ETA: Sony has now reversed the decision

Sony has announced that to play Helldivers II on Steam you will need a PSN account.

This was apparently a requirement intended for launch but not "technically" possible, though if one wanted to by cynical (and one should) one might think that Sony allowed players to play without one long enough to get a lot of copies of the game sold and a lot of people invested before fully implementing this requirement.

A lot of Steam users do not want to have PSN accounts, even though they're free, for a host of good reasons and this is clearly a form of bait and switch. PlayStation's reasoning behind it, to enable the banning of abusive players, is transparently absurd. Lots of Steam games allow for players to be banned without requiring a PSN account.

This kind of implementation of additional requirements after purchase in order to use software you already paid for is just part and parcel of the joys of live services, I guess.

Looks like the linking thing isn't happening now. I guess everyone just made a big enough stink about it.

https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929

I do try to remember that as a general rule, one should not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. I don't really have any trouble believing that there were technical issues with intended PSN account linking at launch and that they just shoved the issue down the road for later (especially since there turned out to be far more urgent server capacity issues to address). Nonetheless, even if one gives them the benefit of the doubt there, they should have been more aware of the optics for its delayed implementation, because it does end up looking like a bait-and-switch, even if it was never intended that way. There's no denying that they really failed to read the room.

But also, the most insane part of this little saga was that a lot of countries don't have PSN, and hence people in those countries who'd already bought the game would not have been able to play the game they paid for at all anymore.

https://twitter.com/PirateSoftware/status/1787163524575490404

I believe Steam had been denying refunds based on the account linking issue, but it's not hard to imagine Valve contacting Sony after they removed access to the game for all these countries and saying, "Yeah, you guys are gonna have to refund all these now," and Sony realizing that implementing account linking just wasn't worth the cost of refunds and/or court fights.

@atheistpreacher: It's good that it isn't happening, and I'm sure they weren't prepared for the blowback (and probably didn't even think about the fact that PSN is only available in a limited number of countries) but I simply do not believe in the "one should not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" saying. At least not anymore.

Our economy runs on malice. Or rather sociopathic greed. It's not actual malice in that there's nobody at Sony who wants to harm people. There are just people who want their data because it's valuable and knew that the game would sell worse if they required linking up front and thought that the bait and switch would be more profitable. The studio head has admitted that it was his decision to delay the linking requirement. The fact that the decision was reversed so quickly shows that Sony was flat out lying about the reason behind the requirement (as does the fact that the game ran fine for months without it.)

Some executive decided to implement things the way they did in order to force more PSN memberships and then the backlash was big enough so that it wasn't worth it. I never thought this was the biggest scandal in gaming history or anything, I mean a PSN account isn't much worse than other forced accounts (except for the availability thing, which is profoundly on brand for Sony and was a stupidity issue; I don't think they intended to sell the game and then take away access in some territories) but bait and switches are very common in gaming these days.

I mean is it stupidity when a game ships to reviewers without a cash shop and then opens one up on launch or shortly after? Is it stupidity when Sony sometimes requires you to perform up to TWENTY tasks often used to train AI in order to log into your account?

How much stupidity do you think these multi billion dollar companies have? I'll grant you it's a lot, but there are limits.

It was a really stupid decision being so far after release it was always going to screw over some people along with fact nobody likes creating pointless accounts, account linking should have been optional and incentivized with in game credits etc.

For a company that at one point was committed to creating a dozen live service games, Sony sure doesn't seem to have the ability to manage a single successful one. The absolutely most generous read is that they failed to communicate the return of this requirement to the player base, and failure to communicate to a LSG community is often a kiss of death. Ultimately, nothing is changing from a week ago, but they managed to lose players and tarnish the game's reputation through their actions.

As a small aside, I don't love the dev sweatily redirecting gamer rage to the publisher. I know this is their livelihood, and Sony deserves the blame for killing the game's momentum (hopefully temporarily), but anytime a game's representative humors / encourages the worst of a player base, it feels like the dev could throw anyone to the wolves. Maybe I'm just oversensitive to that in light of gamergate(s), but it feels bad.

@allthedinos: There are several potential explanations for this. One is that with or without Sony's permission he tried to preserve his own reputation and that of his game at Sony's expense in order to prevent a true revolt. Another is that he's an oversharer who just puts too many of his own thoughts out there without a good PR strategy. He did tweet that part of the blame was his.

