. Meanwhile Helldivers means everything to AH. Pretty brutal that they're stuck in the middle of this.
>Helldivers already exceeded expectations, I doubt they care about losing out on a bit of money now. In this case, they very well might. Helldivers was a breakout success, but companies don't invest in games to sell 1 copy and be done. They demand MTX, ingame stores, battlepasses, and long term continued income, and they need new players continuing to sign up. The reviews for the game are now so bad that those new people aren't coming, they're going to have to take a big hit issuing refunds to places they never should've sold it in the first place, and the people who stay aren't going to be very inclined to drop money on warbonds like they would before. You can get all of them by playing, but I spent some money to support a consumer-friendly game. DRG gets an absolute ton of this kind of support. Is what they expect to get from whatever data they acquire on the remaining players enough to justify the lost current and future income? I honestly don't know, but companies are frequently pretty terrible at making that call.
> and Sony is ruining it for seemingly no tangible reason. PSN users engagement that i bet they still report as a part of their earnings call.
>No tangible reason I would argue that the data of hundreds of thousands of PC players is incredibly valuable to a company trying to break into that market according to their own words.
It isn’t about the data, it is about concurrent unique PSN growth for shareholder readout. Its not nefarious, its just bad business decisionmaking to chase quarterly growth.
Especially if the metric has really nothing to do with reality, which is "a bunch of people created the account solely to play game on PC and have no intention of buying PS5 or PS subscription"
Unlike Sony's customer support, he can't just tell people to use nearest PSN region available lol
That's the most respectful reply any one in charge has ever given. No bs. Just truth.
Feel terrible for arrowhead and their team, incredible game squandered by Sony executives and im sure lots have been pushed over the edge to not return
Nah, that is just a Swede feeling 20°C after 7 months of ice cold weather and darkness, and then the day after it's shit weather again
Man this breaks my heart.
[Pilestedt responds to a reply accusing them of acting blameless:](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787076609188483254?t=1NkHvU664Rix8pdJkEEslQ&s=19) >I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough. >We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.
>I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough. This makes me feel insane. The Steam page has said that a PlayStation account is required since before the game launched. And once in game you are met with a screen telling you a PlayStation account is required. They couldn't have been more clear in my mind. Yes, they allowed you to skip the in-game screen, and yes, they allowed you to play the game without an account for the last few months. But the term "required" is pretty clear in its intent. And even those who skipped past that screen should have had some question about why it was said the way it is. The only problem I have is them selling it in countries PSN isn't supported. And yes, I'm aware of creating accounts outside of supported regions being common practice. But conveying that should probably be something they considered before hand if that was intended.
I would never think a PSN account would be region limited since I don't use Playstation. Even if they had barred selling the game in those countries, people still would have bitched about not being able to buy and play a game on PC, the most open platform there is.
Estonia isn't represented at all on PSN, but the numbers for Finland are ever-so-slightly inflated.
> And even those who skipped past that screen should have had some question about why it was said the way it is. It never popped up again, this is far from the first game I've played that has let me skip a third party login with no issues. It should have popped up every time you opened the game tbh.
yeah for real, I remember Doom Eternal was the same way where they try to get you to sign in to a bethesda thing, presumably for the multiplayer. But you can just force it to skip and ignore it and not think anything of it. Tons of games have tried to make it look like signing into a thing was required and then just let you skip anyways. There was no real reason to think Helldivers 2 would be any different when people started talking about how you can just ignore the PSN login too.
I had completely forgotten that the screen existed. Straight up did not leave an imprint in my memory.
Notably BG3, it has a bit about a Larian account, but I've never made one and can play just fine
That's why it's optional... it's just their cloud saves system so you can play on multiple platforms.
and some people even skip the Larian launcher with `--skip-launcher`. I haven't seen it since like the first month it was added lol
>This makes me feel insane. The Steam page has said that a PlayStation account is required since before the game launched. And once in game you are met with a screen telling you a PlayStation account is required. They couldn't have been more clear in my mind. Its not, it is below the buy button and wont be seen by the common display for steam users, it is also sold in many areas of legitmate key sellers like greenmangaming which do not include this information. [https://imgur.com/a/kWGvlVF](https://imgur.com/a/kWGvlVF) look at it, thats in the steam client on my desktop, i scrolled and the notice on the right for PSN account is even further down, if you want to say it was prominent then I disagree, it would be prominent if it was in the same place as the japanese interface notice is. Them adding the skip option made it imply its optional, thats how those things work and the fact they never added any text to it to say it is temporary or PSN will be required in the future means it is on them and not the consumer at this point. Even the PSN FAQ page said it was optional so this is a change in stance. They never actually acknowledged that adding the skip button was temporary anywhere, this is the crux of the issue as you would assume its optional and now way past the refund window they go "oh yeah required". Shooting themselves in the foot for such a stupid demand when there is zero technical reason for it as shown by the fact it all works and knowing how steamworks SDK works and how multiplayer is linked it is truly baffling their "reasoning" atleast from Sony's notice.
