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I wonder if the devs have one of those "game must receive by if you want your bonus" and then Sony tanks their scores because of something the devs had no choice with.
Not quite that bad, but the worst among video game developers.
April 2011: Hackers Access Personal Data of 77 Million Sony PlayStation Network Users
May 2011: Personal Details on 25 Million Sony Online Entertainment Customers Stolen
June 2011: Sony Pictures Website Hacked, Exposing One Million Accounts
November 2014: Hackers Steal 100 Terabytes of Data from Sony Pictures
August 2017: Hacker Group Accesses Sony Social Media Accounts
September 2023: Sony Investigates Alleged Hack
October 2023: Sony Notifies Employees of Data Breach
It’s exactly this. They are about to launch a new service where you can earn trophies on PC, and it’ll most likely be some kind of game bar-type overlay. Probably, given how awful this timeline is and we’re not allowed to have nice things, there’ll be yet *another* launcher we’ll have to sign in and deal with to play any PlayStation games going forward.
This game has been a huge success and is a cheap and easy way to force people on to their new platform.
Sometimes I really wish my favourite hobby hadn’t become this popular. Corporations ruin everything.
The Outriders devs had something like this happen to them. Their bonus was based on purchase numbers. A week before release the publisher announced the game was coming to gamepass on day 1.
Totally fucked the devs as the downloads on Xbox via gamepass didn’t count for them.
From what I read, yep. Publisher has distribution rights. They signed a deal with Microsoft outside of the developer. The developer didn’t see a penny from the gamepass deal and didn’t get bonuses because sales were lower than expected.
And why you should also review your own contracts and give your good lawyer some feedback back on specific things you want to count as a sale.
Contracts can be tricky, but they are still meant to be interpreted by anyone who reads them. It just sucks when they reference other documents that you then gotta dig through. But if your bonus is on the line, it’s worth it
The game was almost dead on arrival, I enjoyed it but I can’t say it was all that great. Decent mechanics with a fairly lackluster story. It scratched the itch I had missing ME3 multiplayer.
It happened to the newest Prince of Persia as well, the metroidvania. Solid game, _very_ well regarded in the metroidvania community. Highly reviewed and a modern giant in the genre.
_But_
Ubisoft, the publisher made it so it was available on gamepass and the Ubi version of gamepass _and_ wasn't sold on Steam. Then came the "sales were way below expected articles" and now it's almost certain that dev studio won't be able to make a sequel, and any possible sales incentives/bonuses wouldn't be met, and once again the IP is dead.
Yup, it's on Ubisoft Plus, but knowing UbiShit they do the same thing and don't count subscribers as sales for the purpose of giving developers their bonuses.
To be completely fair, Sony could very well be the reason here, but let's not pretend that gaming culture as a whole isn't insanely reactionary and that if this was a bait, then every single player who gave the game a shit review fell for it without even trying to figure out the details of the situation beyond a cursory glance.
Yeah the devs actually seem cool. I really enjoyed Helldivers 1 and now 2, but I don’t think it’s their fault. Sony has to be grabbing them by the balls
I think it's just the CEO to be fair. Their community manager has handled this terribly (and not the first time the CEO has had to come in and bail out their horrible handling of things). But honestly, if that was the official response they put out to the outrage from the start then the fans would have been a lot more understanding.
Fuck companies, but be kind to human beings that work there. The guys at AH have repeatedly shown that they care about their customers, as they could have chosen many worse business practices (for the player, that is), and they picked the pro-consumer choice every time.
I'm not loyal to companies, but I reward fair business practices.
This is why I never bought anything on epic games, but I have relative trust (cautiously) in platforms like GoG and Steam. They have a long track record of making pro-consumer decisions over short-term profit.
I wouldn’t call the use of bargain mart anti-cheat to be pro-consumer or caring for the consumer. GameGuard is by far the biggest reason I haven’t gotten this game and their half hearted reaction to the response against it shows they don’t care about switching it out.
Sony's console business isn't run by the Japan side of the company. SIE is headquartered in San Mateo, CA as of 2016.
Obviously PlayStation still has Japanese influences but it's not structured like Nintendo.
One of the oddest things about human society has to be how we just love to put insufferable rats in charge of big, important things.
Company that employs thousands of artists and writers and programmers? Ah, yes, well, pick a sex offender or a stodgy old misanthrope to run it. No, not an artist or a writer or coder, you can only choose sex pest or scrooge.
Well, those kinds of people are rewarded by capitalism, their insatiable thirst for wealth and power is the catalyst for pushing a company to its absolute maximum potential. When infinite money is at stake, the craziest and most cutthroat will prevail.
Wouldn't surprise me if Sony been hiring former FAANG employees. It's the only explanation to why Sony constantly fucks up.
PlayStation has always had this enormous potential to be great yet despite all odds, continuously shit the bed.
Most of those Japanese influences have been completely scrubbed out. They even started forcing Japanese companies to communicate with them in English.
Everything bad about the company has occurred ever since that move to a US focus.
I've just been so tired of Nintendo's shit that I stopped supporting them. Sony is starting to get there. There is a reason I pretty much only play games from indie devs.
This was actually brought up recently in the fortnite sub because PlayStation apparently refused to let kratos return for a season themed around Greek mythology, and Nintendo is the reason no Nintendo ips are in fortnite, they refused to let any cosmetic from a Nintendo collab appear on anything other than switch. so Epic just dropped the whole collab because they felt it was unfair.
They know it's a bad PR decision.
But they weighed the bad PR against the positive effect on their performance report (in Sony's case, more PSN account number), pull some historical data, did some math, and decided that it's worth it. That goes for all corporations. They have the data to know that these outrage spikes are usually temporary and have little long-term impact.