If I were doing business with the guy I certainly wouldn't like the fact that he threw one of his partners under the bus (unless it was an agreed upon tactic to try and help the game) but I don't think this is anything like Gamergate. For one thing he's "attacking" a faceless corporation that really did do something shitty, not powerless individuals based on rumors. For another I'm not sure I agree he was encouraging "the worst" of a player base. There were people taking things too far, but overall most of the people were calling for boycotts and just being angry, not really going overboard, at least as far as I saw.

Gamergate doxed people and made death threats. As far as I can tell Helldivers II backlash was mostly review bombing on Steam. You may or may not like review bombing, but it's nothing like doxing, especially for a big corporate product like Helldivers II.

@allthedinos: H2 had 110k peak players yesterday which is only 2k difference from last week the discourse was only a relatively small number of players it won't have any lasting damage, it may create a small bump with the publicity and 180.

@bigsocrates: To clarify, I wasn't comparing it to gamergate, I was saying that I'm probably oversensitive to this situation because bad faith actors jump in at the drop of a hat thanks to it. I hadn't had my coffee yet, so I'm assuming I expressed my thought poorly.

For the reaction, I've heard there were people hoping "Japan gets nuked again" when Sony was still requiring the login. I didn't dig into negative comments because I value a small portion of my sanity, but I would bet it wasn't the only sentiment that went well beyond what should be considered to say to another person. That's what I based my second paragraph on, and really it's not a reason to lump the dev in with those worst people so much as a reason to sideeye their response to it.

As for player count, check again in a few months. The game's hallmark has been its momentum, and its incredible word of mouth was lengthening that tail. One incident won't sink a game, and certainly not overnight, but take some of that shine off and it could harm the game's growth / sustainability. The fact that it ended up being for absolutely nothing is what makes me shake my head.

@allthedinos: People say horrible things on the Internet over just about every situation. It's truly deranged. I'm sure people wished death on Phil Spencer after he decided to put Sea of Thieves on the PlayStation, even though that did absolutely 0 harm to them personally.

I guess what I'm saying is that while those sentiments are truly reprehensible, I'm not sure the dev's comments really increased them. Those people are fundamentally broken as humans. Or they're trolling.

I understand that you're not really directly comparing to Gamergate, but what made Gamergate special is that it went well beyond just saying horrible things on the Internet, and bled over into the worst parts of the real world. I don't think this will.

That's not to say his statements were wise, I just don't think they're actually likely to cause much harm, even in terms of more bad stuff being said.

On another note, I wonder if this decision originally came from Europe or Japan. PlayStation is mostly run out of Europe, or has been until recently, but this has all the hallmarks of a Japanese game company insular decision where they don't even think that "People in the Phillipines who can't get PSN have PCs, maybe we should account for that."

I’m just happy the Gamers were given a real problem that actually existed to focus on for a day or two.

Yeah, whatever disagreements we had in the other thread about the battle passes (re: still haven't launched the game in the week since) I think it's both remarkable that

A) One of the most fun subreddits in years immediately, resolutely became the most performatively toxic displays of "fandom" I've had no one but myself to blame for witnessing

B) As best my bystander perspective could perceive, less than zero consideration was given to the multi-pronged clusterfuck that would be borne by how limited PSN's reach is in comparison to Steam's

I found the data warrior angle pretty embarrassing, considering these were Steam/Twitter/Reddit blatherers taking a so-called stand for data privacy. However, when it became clear how vast the non-PSN diaspora was (that no sale list was, what, 150-odd countries?) I might've still felt the outrage was mostly of the terminally online variety but no matter how small the percentage of players in those countries might've been, I got it.

I'm not fluent enough in legalese to be certain about rightful ramifications (though I do know the guy that proposed launching a class action lawsuit from the States was being an absolute try hard) but if the idea was to require PSN registration from the beginning, selling the game anywhere in the world where that's at best complicated, at worst impossible does seem like malpractice.

To which it also seems like the community managers did an extravagantly poor job managing that reality, while the seemingly well-meaning CEO both sides-ed his way through the murkiest of PR waters probably as well as anybody could, but he's ultimately still steering a ship...I want to make some kind of cholera metaphor, for some reason.