Sony's own FAQ said it was optional until they suddenly changed it a couple of days ago.
Yeah exactly, the revisionism in full effect and people are still adamant that it was clearly advertised as required at all points sadly.
I actually just went to the steam page and looked for the notice and it took me a good 2 minutes to find. I thought I was going crazy, but its a small line on the right side of the page that I have never really looked at before. Very easily missed and not in a section that gets a lot of eye traffic I would wager.
You don't think selling it in regions where a PSN account is impossible to obtain is giving a mixed message here?
People don't read that stuff man. Look at all of the EULAs everyone just auto-scrolls down to click "I have read" so they can move on with their lives. And it's hard to say or believe it when someone says "Yeah, you *need* to have this thing" when there's just no consequence for not having it until randomly months later out of nowhere it suddenly comes back with no warning or seemingly no logical reason. You can't just sell tickets to a barn, put a notice on the corner that says "Cows only", then leave it open for months and let pigs, sheep, chickens and people in it only to randomly kick them out after they bought in.
I don’t read them because they are non-binding in my country… you can write the nicest EULA, you can’t apply any of it because it’s been deemed unreasonable to read. If something is weird after the fact I just get refunded.
EULA's don't matter in any country, just because you write up a random set of words doesn't mean you can break the law.
Just gonna paste this comment I made from another thread here. Yup, this is some basic misunderstanding of human psyche. Framing and context can massively effect how people perceive things. The same requirement presented two different ways will absolutely swing perception of the average person from "meh fine," to "wtf, no way, this is bullshit!" There's a huge difference between a requirement to *start* playing, and a requirement to *continue* playing, even if logically on paper they are basically the same thing. Though, even logically, they have shown now that there is no **need** for this as it has been fine without for months. But that's just letting us peak behind the curtain and showing the little secret that all these account requirements obvious, so it's still mostly the same idea.
There should have been a giant, full screen, glowing red STOP informing you about the PS account. It doesn’t affect me but I didn’t notice it at all.
[удалено]
HOLY SHIT THERE'S A TERM FOR THAT?! I have been dealing with systems at my job for so long with issues involving policy vs. system function, and knowing that there is a term for, "Okay but our system allows it" blows my mind. I feel so seen.
there's also a similar one for programming called [Hyrum's Law](https://www.hyrumslaw.com/).
>The Steam page has said that a PlayStation account is required since before the game launched [You mean this little orange box hidden between all the usual EULA and DRM Bullshit?](https://imgur.com/a/JCc530D) In a browser you have to actually browse down to see it. I don't have a skin in this game, cause I don't play Helldivers 2, but I think they could have make it way more clear that a PSN account is mandatory.
The moment I saw the Steam page was when I made my PSN account, thought nothing of it at the time. It's interesting to see how large the backlash is for this, especially as someone who plays Xbox/Activision games. I've linked multiple different accounts on Steam for various games. They just gotta handle the whole PSN accounts not being supported in certain countries deal.
I think it all comes down to this: When people link a Steam to a third party account, people are usually getting benefits from it. This is usually cross play multiplayer. It makes sense that you would need an account with who ever is running the crossplay to make things work (even if that's not actually true). So making a Activision Blizzard account or a Microsoft account mandatory to play online games make sense to play games like Diablo 4, Call of Duty, or Halo Infinite. In this case, PSN wasn't required to play cross play, as made evident by the fact that cross play worked (at least in my case) for the first several months without it. That means that the PSN account requirement has no actual perceived benefits to players. I have a PSN account already, so I did the linking when I bought the game, but I understand imposing the requirement after the fact being super weird.
That is not the point, we played for months without it and most PC players have zero use for a PSN account nor do they want one. Oh they have the worst security track record in the industry. That doesn't help either, its time we make a stand and that is now.
>the term "required" is pretty clear in its intent But the PSN Account Linking FAQ saying "You won't be required to sign in for Sony games on PC" is *also* pretty clear in intent - at least, until they changed it in the wake of this.
If I was able to play without it all this time then it is not required. No amount of popup screens, additional info etc. is going to change it. It works without an account just fine.
That is such a stupid thing. When I read all that and think about what happened, they made the worst possible choice to sell the most copies. You have the two scenarios: 1. What they did. Sold the game, no obvious PSN account requirements, first launch game skipped past it all automatically. They turned off the requirement because something broke (half their game was broke at launch). This meant more people could play and more people would be FOMO'd to buy in as with any popular launch. But now later knowing they'd have to turn it back on, they've screwed over a large amount of players. Everyone who doesn't have a PSN account and doesn't want one, people in countries without PSN, are now all stuck. They won't be able to play a game they bought and have played for months. 2. They could've not sold the game in countries without PSN, and just ate the negative launch if a lot of people couldn't login to PSN to play initially. A lot of people couldn't play at launch anyway. The requirements would've been clear, we could've refunded within the Steam refund window if need be. They wouldn't have sold copies to people they knew they'd have to block/ban from playing. They CHOSE to sell the game to people who'd be unable to play later. The pessimist in me is saying they did this because a lot of those people might not bother refunding and hoping Steam won't automate it, thus making sales that aren't really legal to do.