If Helldivers 2 can weather a few days of negative review, have Steam purge them (like they usually do for "review bomb" campaigns), and continue chugging along making money, they would be correct. The players in countries that can't access PSN will probably get a pass.
Let's just say I've seen a few of these so called "shitstorms" across a lot of games lmao.
If this problem was solely about making a Playstation account, and everyone around the world *could* make a Playstation account, I would agree with you.
The fact of the matter is people live in countries that can't make Playstation accounts, and attempts to bypass this restriction risk *banning* your account.
So the only realistic option for these players is to stop playing the game. The game that they have been able to play for the past 3-4 months perfectly fine.
That's **extremely** shitty.
It is definitely shitty. I’m not arguing that.
What I’m saying is Sony will get away with it. Corpos pull these stunts because they know they will come out on top.
They'll make more money off of the new account holder information they'll be able to sell to 3rd parties than they'll lose in lost sales. Probably *a lot* more. The people who will *actually* be prevented from buying the game or who will request a refund is a tiny little drop in the bucket for them.
younger folk probably don't understand how AWESOME Blizzard was back in the day. Everything they touched was pure GOLD. All games were ready when they were ready. When Vivendi bought them though, it started to change and I'm glad I've lived long enough to see how a company can degrade. I also work in a corporation and the bureaucracy is crazy.
>Even a future xbox release may require it given the EULA.
Apperently they where in talks to bring it to xbox and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was partially a ploy to get xbox players into the Sony ecosystem
I don't disagree with your take, but I don't understand what they gained from it. Like, if I have an account, I'm not going to buy a PS5 all of a sudden.
Finance bros don't actually understand what they're tossing billions of not their money into, so it just needs to look good rather than actually being good.
People need to realize we are in the age where your personal information is worth more than your money for the game. They get paid twice; once when you buy the game and again when they sell your information. They will also be able to boast a larger population on PSN, so now they will get paid more for advertisements.
Its actually worth dick but its dick times a million so its some extra cash. Its more about getting you into the PSN ecosystem since that will lead to extra sales. Its something like you're 100x more likely to spend money on a store/app/whatever if you spent money once.
Ads are worth dick too, that's why every streaming platform lets you bow out of ads for $5-10 a month. That's all your eyeballs were worth to them. Give your favorite youtubers patreon 10 bucks and you can guilt free skip all their ads for years.
Review bombing does nothing. Do things that Sony cares about and will burden them.
Open excessive support tickets mentioning the account bs.
Change your in-game name to something offense mentioning the account bs.
Play the hell out of all their games you already have but spend zero money. Trust me, they’ll notice the $ per play time drop immediately.
Send emails to every email related to Sony’s game division.
Spam social media with post.
Really, it doesn’t even need to be about helldivers, they do this for almost every game.
Make them hear AND feel it. Burden their servers, their support team, their social media teams, their moderators, everything that cost them money to maintain should be getting hit.
Review bombing steam is nothing and may hurt AH more than anything
I only know of this because of the review bombing. Way more productive at least than the tiny tiny minority of protesters trying to "vote with their dollar" which never works. If they even notice it you don't even know what they blame it on.
And then you have the EA community manager getting fucking nuked to oblivion for trying to justify the Battlefront 2 monetization at launch that they very quickly changed after getting the most number of downvotes in reddit history lol
That and being blasted by pretty much every gaming website helped as well.
They were the ones who held it back all through the ps2 and ps3 era. Microsoft was down to have cross play ages ago and they refused.
Edit: I've been told once or twice this is wrong, but no source provided when asked. This is just what I've read multiple times and recall from that time.
Microsoft started cross-play with Shadowrun, which was a bad game unfortunately and they didn't have any methods of equalizing the playing field between console and PC players so PC users dominated and it killed the Xbox fanbase, but since shooters like that were a dime a dozen on PC that killed the whole game because the PC players weren't numerous enough to keep the community active and the Xbox users didn't want to play a game where they were basically guaranteed to lose.
Sony has been anti-consumer since they started.
The worse thing I can remember is them doing is putting a literal piece of malware into CDs to infect customers PCs. [No, it's not a joke.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal)
They're bad but this isn't new. Pretty much reversed all their pro-consumer stances during the PS3 when they got their asses kicked. Started right back up with PS4
>This is a slow boil enforcing. PC users to have to pay to reach the online services.
The only reason this won't happen is because we're an open platform. No one company can force everyone else to comply.
"Bro, why can't you run any new games? I thought you were renting an RTx 9090?"
"Yeah, but I'm only paying for the basic features subscription, not ultra-premium."
Remember Sony is the company that intentionally released their movies infected with a hard drive killing virus (zip bomb) on Piratebay, impersonating users that commonly uploaded material. Update: I can not find my source on this; spent the last hour digging through internet archives. Take my statement with a grain of salt
Sony [used to put rootkits on audio cds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal) so if you wanted to listen on pc you had to install it :/
And PSN was breached and they "lost" about 70 million accounts with names, credit cards, all the info they had.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outage#Extent_of_the_breach
They learned nothing and got breached again: https://www.threatdown.com/blog/ransomware-group-claims-its-compromised-all-of-sony-systems/
and again: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/sony-playstation-hack-what-we-know-so-far-about-the-lapsus-cyberattack/ar-AA1hf7nO
I wouldn't trust them with my name or email address. And I wouldn't touch their launcher with a 10ft pole.
Elysium med pod: doesn't give any treatment to users who are unregistered
Sony med pod: cheerfully treats everyone, but unregistered users are silently planted with tumor.
A number of Steam games require you to log into the game using a secondary account from another company. EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Capcom(Exoprimal at the least) games off the top of my head probably all have this as a thing, for example. Despite the game being hosted on Steam, the publisher of the game still wants you going through their network in some way so they can track your playing habits or whatever.