It must truly have been the worst of weekends for everyone on the dev team, and for me that was honestly most of what I took away from this whole saga as a lapsed player who owns a PS5 in North America. This game transitioned from a pillar of Devs Done Good fanaticism to Devs Be Schemin' dogmatism instantly.

You're really putting words in my mouth here. I was talking about this specific case. The cash shop thing clearly is malice, trying to get around negative press from reviewers. Also, never seen the 20 tasks thing, not even close. Once at most. Nor do I think 20 tasks would be intentional, sounds like something hinky.

I don't see how this logically follows.

@atheistpreacher: This was something they tried about 9 months ago. It's all over Reddit and other places how a lot of people had to solve an enormous number of puzzles to log in. Not a mistake, they just got too greedy for data and made their site literally unusable (because a lot of the puzzles can be very finnicky) so they relented.

My point is that if a company has a history of doing sketchy things there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume incompetence. How many times do they have to be caught before one starts to presume that maybe these aren't just innocent li'l mistakes? It's a pattern and it breaks the assumption rule.

Sony claimed that the login was necessary so they could protect players from hacking and other bad actions. The fact that they gave up within a few days and didn't say "we have this different system" or require logins in places where PSN does operate shows that was never really the main concern (which nobody believed anyway) and of course the fact that the game has persisted for months without a separate login and not been plagued by these issues (though I'm sure it happens to some degree) shows that too.

They lied about why they wanted the logins and it was such a transparent lie that nobody even mentioned it. We're used to companies just flat out lying to us when they want to do data collection shit and giving some transparently false excuse so we just go "well yeah it's a lie but it's a lie you have to expect."

Call me old but I still don't like it when people lie to me. Even if they do it enough that I expect it.

Pretty much this. It made me think of my own reaction when Dauntless came out of early access and decided to go to Epic instead of Steam. I was annoyed, because I simply didn't want a whole other PC game software platform, it's easier and simpler to have it all in the same "container." Most people feel the same way. That doesn't mean that Epic is any worse than Valve; Valve does plenty of bad and stupid shit. But people who don't want to deal with an inconvenience like this will then scream at the top of their lungs various justifications for why they don't want to do it--including data privacy concerns--when they're just not the real reason (and sometimes they even start to believe their own performative justifications). My dudes, just admit that you don't like it because it's an inconvenience. But no, they enjoy screaming and feeling self-righteous.

Whereas, yeah, this was ridiculous. It's like Sony forgot that the reason they allowed a concurrent release in the first place was that Steam reached places they couldn't. Derp.

@atheistpreacher: I don't think it's precisely inconvenience here. A lot of online games require separate logins and people bitch and moan but it's usually not a huge deal. I think that other than the people who legitimately couldn't get PSN accounts there are three major factors at play.

1) The bait and switch. Sony acknowledges this too because Ghost of Tsushima will require PSN for its online multiplayer so they're not totally backing away from the requirement, they just understand they did it really poorly here.

2) Sony itself has a terrible reputation for data security. PSN has been hacked a number of times and people's data sold off. It happens to other companies too but Sony just has a terrible track record.

3) A lot of PC gamers really didn't want to get a PSN account specifically because that's a console thing and they feel like they shouldn't need it. Microsoft requires a Microsoft account for a number of its PC games. Minecraft is a huge one, but Forza Horizon 5 requires an MS account. However most gamers have a Microsoft account for Windows and it's not seen as a console gamer thing so while people do gripe it's not as big a deal.

I also don't think Sony did a simultaneous release to reach regions it doesn't usually. They wanted sales for people without PlayStations but I'd wager the vast majority of Steam sales are in territories that have PSN. Selling $40 computer games is a business that overlaps well with countries that have PSN access. I'd also guess that the developer pushed for simultaneous release, and Sony wants to test the waters on it because they are clearly more and more PC curious.

@bigsocrates: Your (3) fits the definition of "inconvenience" exactly.

And yes, of course (1) is a factor, as we've already discussed; whether this was "malicious" or not, it certainly at least gives the appearance of intent to bait-and-switch (though I'd argue that if this were the true intent, it would have happened much earlier, much like those added cash shops). But also, bait-and-switch isn't a reason in itself; it only matters if the "switch" is something people actually care about.

(2) is true, Sony has a bad reputation on data breaches. But that still doesn't make it the real reason. People should realize by now that their data isn't safe with anyone. I should know, I was in the Equifax breach. Your data is out there somewhere already.