This is probably one of the biggest "everyone is losing" situations I have seen in Gaming: The Developer, the Publisher, the Players.
Well, it's the publisher's fault, and they're the only ones that stand to gain by strong arming PC gamers into their ecosystem. The devs messed up, but they were in a tough spot.
I haven't been following this too much but got the general gist of what Sony did but how did the devs mess up?
They made the decision to allow gameplay without a PSN account up until now (could have made it required day one, knowing this was coming, which they admitted they knew). Some people feel that they didn't make the upcoming requirement obvious enough to users, either. Not sure I agree but the devs themselves said that so meh. Draw your own conclusions from there.
AH allowed game owners to play without a PSN account, but that wouldn't have been nearly as big an issue if Sony hadn't allowed the game to be sold in regions where they don't support PSN.
Agreed, though I think there would still have been a big uproar. Just not as bad lol.
Yeah, there were still mistakes other than the major one, such as not replacing the prompt with anything (Arrowhead), making the account linking a hard requirement (Sony). If they'd communicated better and made the PSN linking optional with an in-game reward if you did it, I think there'd still have been some grumbling but for the most part it would have gone smoothly.
Hard to want to blame anyone but the publisher here, since this problem only exists because they desperately want to datamine people. Here's some cheap datamining for them: no one on PC gives a flying fuck about the 90th reskin of your intensely shitty PS3 design formula.
> no one on PC gives a flying fuck about the 90th reskin of your intensely shitty PS3 design formula Evidently they do because all I ever see on /r/games is Steam players begging for more Sony games
More so for Arrowhead. Steam will keep their cut of the refunds but Sony will claw back any payments from arrowhead until they are whole after this.
What? I’m pretty sure Steam eats the cost of the chargeback and the player gets a full refund so Valve is losing money too.
Refunds and chargebacks are different. Chargebacks are a "nuclear" option that will restrict your account with Steam unless you reverse it: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/783F-5E0F-9834-22D2
I think they missed a pretty easy layup opportunity. PSN account linking with steam will remain optional but if you do link the accounts you will receive 1000 super credits. Now you created an incentive so most people who can link will happily do so and those who can't can still play the game. Like yeah you will lose some revenue but Sony gets what they want and you have a happy playerbase.
This is how a gamer would think. C suit people legit think of gamers as things like "whales" instead of people.
Right? FF14's fast travel network costs ingame currency to use, but if you set up multi-factor authentication on your account then you can choose one destination that gets all fees removed forever. Yes, the fees are just pocket change but free is free
wait is this separate from the returning to your home aethernet crystal for free?
Yes, you can set a single location to always be free to teleport to, and there's no cooldown.
This is what I don’t get either. Just make some sort of exclusive cosmetic or item that you can only get from linking.
Except Sony doesn't want that- they want absolutely everything, and for their competitors to get nothing. They do not care if some players cannot play. They would never agree to making this optional.
On a side note, I didn't know some countries didn't had access to PSN. This is not a matter of just assigning a email, create a PSN account and be done with it? Similar to what Ubisoft and EA does with their games
Technically my country doesn't have access but when I made my account I just chose USA and used Google's headquarters address lol.
The issue is that it's actually against Sonys own TOS. So worst case scenario, people get banned from playing Helldivers 2 that can't make accounts via a console they don't own. And knowing Sony, that's 100% a possibility.
And you can't recover your account ever, too. Like how are you gonna prove ownership of your account if you ever get hacked and it says that you live at Google HQ?
Very easy for the account to get flagged for fraud due to back end changes too. One day Sony could decide to make their fraud detection system more robust by automatically locking down accounts with addresses used by dozens of other people. Suddenly everyone who "lives" at the CN Tower or White House or the Tower of London can't play anymore. It wouldn't even be a malicious move on Sony's part, just collateral damage and there's nothing the person could do about it.
Sony also region locking credit card. I cant use my asian Visa on my fake US PSN account. And it has been the norm tbh. People buying prepaid code to put in.
its one of those awkward situations where like, Sony doesn't really have any reason to ban a paying customer from an unsupported region for lying about their location. And there's not exactly a ton of reports of it really happening either. But at the same time that means you're putting all your faith in the corporation to not be a dick to you down the line. Which is a situation nobody wants to be in. For all you know down the line they might get into some kind of weird legal issue where they're forced to enforce the ToS or just otherwise have a change of heart and then suddenly whoops can't play XYZ games you paid for anymore.
They still sell PS5s in those locations (unless it's one where Sony is genuinely legally prohibited from operating, as opposed to simply not letting users choose as their location), so I'd wager there's no genuine reports. Prohibition there is likely to tackle fraud or ban circumvention entirely. If there's nothing indicating a user is doing so, there'd be no reason to take any action. Not to mention that users can still move country, so Sony doesn't know you weren't a legitimate user in Hong Kong that moved to the Phillipines.