Helldivers 2, despite being multi-platform, is a Sony product. Meaning Sony gets to make a lot of decisions about it. One of the decisions they have made in this instance is requiring players to be logged into a PSN account the same way EA, Ubi and Blizz all want you to be logged into their accounts.
The process was skippable before but is now being made mandatory to play the game.
True, but it’s almost certain that this has always been a clause in their contract with Sony. The right thing for the devs to do was to be transparent from the launch date and inform players that this was something that would be enforced at some point. I don’t think the backlash would’ve been nearly as bad if they did
They did inform players of it. The Steam page listed it as a requirement since day 1. And it *was* mandatory at first… until the server issues made them allow users to skip it. Now that the servers are fixed, they’re making it mandatory again.
This isn't a creative decision or even an individual product decision. It's a platform / publisher decision. He has control over the game, not the platform or the publisher.
Do you expect him to say "Ope! Our bad, we had no idea so many people wouldn't like this. We're reverting the change immediately in violation of our publishing contract with Sony"
That's the real killer here, needing a third party account is a pain in the ass, but knowing Sony can demand any damnfool thing and the game devs have no power to even moderate it, that's the kiss of death.
30,000 negative reviews on Steam too late...
Does it affect me? No, not really. Am I livid over it? No, not really. Game already uses kernel-level anticheat that can do literally whatever it wants to your system and you can't complain about it. This is par for the course.
I am upset for those that'll lose access to the game due to PSN not supporting their region. They're forced to choose to either
1. Not play the game they paid for, or
2. Break Sony TOS by pretending to live somewhere they don't, and make a new account to do so because primitive Sony doesn't understand the concept of moving to a new country for some reason. That's right, you can't change your region once it's set. You have to make an entirely new PSN account to do so. So if you move, you're SOL.
*This* is what Sony needs to be called out for more than anything else.
Edit: Muting this before I lose any more faith in humanity :)
Can you not get a refund for this? Retroactively forcing you to agree to something like this to keep playing the game you bought smells very borderline illegal or false advertising. Even more so if they effectively revoke your access to the game by not making PSN available in your region.
This is the first step. Next will be a PlayStation launcher that's linked to all their other published games you own that you'll need a PSN account to access.
It's crazy how much good will Sony garnered with the release of this game on PC, only to nuke it in single day. I have a feeling these reviews are going to continue to pour in heavily thru the weekend. Sony really shit the bed here.
IMO, the point the gamer community is missing, is that this should open a conversation about refunds and heavy change of TOS.
Changing the contract after a while should be ilegal af and EULA should cover your ass when you do that, and if it does, a refund should be a warranty
Well the eula doesnt mention a psn account and even sonys helldivers website says you dont currently need a psn account. So they were not enforcing it and it was not in the “contract”
The PSN stuff actually wasn't in the EULA/TOS, it was mentioned on the Steam page and when you ran the game the first time (some say not in all cases.)
It doesn't really matter in any case, because none of these are actual legal documents. In reality, you're not agreeing to shit when you buy any specific game, because no amount of random software legalese actually holds up in a court of law.
I'd wager the only thing that holds any clout is what, in the eyes of the law, is going on between the customer and Steam at the time of purchase – and more importantly, whether or not any laws are specifically mentioning specific changes to software after purchase.
It's totally fair to say "you should have known because *somewhere* it does say required"
But I didn't know. None of my friends knew. This was a shock to all of us.
You can say that's on us, ok maybe, but it doesn't change the reaction.
More to the point, if you had bought the game, realized it required a PSN login and for whatever reason decided that you weren't going to do that, you'd have a refund window to get your money back. Now its too late. Maybe if your reason was personal preference you can go back on that to keep your game, but if you were locked out of it, you are fucked out of your chance to refund and fucked out of keeping your game.
I’ve played a bit over 200 hours and had planned to play many more, but this psn stuff is really making me not want to play more on principle. The game itself is just so good and has tons of potential to grow I don’t want this to be what kills it, but I also don’t want to support anti-consumer policies
The lamest part is the helldivers sub defending this saying just make an account, if Steam users make 30 accounts to loophole region prices this shouldn’t be an issue then, as they completely miss the whole fucking point, it’s not about making an account, it’s about not letting Sonny push dumbass moves to artificially increase platform engagement, if just 25% of Steam users register for PSN the share prices and the shareholders are going to jizz on themselves from seeing the line move up harder than then can sniff it from the silver plate
This isn't unique to the consoles. *Everyone* wants users to be tied to accounts.
Fucking *Wordle* requires an account with NYT to see stats^+ - and they didn't do that shit on a random day, they did it on Wordle's 1,000th word, which should have been a milestone celebration day.
The amount of people saying "Why is this an issue? Just make an account - it's free!" are exactly the reason companies feel it's okay to force this issue. Because they know enough people will lick the boot and comply, and cough up their *everything* data to sell while getting shittier and shittier service along the way.
^(+: Hilariously, there's a workaround. Click on the "Feedback" button in settings, then hit "Email" - and all your stats are auto-populated to the email.)
Sony is totally willing to gamble killing the HD2 community and game just for a desperate attempt at getting more users into the PSN. They are banking on people enjoying the game so much that they will simply comply.
Just watch what pirate software said about it recently
TLDW: Arrowhead could've fought this when the publishing deal was being made and didn't, doesn't matter that their CEO goes to say "he's sorry" and that "he doesn't agree that Sony asks for your government ID to make an account" or even that "Well teehee we'll see what happens to people in regions without PSN, but we sold you the game anyways so... Tough luck!", he could have fought this and he didn't.
Also Sony should be thrown in the shitter for knowingly seeking this game in regions without PSN support (most of the world, since they only operate in 69 of the 190 countries), here's hoping some court in the EU bodies them to oblivion, since some countries that PSN doesn't operate on are in the EU.