I still find it more plausible that most of these people screaming are doing it because it's a minor inconvenience and they enjoy screaming and feeling self-righteous. See: all of Twitter now.

I dunno, I find it funny that you seem to assume everything Sony does is malicious, while apparently all consumers are pure as the driven snow and are never performative assholes on the internet for dumb reasons. Aside from the people genuinely affected by being in regions that can't create PSN accounts, I think this is more of an "ESH" situation.

Glad to see that uprising from the gamers can still make a difference. All hope is not lost. But let's see what happens in the future.

@atheistpreacher: I think Sony wanted to wait until sales tapered off before pulling the Switch because they knew there would be blowback (though not this severe.) It's different from the review score bait and switch on cash shops, which is generally about manipulating review scores but is something that you want to do early because you want the maximum number of players exposed to the cash shop when they are first playing the game.

2 may or may not be rational. But people are bothered by it.

3 is not really about convenience, more stigma. If they required a Helldivers II account, or an Arrowhead Game Studios account, equal amount of inconvenience, I think there would be much less blowback. PC players don't want to have to join the console peasant network.

I didn't mean to imply it wasn't an ESH situation for some people or that all the outrage was sincere. There's clearly a lot of bandwagoning going on here, and people do like to be angry on the Internet. I just think that there are legitimate reasons for people not to want this additional requirement, and I think Sony's claimed reasoning was completely bogus.

My personal issue with this, and to be clear I was not affected personally because I have a PS5 and PSN account anyway, was much more the bait and switch (and especially those who bought it in territories without PSN) than anything else. As a practical matter I don't think a PSN account is different from any other account, including a Steam account, and while I don't think games should require separate accounts to play them it's extremely common at this point and nothing special. But to sell a game that's always online and require an account after months of sales or you totally lose access to the game (without any refund offered, at least at first) is some grade A bullshit regardless of the reason.

You shouldn't be allowed to sell something and then revoke access unilaterally after the fact unless someone does something you want. And yes I know that the Steam page warned about it in the fine print, but I think fine print is generally bullshit (and hasn't been tested in court very often.) Unless there was a separate splash page prior to purchase alerting people you're going to get lots of buyers who don't know about it.

So you take their money and then you change the deal and I think that's a trash thing to do, regardless of what company it is and whether it's malicious or because you're too incompetent to get it working on launch.

Hah. You're right about that. The whole "PC Master Race" thing. "We don't want to be in any way affiliated with those console peasants!" Pardon me while I roll my eyes so hard that I need to retrieve them from off the floor.

I don't. And here I speak from personal experience as a consumer.

Whenever there's a multiplatform, cross-play game, the most rampant cheaters are always on PC, because as an unregulated platform it's just way easier to do. It's why PS5 suddenly no longer allowed offloading saves to USB, because that made it all the easier to move a save over to your PC and edit it for purposes of cheating. Yes, there are various PC anti-cheat services that everyone hates, but as an added bonus, they never seem to actually work.

In Helldivers 2 specifically, from the beginning there were players cheating, and it was affecting other random users. E.g., they'd end a mission and be rewarded with the max number of resources because there was a cheater in their group, and then their account is sort of ruined because they wanted to play the game legitimately, not just give themselves 9,999 of everything (let alone open themselves to a ban for something that wasn't their fault). I can name half a dozen multiplayer games off the top of my head where I've stuck to the console version because I didn't want to be in a pool with so many people with hacked saves. And I typically turn off crossplay for just this reason in any games that have it.

So when Sony says: "We're implementing this to protect our players," I don't immediately jump to the conclusion that they're lying, because as a general rule, I have personally found the closed console environment to be more secure from these kind of hijinks. Now, does that mean that Sony doesn't also want that sweet, sweet personal data? Of course not! Both can be true. And yet you're telling me that you're completely certain they're lying about the intended reason, when you simply have no way of knowing that. It is almost always a safe bet that the reality is more complicated that a single reason, particularly a nefarious one.

EDIT: I should probably also clarify that I don't necessarily think Sony would have done a better job at *actually* stopping cheating; these players are still on PC and it's not clear to me how exactly tying them to a PSN account would help with regulation. But that doesn't mean I automatically dismiss the stated *intent*. After all, I don't actually know how any of this stuff works.