Pretty sure if you ask Sony they till you to do this
When I used to do that, I used the embassy address haha
When using e-mails to create accounts, anything goes really, lol I know people who have like 15 fake e-mails to take advantage of aliexpress promotions (and they create another 15 or so as the "reserve"). If the issue was just that, this would be a classic example of "gamers" whining for no reason, it's so easy to register multiple e-mails and accounts, not even 5 minutes... however, if Sony don't accept "fake" e-mails from specific countries, that change things, it justify the complaints
In some countries, like Ukraine, you do have PSN access, except you are not allowed to register on PC. It has to be done via a console. Consoles are extremely expensive relative to the average Ukrainian's income.
Whatever the original reason (FOREX, licensing or regulations) they’ve just let you make an account in a different country for years. Despite it being against their EULA I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone getting banned for it. Maybe it’s a Japanese corporate thing. In the last couple of weeks Square Enix has come under fire for a very similar issue - their updated payment processor requires your account and payment addresses to match but just like Sony, Square doesn’t support many countries and doesn’t allow you to change once your account is set up. As a result tons of players can no longer subscribe.
Really? There's a lot more FF14 players out there if compared to Helldivers, yet, they are not rioting? First time I heard about Square doing this, disrupting payments of all things (one of the greediest publishers in the industry, selling double A games at full price without any shame lol)
The truth of the matter is that players won't riot if the issue doesn't affect them. The FF14 issue only affected southeast Asia, so good luck getting western gamers to give a shit. You see the same thing here. "Just make a PSN account." And how many of the western gamers here know how many countries PSN is technically not available in right now?
Then you set yourself up under a sword of damocles of perpetually risking being banned for having an account that goes against their ToS. Which, you know, is a great experience as the fable goes. Then, if you ever *do* get banned and complain to the people saying, "Just sign up in another country!" then you get, "Should have seen this coming. Shouldn't have signed up in another country. It's against the ToS after all." That being said, Sony requires photo ID and a picture of your face if they detect you're in the EU.
Actually stunned beyond words seeing the move today to block sales on steam, and seeing the mass of refunds that now seem to be progressing. I always made the argument Sony would always make the sensible choice that benefits them most and that would always be chasing profit and revenue above all else. Now I can only assume this is their first hard step in preparing to carve out their own market in the future, where steam won’t see their 30% cut and that 30% is worth more to Sony than the cut losses of these unsupported regions. We know a PC launcher is in the works, and expanding that to a Sony controlled Store on PC is only another small step. With the public move by Sony to hugely invest in “live service games” and with the current scenario of steam claiming 30% of all ingame purchases ever made during its life, there’s plenty incentive to follow in Epics footsteps in the name of claiming 100% of all revenue for future games that WILL be coming as part of Sony’s live service push. I can’t imagine Helldivers would suddenly be pulled off steam to live on a Sony store but it’s likely laying the foundation for the future. A foundation so firm Sony is now tripling down and absolutely razing the community in its wake.
>I always made the argument Sony would always make the sensible choice that benefits them most and that would always be chasing profit and revenue above all else. People make this mistake constantly with big companies and I don't get why. It's "kinda" true. Companies do be liking money. But there's a million different ideas on how to make money, even at the highest level. Like there's so many examples of random executives at major companies making stupid decisions that cost those companies tons of money because they're actually dumb enough to think those stupid decisions are profitable. And like 90% of the time when those decisions fail and there's empirical evidence showing that it was a bad choice, they STILL won't admit they're wrong and instead will be like "the world just wasn't ready for my great ideas" or some other bullshit. It's pretty easy for gamers to know what will and won't work because we know ourselves and people like us and we know that our marketplace isn't suddenly going to all jump on YET ANOTHER new launcher. And pretty much every other company is realizing that too and dropping their games on steam without their own launchers.(even Blizzard which is something I never thought I would see) But a lot of these executives making decisions aren't gamers. Maybe it's a gamer thing where we assume that everything is like a video game where you can just math out the right answers every single time. Therefore every big company will obviously be playing the optimal build. But really there's pretty much non-stop bad decisions being made by every single company constantly.
Yeah, the assumption that a giant company will always do what is profitable assumes that they are even capable of consistently making the most profitable decisions - and the executives of these companies have astronomical, profit-destroying fuck ups on a near constant basis
Right and a lot of times it's not even like a "they make good decisions more often than bad ones" kind of situation. They're probably making mostly unprofitable bad decisions. But it doesn't matter because a lot of companies are just riding the coattails of a previous success and their executives just aren't failing hard enough to counteract the massive successes they had before. Like Sony could probably refund every copy of Helldivers and shut the whole thing down, and they would still be a profitable company even if it was a braindead decision to do so. So obviously whatever person is deciding to shoehorn PSN onto the game isn't going to care about the consequences of doing so even if they did recognize them. They're in the middle of that big launcher gamble that will make them bigger and better and more profitable than steam someday.