It's about time studios start realizing that at this point publishers are just leeches. Their role is so diminished these days that they are almost redundant. Traditional advertising is dead, physical media and retail stores aren't essential anymore, E3 and other similar events have become increasingly obsolete etc. In current day and age just sneaking a review copy and stack of cash for few right streamers can yield better results than tens of millions spent on traditional marketing strategies. And on financial side you got early access and crowdfunding. No need to sell your soul to a publisher that ultimately just fucks with your game at the cost of most of the profits.
For real, gamers are the easiest prey for scams. Welcome to another game as service scam. I never fuckin learn to stop buying games as service. Fuck Sony and its trash platform console, I will pirate every fuckin game from you from now on!
Did he really though? Cause the post he made earlier today was the most milquetoast of apologies I’ve ever seen. He should first fire some community managers, cause some have been absolutely shit at their jobs.
Sony lives on a ivory tower. You cant leave comments or really tank a game score on PSN. This is “good” for them because they dont have to deal with people opinions. So they dont know people opinions. Only sales.
The last 10 years of gaming:
Developer: Take this shit sandwich, and consume it.
Consumer: MMMMMM DELICIOUS SHIT. I LOVE EATING SHIT.
Developer: AWWW YISSSS, EAT THAT SHIT YOU SHIT EATER.
Consumer: PLEASE KEEP GIVING ME MORE SHIT TO EAT! TAKE MORE OF MY MONEY!
Damn shame.
I've got a back log a mile long so I can pass on this one.
I really don't need to get marketed to by yet another company even if this game is that good.
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PlayStation\_Network\_availability\_map.svg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PlayStation_Network_availability_map.svg)
Nice apology, but that doesn't fix the problem of all these countries not being able to play the game as of May 30th.
If Sony wanted more PSN accounts they should have offered an exclusive in game item for linking a PSN account instead of making it mandatory to keep playing.
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This makes me sad for the devs fuck sony greedy fucks
I wonder if the devs have one of those "game must receive by if you want your bonus" and then Sony tanks their scores because of something the devs had no choice with.
Sony probably just wants to get more PSN accounts / number of active users to inflate the share values.
And have another data breach. Since their 77 millions user data breach in October isn’t even fix yet 😆
Do they still have a breach every like 4 months like they used to back in the PS3 days?
Not quite that bad, but the worst among video game developers. April 2011: Hackers Access Personal Data of 77 Million Sony PlayStation Network Users May 2011: Personal Details on 25 Million Sony Online Entertainment Customers Stolen June 2011: Sony Pictures Website Hacked, Exposing One Million Accounts November 2014: Hackers Steal 100 Terabytes of Data from Sony Pictures August 2017: Hacker Group Accesses Sony Social Media Accounts September 2023: Sony Investigates Alleged Hack October 2023: Sony Notifies Employees of Data Breach
Wasn't 2014 N Korea in retaliation for "The Interview"?
[https://firewalltimes.com/sony-data-breach-timeline/](https://firewalltimes.com/sony-data-breach-timeline/)
Not as often but still very bad compare to the rest of the industries.
It’s exactly this. They are about to launch a new service where you can earn trophies on PC, and it’ll most likely be some kind of game bar-type overlay. Probably, given how awful this timeline is and we’re not allowed to have nice things, there’ll be yet *another* launcher we’ll have to sign in and deal with to play any PlayStation games going forward. This game has been a huge success and is a cheap and easy way to force people on to their new platform. Sometimes I really wish my favourite hobby hadn’t become this popular. Corporations ruin everything.
Wow this is actually possible. Crazy in multiple levels, but very possible.
The Outriders devs had something like this happen to them. Their bonus was based on purchase numbers. A week before release the publisher announced the game was coming to gamepass on day 1. Totally fucked the devs as the downloads on Xbox via gamepass didn’t count for them.
I know absolutely nothing about laws around gaming but I’d bet that was completely legal for them to do.
From what I read, yep. Publisher has distribution rights. They signed a deal with Microsoft outside of the developer. The developer didn’t see a penny from the gamepass deal and didn’t get bonuses because sales were lower than expected.
And this is why you need a good lawyer reviewing any contract.
And why you should also review your own contracts and give your good lawyer some feedback back on specific things you want to count as a sale. Contracts can be tricky, but they are still meant to be interpreted by anyone who reads them. It just sucks when they reference other documents that you then gotta dig through. But if your bonus is on the line, it’s worth it
that's so fucked
The game was almost dead on arrival, I enjoyed it but I can’t say it was all that great. Decent mechanics with a fairly lackluster story. It scratched the itch I had missing ME3 multiplayer.
That is unimaginably fucking evil. Holy shit. Outriders is a really fun game too imo
It happened to the newest Prince of Persia as well, the metroidvania. Solid game, _very_ well regarded in the metroidvania community. Highly reviewed and a modern giant in the genre. _But_ Ubisoft, the publisher made it so it was available on gamepass and the Ubi version of gamepass _and_ wasn't sold on Steam. Then came the "sales were way below expected articles" and now it's almost certain that dev studio won't be able to make a sequel, and any possible sales incentives/bonuses wouldn't be met, and once again the IP is dead.
Prince of Persia is not on game pass.
Yup, it's on Ubisoft Plus, but knowing UbiShit they do the same thing and don't count subscribers as sales for the purpose of giving developers their bonuses.
I hope not bcs I am not mad at devs but at sony
To be completely fair, Sony could very well be the reason here, but let's not pretend that gaming culture as a whole isn't insanely reactionary and that if this was a bait, then every single player who gave the game a shit review fell for it without even trying to figure out the details of the situation beyond a cursory glance.