Yes, we completely agree on this and have from the beginning. I never said otherwise.

There are, but my feeling is that that the ratio of entitled whining to legitimate grievance is somewhat higher that you apparently think it is. There are legitimate reasons, but those are so often not the real reasons. As @nodima already said, "I found the data warrior angle pretty embarrassing, considering these were Steam/Twitter/Reddit blatherers taking a so-called stand for data privacy." And you yourself speculated that "the vast majority of Steam sales are in territories that have PSN." My feeling is that a whole lot of people got fairly irrationally angry and then sought more legitimate reasons to justify it.

Doesn't mean Sony didn't royally fuck up! They did! It was a dumb decision and now they've paid the PR price and reversed it, and will hopefully stop to think a little more next time. This whole thing resembles an extremely miniaturized version of Microsoft with their epically disastrous Xbox One Launch; they assumed that since people already accepted most of their proposed DRM stuff from Valve/Steam, they would accept it from a MS console. Boy were they wrong; the console loyalists were used to physical games and weren't ready to make that switch, and now it's a decade later and MS is the perpetual underdog because of it. Somewhat ironically, this time it is the Steam users complaining from the other side for being asked to do something that is, as you say, getting more and more common these days anyway.

Anyway, this is still a win for consumers, and I think that we ultimately agree on a lot, with the proviso that I am slightly less cynical about Sony and more cynical about the userbase. But as I've said, aside from people in those territories which actually can't create PSN accounts, EHS. And certainly this will be a candidate on @allthedinos' "Hottest Mess" list for our due consideration. It blew up so much that, who knows, it might actually end up being one of the winners...

@atheistpreacher: I think I agree with almost everything you wrote here. I will admit that I kind of tune out a lot of the outrage noise in gaming because so much of it is about pretty much nothing, and focus instead on whether there's an underlying point, which there is here. But yes a lot of the actual outrage is just outrage for the sake of it, like the Spider-Man puddles.

The one thing I don't understand about your whole cheating passage, which I don't dispute, is how including PSN addresses those issues. Maybe I'm genuinely ignorant here, but my understanding is that all that PSN does is allow people to be banned on a PSN level instead of banning their Steam account from the game, which has pretty much the same effect (unless the person has a PSN account already with purchases and such that Sony can punish them with I guess.)

Even given a cheating issue I'm not sure how PSN addresses it, especially for people who don't already have accounts.

@bigsocrates: I did add an "edit" in the middle of my response above (which maybe you didn't see?) acknowledging that I'm also extremely not clear about how adding a PSN account would actually help the problem, but that this doesn't necessarily have anything to do with their intent. I fully acknowledge that it may well be sheer hubris on Sony's part to think that adding this requirement would actually meaningfully move the needle. The truth is that I know next to nothing about how such anti-cheating/policing actually works (probably by design! because if everyone knew exactly how it all worked, it probably wouldn't be very effective!), so I just don't have an informed enough opinion to weigh in on the matter. But yeah, they may well be deluded there.

Also, I should probably just append that when it comes to the whole malice vs. stupidity/incompetence thing, this is hardly a binary. There's a continuum there and almost everything falls somewhere in the middle. This is intuitively obvious, but neither of us actually stated it explicitly. E.g., with regard to that whole 20 captcha thing (first I'd heard about it), I'm sure some executive ultimately signed off on it at some point, but did they even realize how ridiculous it was when they did so? Does that make them malicious/evil, or just lazy/incompetent for not fully realizing what they were approving or thinking through all the implications? Probably a little from both buckets. But I try not to begin by assuming bad faith, because we tend to ascribe malice to others very easily, but never to ourselves, and as a practical matter, assuming bad faith often just puts everybody's backs up rather than leading to a resolution.

while i'm glad those with legit grievances appear to have those ameliorated (folks losing access to something they've purchased is completely unacceptable); i'm kinda walking away from this situation wanting to shower off a layer of vicarious ick (i don't play helldivers; let alone any multiplayer games to speak of).

Sony fucked up, but it's not like mandatory PSN logins are going anywhere- they'll just be more strategic (if they have any sense of market survival).

and for reasons i can't quite articulate- i just hate this review-bomb shit. it feels like mob justice for what's often a subset of a subset, even if the outcomes occasionally benefit the legitemately aggrieved.