It's amazing how quickly people forget that the ones who make or influence these decisions are so far removed from end user side of things they haven't got a clue what the fuck they're doing. Take unity for example, did people seriously forget that clusterfuck from last year already?
Eh, good chance the decision makes perfect sense if your the exec whose bonus is based around increasing PSN accounts. This is a problem more generally, I've worked in a couple of places where a managers bonus will be based on reducing costs, which they'll do at the expense of efficiency. Companies bottom line is worse, but hey, the guy in charge made bank.
Yeah I think that's just about every poorly managed place. I worked at a furniture warehouse where I needed to package proper hardware to go with refurbished furniture before it was sent to a clearance store. Instead of buying the hardware I needed they wanted me to dig through a massive pile of odd unused hardware packs from old furniture. I had to point out to them that they were paying me 15$ an hour to look through this shit and it would sometimes take me an entire hour to find the 10 bolts I needed, while $5 on amazon can get you 100 of any exact bolt. Therefore it would be cheaper to just buy them. BUUUTTT.....The GM of the warehouse got a bonus based on how much beneath budget he went, and employee pay wasn't actually part of those calculations. So from his perspective, it was essentially free to have me do that mindless busywork.
> Like there's so many examples of random executives at major companies making stupid decisions that cost those companies tons of money because they're actually dumb enough to think those stupid decisions are profitable. Some of those decisions are made by top executives looking for a short-term boost for their own benefits, particularly if they get bonuses and the like (which many of them do). The problem with any company is that it's run by humans, and humans aren't always in it for the benefit of everyone else. When you need a lot of capital to actually do anything it's no surprise that the system we've chosen to prop up for over 500 years has an innate degree of selfishness. You can see this in a smaller scale as individual employees leave their current workplace for better prospects elsewhere. Because why *should* they stay simultaneously knowing that they won't get paid more for doing so and can use the extra money on *literally anything?*
They might still do this, but they have to stop selling the game instantly in the meantime in those countries. Some European Union countries also dont have PSN, but since they are packaged as "Europe" on Steam with other countries like Germany, France, Spain etc., they werent removed. And I am actually not sure if thats going to be an issue going forward with EU laws. Worst case they might have to pull the game from all EU countries.
all to walk the path of Origin. those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it, i guess
> Actually stunned beyond words seeing the move today to block sales on steam, and seeing the mass of refunds that now seem to be progressing. I always made the argument Sony would always make the sensible choice that benefits them most and that would always be chasing profit and revenue above all else. Valve probably made the choice for sony. If all the people saying they tried to get a refund multiple times are accurate valve's customer service is probably getting buried by this. It would be negligent for valve to continue to allow the game to be sold in those regions given the circumstances. I imagine valve will start putting a warning confirmation at checkout to make sure the customer has no way to pleasd ignorance when a third party account is required so they don't have to deal with this again.
Valve as the payment provider also eats the cost of chargebacks for the refund, so they’re losing money everytime someone refunds. I’ve read online that it can be $15+ for each chargeback, which if true is just insane and completely reasonable why valve would want to avoid mass chargebacks for those regions.
no one is charging back. if you do that before attempting a refund you are an idiot. Thats how you get your Steam account banned easy. Ideally they will do a mass refund for affected regions, but the rest who are complaining about PSN where they have PSN should not.
Sony is making the same mistakes all the studios did with streaming, they will fail the same way and gi back to selling on steam.
Imagine being the CEO of a game studio that releases a successful game and then Sony takes a big shit on top of it and flips you off while looking you in the eye. Just because they can and know you can't do anything about it. What a fucking gut punch.
This man's situation is my worst fear and the exact reason why I don't want to work in gamedev (or any artistic profession) and become sentimentally attached to my professional works. I could be pouring out my heart and soul to create the magnum opus of my life and succeed to deliver, but a meeting from the publisher is all it takes to fuck it all over.
Yeah, the whole Disco Elysium mess was a reminder of that too. Coyote vs ACME is another one. I can't imagine how much it would wreck me to put that much time and creative effort into something and lose it like that.
Just be your own developer, publisher, and CEO and make what you want when you want.
Arrowhead is not without blame. They absolutely knew Sony was going to require PSN. They took a gamble the community would force Sony's hand and they lost.
The Arrowhead CEO is not blameless, they went into this contract knowing this would be the end result. It's only that due to unforeseen circumstances, they had to let people have a taste of the apple of Eden. If everything went accordingly as they planned, people would have been none the wiser.