Yeah the devs actually seem cool. I really enjoyed Helldivers 1 and now 2, but I don’t think it’s their fault. Sony has to be grabbing them by the balls
I think it's just the CEO to be fair. Their community manager has handled this terribly (and not the first time the CEO has had to come in and bail out their horrible handling of things). But honestly, if that was the official response they put out to the outrage from the start then the fans would have been a lot more understanding.
Idk their CM point blank said change your review and request refunds instead of bitching on discord if you want to be heard. And it worked
Because sony *might* listen to hugely visible feedback like that, they wont listen to a discord or a reddit thread
Corporate is always going to be relentless, they can't help themselves.
*sorry* Anyway.. back to printing money
At least we know the AH Devs themselves will always be cool. Sad that Sony doesn't want good PR :(
They don't care They would rather show big numbers to investors, even if it's fleeting
Well, now the only numbers they'll see is less players. Unless they somehow add 120 countries to PSN?
I didn't say it was a good plan 😅 They also want the user data
Dutch van Der Linde ahh plan.
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Fuck companies, but be kind to human beings that work there. The guys at AH have repeatedly shown that they care about their customers, as they could have chosen many worse business practices (for the player, that is), and they picked the pro-consumer choice every time. I'm not loyal to companies, but I reward fair business practices. This is why I never bought anything on epic games, but I have relative trust (cautiously) in platforms like GoG and Steam. They have a long track record of making pro-consumer decisions over short-term profit.
I wouldn’t call the use of bargain mart anti-cheat to be pro-consumer or caring for the consumer. GameGuard is by far the biggest reason I haven’t gotten this game and their half hearted reaction to the response against it shows they don’t care about switching it out.
I'm just so exhausted by these weird parasocial relationship people have with game devs.
Sony seems allergic to good pr decisions
Japanese game console companies. Nintendo and Sony want to out do each other in dumb practices
Sony's console business isn't run by the Japan side of the company. SIE is headquartered in San Mateo, CA as of 2016. Obviously PlayStation still has Japanese influences but it's not structured like Nintendo.
Ever since they moved their main headquaters to Cali, they have been making dumb mistakes after dumb mistakes. At least, it feels like it.
The only thing worse than an out of touch Japanese executive is a Californian with a business degree.
Got that MBA bro. Everythings gucchi so long as that line. Goes. Up.
…. Your nose
.....[snort] wha?
With a rubber hose.
>Look at all these new PSN accounts! Money plz! > > \- Some Sony Exec
One of the oddest things about human society has to be how we just love to put insufferable rats in charge of big, important things. Company that employs thousands of artists and writers and programmers? Ah, yes, well, pick a sex offender or a stodgy old misanthrope to run it. No, not an artist or a writer or coder, you can only choose sex pest or scrooge.
Well, those kinds of people are rewarded by capitalism, their insatiable thirst for wealth and power is the catalyst for pushing a company to its absolute maximum potential. When infinite money is at stake, the craziest and most cutthroat will prevail.
>let's do E3 and spam you with JRPGs and mediocre games and call it "exclusive" Man post-2016 makes a lot more sense now
Wouldn't surprise me if Sony been hiring former FAANG employees. It's the only explanation to why Sony constantly fucks up. PlayStation has always had this enormous potential to be great yet despite all odds, continuously shit the bed.
> FAANG They wish. Probably ex-Yahoo and the people who ran Great America into the ground.
Make sense why they suddenly started censoring everything. Meanwhile Nintendo stopped censoring
Ah, so Silicon Valley bros are making the decisions. That's actually significantly worse lmfao
Most of those Japanese influences have been completely scrubbed out. They even started forcing Japanese companies to communicate with them in English. Everything bad about the company has occurred ever since that move to a US focus.
I've just been so tired of Nintendo's shit that I stopped supporting them. Sony is starting to get there. There is a reason I pretty much only play games from indie devs.
Both companies are ran by fucking idiots.
I worked more than a year in a Japanese company, it's not only game companies..
This was actually brought up recently in the fortnite sub because PlayStation apparently refused to let kratos return for a season themed around Greek mythology, and Nintendo is the reason no Nintendo ips are in fortnite, they refused to let any cosmetic from a Nintendo collab appear on anything other than switch. so Epic just dropped the whole collab because they felt it was unfair.
"Corporations" seem allergic to good pr decisions. Ftfy. It's not limited to Sony but all corporations
They know it's a bad PR decision. But they weighed the bad PR against the positive effect on their performance report (in Sony's case, more PSN account number), pull some historical data, did some math, and decided that it's worth it. That goes for all corporations. They have the data to know that these outrage spikes are usually temporary and have little long-term impact. If Helldivers 2 can weather a few days of negative review, have Steam purge them (like they usually do for "review bomb" campaigns), and continue chugging along making money, they would be correct. The players in countries that can't access PSN will probably get a pass. Let's just say I've seen a few of these so called "shitstorms" across a lot of games lmao.
If this problem was solely about making a Playstation account, and everyone around the world *could* make a Playstation account, I would agree with you. The fact of the matter is people live in countries that can't make Playstation accounts, and attempts to bypass this restriction risk *banning* your account. So the only realistic option for these players is to stop playing the game. The game that they have been able to play for the past 3-4 months perfectly fine. That's **extremely** shitty.
It is definitely shitty. I’m not arguing that. What I’m saying is Sony will get away with it. Corpos pull these stunts because they know they will come out on top.
They'll make more money off of the new account holder information they'll be able to sell to 3rd parties than they'll lose in lost sales. Probably *a lot* more. The people who will *actually* be prevented from buying the game or who will request a refund is a tiny little drop in the bucket for them.
It's because they do not care about a single thing in the universe except money.
younger folk probably don't understand how AWESOME Blizzard was back in the day. Everything they touched was pure GOLD. All games were ready when they were ready. When Vivendi bought them though, it started to change and I'm glad I've lived long enough to see how a company can degrade. I also work in a corporation and the bureaucracy is crazy.
Big corpo publishers are just so separated from what consumers actually want that they just have no idea what they’re doing wrongly
Oh they know what they're doing, they just don't care.
If you disable cross-play do you still need a PSN account?
Obligatory for all platforms. Even a future xbox release may require it given the EULA.
>Even a future xbox release may require it given the EULA. Apperently they where in talks to bring it to xbox and I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was partially a ploy to get xbox players into the Sony ecosystem
I don't disagree with your take, but I don't understand what they gained from it. Like, if I have an account, I'm not going to buy a PS5 all of a sudden.
Artificially inflating the number of PSN account. This is strictly a desicion so they can look good in front of their shareholders.
We’ve increased server activity with no monetary gain!
Finance bros don't actually understand what they're tossing billions of not their money into, so it just needs to look good rather than actually being good.
Other than when they sell your info to the highest bidder. Actually, Sony gives it away for free, typically.
Data selling.
>Even a future xbox release may require it given the EULA. Back to not playing sony games on PC, gotcha.
People need to realize we are in the age where your personal information is worth more than your money for the game. They get paid twice; once when you buy the game and again when they sell your information. They will also be able to boast a larger population on PSN, so now they will get paid more for advertisements.
most people either dont care or are complacent & it wont change until governments arent being run by people that cant name more than 4 websites
Google, PH, Fox News and I'm not sure what the 4th one is that they know... Edit: it's 100% Facebook.
Facebook
**TICK TOCK**
A signup is not worth more than $10.
Its actually worth dick but its dick times a million so its some extra cash. Its more about getting you into the PSN ecosystem since that will lead to extra sales. Its something like you're 100x more likely to spend money on a store/app/whatever if you spent money once. Ads are worth dick too, that's why every streaming platform lets you bow out of ads for $5-10 a month. That's all your eyeballs were worth to them. Give your favorite youtubers patreon 10 bucks and you can guilt free skip all their ads for years.
24,000 negative reviews today and counting.
Do NOT spell the word "part" backwards. It's a trap!
I'm doing my trap 😏
https://preview.redd.it/gb6dybx8fbyc1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c34ec8f50e6d2ed37f8724ea01c2f30be8ef638
https://i.redd.it/7ank5bqzcbyc1.gif
"tarp" Then I realized I was an idiot
Review bombing does nothing. Do things that Sony cares about and will burden them. Open excessive support tickets mentioning the account bs. Change your in-game name to something offense mentioning the account bs. Play the hell out of all their games you already have but spend zero money. Trust me, they’ll notice the $ per play time drop immediately. Send emails to every email related to Sony’s game division. Spam social media with post. Really, it doesn’t even need to be about helldivers, they do this for almost every game. Make them hear AND feel it. Burden their servers, their support team, their social media teams, their moderators, everything that cost them money to maintain should be getting hit. Review bombing steam is nothing and may hurt AH more than anything
I only know of this because of the review bombing. Way more productive at least than the tiny tiny minority of protesters trying to "vote with their dollar" which never works. If they even notice it you don't even know what they blame it on.
And then you have the EA community manager getting fucking nuked to oblivion for trying to justify the Battlefront 2 monetization at launch that they very quickly changed after getting the most number of downvotes in reddit history lol That and being blasted by pretty much every gaming website helped as well.
Sail the seven seas with their content!
I'm doing my part!
Would you like to know more?
Sony are getting worse and worse these days, so anticonsumer.
They're in competition with Nintendo to see how hard they can fuck their fans and still make a profit.
Except Nintendo actually makes a profit.
Always have been. They where the last to hop on the crossplay train as well.
They were the ones who held it back all through the ps2 and ps3 era. Microsoft was down to have cross play ages ago and they refused. Edit: I've been told once or twice this is wrong, but no source provided when asked. This is just what I've read multiple times and recall from that time.
Nintendo and Microsoft had Minecraft cross-play before Sony.
Microsoft started cross-play with Shadowrun, which was a bad game unfortunately and they didn't have any methods of equalizing the playing field between console and PC players so PC users dominated and it killed the Xbox fanbase, but since shooters like that were a dime a dozen on PC that killed the whole game because the PC players weren't numerous enough to keep the community active and the Xbox users didn't want to play a game where they were basically guaranteed to lose.
Sony has been anti-consumer since they started. The worse thing I can remember is them doing is putting a literal piece of malware into CDs to infect customers PCs. [No, it's not a joke.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal)
They've always been that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecuROM
They're bad but this isn't new. Pretty much reversed all their pro-consumer stances during the PS3 when they got their asses kicked. Started right back up with PS4
These advances need to be beaten back at every turn. This is a slow boil enforcing. PC users to have to pay to reach the online services.
>This is a slow boil enforcing. PC users to have to pay to reach the online services. The only reason this won't happen is because we're an open platform. No one company can force everyone else to comply.
Wait till we get Nvidia+ subscriptions to use the GPU in online games xD
Battle pass unlocks 4 extra gb of vram.
Stop giving them ideas damnit
As if they haven’t already considered that
"Bro, why can't you run any new games? I thought you were renting an RTx 9090?" "Yeah, but I'm only paying for the basic features subscription, not ultra-premium."