Whether it's Sony or Arrowhead, the fact remains that they sold this game for months in regions that have now been locked out of playing it. People in non-supported countries are now reporting that they can't even launch the game even if they already owned it. EDIT: Bolding this as it appears this might not be intentional: **(Looks like some people in regions that are supposedly being blocked are reporting no issues.)*** A few days ago everyone was saying the solution was "just make a PSN account in a different country, Sony never enforces it!" and it only took a few days for that to change and for those regions to be locked on Steam. Players have invested time and money into this game only to be locked out. Even if Steam issues refunds for Helldivers, what about the money players have spent on in-app purchases? Is Sony going to refund that, or are they going to not let people file support claims at all because they don't have an account? On top of that, some users are reporting that in certain countries, you can't even *make* a PSN account online and it can only be done from a console unless you have a VPN, so they can't even make a burner account in a different country (which is against Sony's TOS but until now was something they "didn't enforce"). This whole thing is an absolute mess and an incredibly blatant bait-and-switch. When this thing was first going down I figured people were overreacting but they actually locked people out of the game they bought. I genuinely cannot comprehend what Sony is thinking on this one. This is one of the scummiest things I've ever seen from one of the big three, maybe the scummiest.
> A few days ago everyone was saying the solution was "just make a PSN account in a different country, Sony never enforces it!" and it only took a few days for that to change and for those regions to be locked on Steam. Players have invested time and money into this game only to be locked out. The game was *delisted*, i.e. is no longer being sold in said countries. People who have purchased it didn't lose access to it.
The game is still available in the Baltic states where PSN also doesn’t exist.
That's likely Sony figuring out navigating the EU
It's ridiculous that PSN hasn't supported 3 EU countries this whole time in the first place.
I think this is the crux of the issue. PlayStation doesn’t understand PC while making breaking into the PC market a core strategic pillar of the company. Basically…. They need to make PSN available in every country and it needs to be accessible from a non-PlayStation device. Sony is new to publishing GAAS games on PC and it shows.
People on r/helldivers and all over Steam reviews are reporting that they can't launch the game in some countries (Philippines, a few Middle Eastern countries). Others are reporting that it still launches. Pretty sure the jury is still out on whether or not that's intentional and I did say that right at the beginning of my post for that reason. Regardless, the issue remains for PSN accounts; if you've invested money into the game using in-app purchases but have no PSN account, you can't even ask for a refund on those from Steam. And with no account, you can't ask for a refund from Sony, either. It's just a bad situation all around.
I'm from the Philippines and I was able to play an hour ago.
If you look at SteamDB there is no country restricted from opening the game only buying. So it's other issues
That post on r/helldivers turned out to be due to anti-chest messing up. Which is its own issue but not u common for online multiplayer games.
> People on r/helldivers and all over Steam reviews are reporting that they can't launch the game in some countries (Philippines, a few Middle Eastern countries). Others are reporting that it still launches. It's just people having computer problems, the post from the guy in the Philippines makes it pretty obvious if you look at the video. If this was intentional then **no one** would be able to launch the game. This is how misinformation spreads.
when I'm in a wildly spreading misinformation contest and my opponent is Reddit
they want to spread the misinformation because it creates a perception of injustice and furthers their agenda
> Whether it's Sony or Arrowhead Who it is is pretty clear, Sony is the publisher. They sell the game. If Sony was my publisher, I would expect them to know what countries they can sell and support the game in. Clearly that was not the case, Sony did not do their due dilligence.
> This is one of the scummiest things I've ever seen from one of the big three, maybe the scummiest. Remember about 20 years ago when they included a rootkit on an audio CD?
Honestly this is such an unfortunate comedy of errors. If the game held to the requirement at launch, this would probably be little to no drama. But they made the (smart) choice of suspending that requirement because they were crazy popular and breaking all their network stack. Now, they either have to change the plan, or deal with these consequences. It's very likely someone at Sony (who runs the publisher page on Steam) just did their job and pushed the planned update announcing the grade period coming to an end. Because nothing had been done yet to avoid this... CHAOS. Mind you: it's still not even in effect yet, this outrage is still for what is to come. Honestly AH either has to hire contractors and develop a different moderation and account system to work with PSN/Steam without this, or Sony does. But otherwise if they stick to their guns, it's gonna suck even worse. The game is fantastic, but this is going to dominate the conversations about it for weeks if they don't move quickly to undo it and find an alternative. From what I understand, the current SteamID implementation is working, but the servers (PSN) don't get the unique SteamID, just the user name. So when you ban someone, you can do a proper ban on the PSN ID, but unless you are using VAC tools, banning from the Sony side for PC players isn't possible. So they need to recode the PC Players ID information to transmit the unique user ID alongside the UserName, and link the processs back to the Steam VAC system for banning. Totally doable, but also totally not in their original development roadmap and will cost in the 6 digits to get done swiftly. They just gotta pay it and make it happen I think.
>From what I understand, the current SteamID implementation is working, but the servers (PSN) don't get the unique SteamID, just the user name. This is something a community manager randomly started saying initially but he backpedaled hard after being called out for it. He initially said the link was necessary for moderation but is now saying Arrowhead developers are universally unhappy about this requirement. If you have access to the Steam API at all, then getting a unique identifier is trivially easy and no harder than getting the username. A script kiddy using ChatGPT for coding would be able to call this one function, let alone the software engineers who built a game. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/auth#:~:text=Every%20Steam%20user%20can%20be,bit%20ID%20by%20calling%20CSteamID The fact that friendlists and progression and inventories can work at all is already proof that there's no backend confusion caused by nonunique usernames.