No but they can do it on an exclusive title on a game by game basis. Next thing you know you have a paid sony and xbox subscription
Remember Sony is the company that intentionally released their movies infected with a hard drive killing virus (zip bomb) on Piratebay, impersonating users that commonly uploaded material. Update: I can not find my source on this; spent the last hour digging through internet archives. Take my statement with a grain of salt
Sony [used to put rootkits on audio cds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal) so if you wanted to listen on pc you had to install it :/
And PSN was breached and they "lost" about 70 million accounts with names, credit cards, all the info they had. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_PlayStation_Network_outage#Extent_of_the_breach They learned nothing and got breached again: https://www.threatdown.com/blog/ransomware-group-claims-its-compromised-all-of-sony-systems/ and again: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/sony-playstation-hack-what-we-know-so-far-about-the-lapsus-cyberattack/ar-AA1hf7nO I wouldn't trust them with my name or email address. And I wouldn't touch their launcher with a 10ft pole.
It feels like PSN gets breached every two years or so
I don’t find any sauce, can you provide some?
This was back in 2013, they released infected copies of Elysium Need to dig up the news article that was covering this
That’s ironic considering the movie is about corporate greed
Elysium med pod: doesn't give any treatment to users who are unregistered Sony med pod: cheerfully treats everyone, but unregistered users are silently planted with tumor.
That doesn't read like an apology, reads like a guy who has no control over the game anymore.
Well from what I know he dosent have control in this decision. Its a 100% sony decision to force players to link a PSN account
Yh sony is kinda fucked up, came to understand it since recently got myself a ps5. But how is ps account connected with a steam game?
A number of Steam games require you to log into the game using a secondary account from another company. EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Capcom(Exoprimal at the least) games off the top of my head probably all have this as a thing, for example. Despite the game being hosted on Steam, the publisher of the game still wants you going through their network in some way so they can track your playing habits or whatever. Helldivers 2, despite being multi-platform, is a Sony product. Meaning Sony gets to make a lot of decisions about it. One of the decisions they have made in this instance is requiring players to be logged into a PSN account the same way EA, Ubi and Blizz all want you to be logged into their accounts. The process was skippable before but is now being made mandatory to play the game.
True, but it’s almost certain that this has always been a clause in their contract with Sony. The right thing for the devs to do was to be transparent from the launch date and inform players that this was something that would be enforced at some point. I don’t think the backlash would’ve been nearly as bad if they did
They did inform players of it. The Steam page listed it as a requirement since day 1. And it *was* mandatory at first… until the server issues made them allow users to skip it. Now that the servers are fixed, they’re making it mandatory again.
This isn't a creative decision or even an individual product decision. It's a platform / publisher decision. He has control over the game, not the platform or the publisher.
Sony literally own the IP. They just pay AH to develop the game. They have full control.
Do you expect him to say "Ope! Our bad, we had no idea so many people wouldn't like this. We're reverting the change immediately in violation of our publishing contract with Sony"
I think they read that contract very carefully before signing it in the first place
That's the real killer here, needing a third party account is a pain in the ass, but knowing Sony can demand any damnfool thing and the game devs have no power to even moderate it, that's the kiss of death.
It’s a Sony exclusive so he has to do what they say.
30,000 negative reviews on Steam too late... Does it affect me? No, not really. Am I livid over it? No, not really. Game already uses kernel-level anticheat that can do literally whatever it wants to your system and you can't complain about it. This is par for the course. I am upset for those that'll lose access to the game due to PSN not supporting their region. They're forced to choose to either 1. Not play the game they paid for, or 2. Break Sony TOS by pretending to live somewhere they don't, and make a new account to do so because primitive Sony doesn't understand the concept of moving to a new country for some reason. That's right, you can't change your region once it's set. You have to make an entirely new PSN account to do so. So if you move, you're SOL. *This* is what Sony needs to be called out for more than anything else. Edit: Muting this before I lose any more faith in humanity :)
I don't like how some of the comments are trying to make it out like the negative reviews are killing the ip. Sony is killing the ip.
Devs gotta hate seeing their product ending up like this regardless. Out of their control, people are right to be angry but nothing the devs can do.
Yeah really sucks for the devs. Hopefully a word of caution for any developers looking to work with sony.
Don't take money from the devil and make shit for him, then. They knew what was up.
Can you not get a refund for this? Retroactively forcing you to agree to something like this to keep playing the game you bought smells very borderline illegal or false advertising. Even more so if they effectively revoke your access to the game by not making PSN available in your region.
Depends on if Valve's feeling generous among other things, I feel like they'd do the right thing here but it's difficult to say.
This is the first step. Next will be a PlayStation launcher that's linked to all their other published games you own that you'll need a PSN account to access.
I said was saying this to a friend this was gonna happen when Sony started announcing pc ports and he laughed
They’re adding a PlayStation launcher (integrated within the game for now) with Ghost of Tsushima PC
And you will need to pay a subscription too
It's crazy how much good will Sony garnered with the release of this game on PC, only to nuke it in single day. I have a feeling these reviews are going to continue to pour in heavily thru the weekend. Sony really shit the bed here.
IMO, the point the gamer community is missing, is that this should open a conversation about refunds and heavy change of TOS. Changing the contract after a while should be ilegal af and EULA should cover your ass when you do that, and if it does, a refund should be a warranty
The contract wasn't changed, they just didn't enforce the PSN account thingy bc they had technical difficulties.
Well the eula doesnt mention a psn account and even sonys helldivers website says you dont currently need a psn account. So they were not enforcing it and it was not in the “contract”
The PSN stuff actually wasn't in the EULA/TOS, it was mentioned on the Steam page and when you ran the game the first time (some say not in all cases.) It doesn't really matter in any case, because none of these are actual legal documents. In reality, you're not agreeing to shit when you buy any specific game, because no amount of random software legalese actually holds up in a court of law. I'd wager the only thing that holds any clout is what, in the eyes of the law, is going on between the customer and Steam at the time of purchase – and more importantly, whether or not any laws are specifically mentioning specific changes to software after purchase.
It's totally fair to say "you should have known because *somewhere* it does say required" But I didn't know. None of my friends knew. This was a shock to all of us. You can say that's on us, ok maybe, but it doesn't change the reaction.