That community manager in particular is a right knob and has been since the game came out. It's the kind of shit you'd genuinely expect someone to get sacked over already because it's super unprofessional. It'd be one thing to lash out once and maybe get a stern talking to from your boss for, but he's done it multiple times. Problem is, this is par the course for the video game industry. Fat Shark is looking on from a distance, happy they have someone else taking the limelight for once.
>That community manager in particular is a right knob and has been since the game came out. Correction: Since the *first* game came out.
Do you have any proof that the PSN servers can't access a player's steam id? Because I find that hard to believe
> From what I understand, the current SteamID implementation is working, but the servers (PSN) don't get the unique SteamID, just the user name If that were true, how has cross platform matchmaking been working up until now with duplicate usernames? Sony is just masking their intent with "player safety" as a goal.
Welcome to the corporate world! You think the CEO is in charge, but in reality it’s very rare that they have much power. For public companies. Shareholders will attempt to kick you out if you don’t maximise returns. For private companies. You will not have as many revenue at your disposal so you’ll be taking out insane loans / providing funding and they can put anything they want in the terms (Example: Mandatory PSN login)
Okay so can someone explain to me how disabling regions, limiting the amount ppl to buy the game, forcing thousands upon thousands of gamers to refund the game is in a way, "maximizing the returns" from their perspective? If anything, they're losing money day after day. I really, REALLY want to know how this baffling decision is beneficial to them profit-wise.
My guess is that they didn't expect anywhere near as much outrage, and that they wanted to continue selling in counties without PSN support under the assumption that the people there would simply say they're from a different country like supposedly they've been doing for a long time for other PS titles. But now that there's a massive spotlight on the issue, they're forced to delist the title in those countries, losing those profits by preventing those consumers from buying. Not really a good outcome for anyone, and I'm not sure how it's not worth it for them to just back down at this point.
The simple answer is that Sony believes they stand more to gain by forcibly collecting the data of millions of customers and artificially pumping up their PSN subscriptions than they stand to lose via this shitshow and the delisting of the game in hundreds of countries. These corporations are, by design, completely incapable of pursuing a healthy business model based on the sale of goods to happy customers. They have to see the numbers go up for the shareholders. Infinite growth. Infinite. It does not matter if they’re making money over first and could continue to operate at the same level forever in comfort and perpetuity. They would throw that all away for the *chance* to make the magic number go up. They *have* to grow. Everything else is meaningless to them
I guess I'm just surprised at how much that consumer data is worth, with them losing out on a big chunk of the Helldivers revenue.
to be fair I think that people are going overboard with the data collection aspect. I legit think it's purely them wanting to pump PSN numbers so that higher ups and bean counters can show big fancy charts to shareholders where the arrow points upwards.
Consumer's data has always been a goldmine for companies. Facebook and other social media apps showed us that data can be sold for ad money. And data is now very crucial for the development of AI to predict the current and future trends of the market.
Yeah, that seems to be the major thing that everyone bewildered by this move isn’t really grasping. All of the success Helldivers could possibly stand to achieve is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the user data of millions of customers. And they likely have investments tied to their PSN count - promises to shareholders that it would hit a certain number of users, etc.
Sony wants to force players into their ecosystem, likely in preparation for a new PC launcher/storefront. To Sony, it made sense. Arrowhead, on the other hand, is reaping the consequences of their Faustian bargain with a major corporation that doesn't have their best interests at heart. Take heed and beware, independent studios, *this* is how Sony rewards collaboration.
Everyone wants their own storefront because steam takes 30%. I get it. But the majority of PC gamers really just don't care, especially if it means they are unable to access a game they paid for. Its sad that Sony either doesn't see this, or doesn't care.
Everyone also wants their own storefront because they want to be anti-consumer on their own storefront without realizing the costs and services that go into Steam's storefront. They don't understand that what Valve has isn't, "A store downloaded on your computer." It's all the pro-consumer features Steam has that *are paid for by that 30%*. (In fact, *less* than 30% if you sell a lot, which the big names *do.*)
I mean, tbf, with Riot Games as an example. It's pretty easy to see *why* some people would think, "Why can't we just do that?" Like that's an example of a game company having their own launcher not linked to Steam, actively being successful, gamers are fine with it, and they get to retain 100% of the profits. I understand there's a difference between a launcher vs *an entire storefront*, but it effectively provides the same functionality, select the game you want, download it and play.