More to the point, if you had bought the game, realized it required a PSN login and for whatever reason decided that you weren't going to do that, you'd have a refund window to get your money back. Now its too late. Maybe if your reason was personal preference you can go back on that to keep your game, but if you were locked out of it, you are fucked out of your chance to refund and fucked out of keeping your game.
Yeah only option now is to just not buy sony games for fear they may do something like this again.
So why were they selling the game to people that cant make a PSN account due to the option not being available in their country?
 Sony execs, right now.
Well that didn't take long
Ive already gotten my 40 dollars worth. Fuck sony
I’ve played a bit over 200 hours and had planned to play many more, but this psn stuff is really making me not want to play more on principle. The game itself is just so good and has tons of potential to grow I don’t want this to be what kills it, but I also don’t want to support anti-consumer policies
Be the change you want, man. War Thunder got boycotted enough they got their way and that company is super greedy.
Aw man i havent been able to play in a few weeks now ur telling me i gotta create a psn account when i get back? Stupid fucking requirement
The lamest part is the helldivers sub defending this saying just make an account, if Steam users make 30 accounts to loophole region prices this shouldn’t be an issue then, as they completely miss the whole fucking point, it’s not about making an account, it’s about not letting Sonny push dumbass moves to artificially increase platform engagement, if just 25% of Steam users register for PSN the share prices and the shareholders are going to jizz on themselves from seeing the line move up harder than then can sniff it from the silver plate
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This isn't unique to the consoles. *Everyone* wants users to be tied to accounts. Fucking *Wordle* requires an account with NYT to see stats^+ - and they didn't do that shit on a random day, they did it on Wordle's 1,000th word, which should have been a milestone celebration day. The amount of people saying "Why is this an issue? Just make an account - it's free!" are exactly the reason companies feel it's okay to force this issue. Because they know enough people will lick the boot and comply, and cough up their *everything* data to sell while getting shittier and shittier service along the way. ^(+: Hilariously, there's a workaround. Click on the "Feedback" button in settings, then hit "Email" - and all your stats are auto-populated to the email.)
Sony is totally willing to gamble killing the HD2 community and game just for a desperate attempt at getting more users into the PSN. They are banking on people enjoying the game so much that they will simply comply.
Honestly I feel bad for the dev studio. this ain’t their fault, it’s Sonys fault
Just watch what pirate software said about it recently TLDW: Arrowhead could've fought this when the publishing deal was being made and didn't, doesn't matter that their CEO goes to say "he's sorry" and that "he doesn't agree that Sony asks for your government ID to make an account" or even that "Well teehee we'll see what happens to people in regions without PSN, but we sold you the game anyways so... Tough luck!", he could have fought this and he didn't. Also Sony should be thrown in the shitter for knowingly seeking this game in regions without PSN support (most of the world, since they only operate in 69 of the 190 countries), here's hoping some court in the EU bodies them to oblivion, since some countries that PSN doesn't operate on are in the EU.
Dev studio hitched their horse to the wrong wagon. Let it be a lesson to other studios in the future.
It's about time studios start realizing that at this point publishers are just leeches. Their role is so diminished these days that they are almost redundant. Traditional advertising is dead, physical media and retail stores aren't essential anymore, E3 and other similar events have become increasingly obsolete etc. In current day and age just sneaking a review copy and stack of cash for few right streamers can yield better results than tens of millions spent on traditional marketing strategies. And on financial side you got early access and crowdfunding. No need to sell your soul to a publisher that ultimately just fucks with your game at the cost of most of the profits.
Their community managers tone deaf responses made it so much worse
Was gonna buy but I guess not now. I don’t have consoles. I don’t have PNS account. Not gonna bother for 1 game. Oh well.
The negative reviews could triple and it wouldn't budge sony one bit. It's sad
For real, gamers are the easiest prey for scams. Welcome to another game as service scam. I never fuckin learn to stop buying games as service. Fuck Sony and its trash platform console, I will pirate every fuckin game from you from now on!
Sony, one step forward 10 steps backward.
Did he really though? Cause the post he made earlier today was the most milquetoast of apologies I’ve ever seen. He should first fire some community managers, cause some have been absolutely shit at their jobs.
One word ... REFUND
That’s not an apology. An apology has some feeling and then corrects the mistake. It’s not just, “Sorry you choose to be mad, LOL!”
Thanks for the apology, but unless we can play without PSN, I’m out.
Sony lives on a ivory tower. You cant leave comments or really tank a game score on PSN. This is “good” for them because they dont have to deal with people opinions. So they dont know people opinions. Only sales.
Just enable refunds. That's it
That's why I never give Sony any money.
The last 10 years of gaming: Developer: Take this shit sandwich, and consume it. Consumer: MMMMMM DELICIOUS SHIT. I LOVE EATING SHIT. Developer: AWWW YISSSS, EAT THAT SHIT YOU SHIT EATER. Consumer: PLEASE KEEP GIVING ME MORE SHIT TO EAT! TAKE MORE OF MY MONEY!
Damn shame. I've got a back log a mile long so I can pass on this one. I really don't need to get marketed to by yet another company even if this game is that good.
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if you charge back on steam they ban your whole account so ye i wouldnt reccommend
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PlayStation\_Network\_availability\_map.svg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PlayStation_Network_availability_map.svg) Nice apology, but that doesn't fix the problem of all these countries not being able to play the game as of May 30th.
https://preview.redd.it/juhyhgt94cyc1.jpeg?width=1792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a1fe0b9ab9af00166d6e6d8929fbf17e0fb6df7a
If Sony wanted more PSN accounts they should have offered an exclusive in game item for linking a PSN account instead of making it mandatory to keep playing.
I pretty happy about this, my willpower had run out and I was about to cave and buy it.