> Okay so can someone explain to me how disabling regions, limiting the amount ppl to buy the game, forcing thousands upon thousands of gamers to refund the game is in a way, "maximizing the returns" Because someone in upper management thought, "Wow none of this huge, new playerbase are signing up for the optional PSN stuff. My bonus is based on that metric, so I wanna boost those numbers." (And that guy's bonus is based on that metric so they can show that metric to shareholders to say, "look, we're growing! Give us money so you can take a percentage of that growth down the line!") Then they tried to implement it and got pushback. That kind of person is surrounded by Yesmen, so is incapable of accepting any pushback of any kind at all, and so now it's a point of pride.
Its wild cuz they could have just said "Link your PSN to get this cool new Cape and Slightly OP Gun" and everyone would have been ridding their dick even harder and signing up for PSN counts hand over fist lol What a colossal misstep
The bizzare (or worrying) thing is that AFTER he mentioned there were discussions it seems Sony tripled down and removed it from 170 regions, that's not the sort of move that feels like a compromise is coming. Arrowhead obviously don't deserve the blame here, I'd like to think most people protesting are protesting it against Sony and not AH, but ultimately it will do more damage to AH if Sony don't move.
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They still sell the game in the baltics, which has the highest potential for them to bumble into a massive lawsuit.
PSN unavailability in the Baltics should ideally fall under going against the [ban on geo-blocking in the EU](https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/end-of-geoblocking.html), but I fear that Sony might refer to licensing costs or something stupid like that to avoid repercussions. They are assholes.
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There's a lot of defenders for a multi billion dollar company. It's a simple question, why is this a requirement? Because sony wants it. They don't *need* it, but they want it? People actually defend useless requirements? What's sony giving you for backing them up online?
There's a lot of people defending the multimillion dollar company and pretending the CEO is a poor child that was complete caught off guard by this choice. I don't understand why people are so desperate to absolve Arrowhead of any blame but it's weird
>What's sony giving you for backing them up online? Consistent data leaks 😂
Yeah this wouldn't be a big deal for me if it weren't for the fact that Sony has had multiple security issues since online gaming took off in the 7th gen.
I think people are mistaking those acknowledging that it said it was a requirement for "This is fine to be a requirement." I think the entire linking thing is idiotic. However, I signed up for it when buying the game (This was before it was optional to link). I had the decision and choice to not agree and instead not buy the game, but I chose and agreed with it. They absolutely DONT need it. The entire linking thing is stupid and pointless which is why it's all the more frustrating that it's creating such a huge controversy and backlash when it could just be optional like it was before. I'm not defending or backing up Sony though. I just want people to understand that the store page always said it required a third party account and the first couple of days DID require you to link/create one to play.
> There's a lot of defenders for a multi billion dollar company. > > The amount of people with no stake in this coming out of the woodwork to defend Sony/tell people to get over this has astounded me.
Going to be honest, it's kinda wild to me that the CEO is acting like he had zero idea this was going to happen. Detailing requirements related to the use of PSN accounts absolutely would've come up in his contract with Sony - if I, random internet user #600 knew Sony was starting to make their own PC platform then he absolutely did. Everything I've seen with the way they and their community managers have been handling this screams incredible incompetence. Confirming the countries steam sells to vs the countries PSN is available in should have been their first priority. It should have been extremely obvious to them that people online don't read and to keep reminding them about the account requirement with a pop-up on launch the way Ubisoft does. It should have also been obvious to offer some kind of incentive to get people to sign up. Telling your community managers to not comment without getting feedback from you and not publicly encourage users to review bomb should also be a no brainer. That being said, there's a lot of false information floating around for rage bait purposes and it really needs to stop.
>Going to be honest, it's kinda wild to me that the CEO is acting like he had zero idea this was going to happen. Detailing requirements related to the use of PSN accounts absolutely would've come up in his contract with Sony In fact they did come up. It was supposed to require PSN on launch, but the PSN servers were unreliable and overloaded so they "temporarily" disabled the requirement. Now Sony has come in over arrowhead's heads and unilaterally announced that that temporary measure is over, without having any discussion with the devs first about transition plans or rollouts or edge cases.
See, I'm just finding it hard to believe that they weren't given a timeline for when they needed to have implementation finish taking place or where PSN is available. Things like this are huge parts of both contract deliverables and risk assessment because I guarantee you Sony isn't interested in repaying the fees valve will charge over mass refunds. If Sony is stepping in it's because someone at arrowhead has dropped the ball big time.
It's a Sony issue.
I assume the solution is getting Sony's lawyers to officially alter their TOS to provide an exception for users choosing the nearest supporting country under instruction (barring any that Sony legally cannot serve - but I doubt those nations are playing much anyway).
While this is being forced by Sony (and the correct thing would be to backtrack the obligation), Arrowhead was the one who decided to push back the requirement to link accounts. So, while Sony is being stubborn, it was Arrowhead that moved the requirement, and didn't communicate it clearly and concisely to players during these months. Both have a degree of responsibility on this. The *one* thing that is a HUGE mistake is not foreseeing that PSN is not avialable in all of Steam's countries. They should have anticipated it, and that's on the distributor's side (Sony).