This is not true. We gotta stop spreading this misinformation.
It was not a dev, it was a community manager and they have since been gone from the Discord since yesterday.
Helldivers 2 has been delisted on Steam in countries where PSN isn't available
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This is not true. We gotta stop spreading this misinformation.
It was not a dev, it was a community manager and they have since been gone from the Discord since yesterday.
You know what's ironic? This whole drama would be far worse if it was Sony's platform (and some other publisher now required an account to play) instead of them being the publisher. At least people on Steam can get a refund, if this happened on PS5 people would be fucked. AFAIK they've only given refunds for Cyberpunk 2077, right?
Then I stand corrected on my first point. I didn't know that and thanks for bringing it to my attention. Though in line with this, we don't know how specifically PSN was broken at release. We have to consider that we are talking about a network that already supports without issue millions of players at the same time, perhaps even 10 million+. What more harm can 500 thousand more people make? Maybe their PSN problems were in their end, in their implementation, in which case there would be no PSN issue at large. Maybe whatever issue they had could have been solved by disabling cross-play temporally as they seem to have suggested to their users to do manually. We just don't know but of course I can be wrong in this. Please correct me if I am.
However the case, my second point still stands. There were a lot broken subsystems in that game at launch as far as I understand it but they weren't disabled as far as I know. If the wanted to disable a functionality demanded by their publisher, the correct course of action would have been to communicate with them first. You don't go around disabling agreed-upon functionality of yours client product as you see fit after launch. That's unprofessional.
Thanks a bunch for letting me know. Something that popped into my social circle today and I wasn't sure if this was a true thing or not because the person who posted it literally gave no other context. Much appreciated.
Their CEO said so. I don't know how this is still a debated topic.
What a shitshow.
Like I said, Sony should have seen it coming and just let it go for this one game that exceed their wildest expectations.
Personally I don't think having to sign up for another account to be that big of an hassle but I think people have the right to complain.
As for Arrowhead, I praised their hands-on approach on social media, specially the CEO, but that's a hard place to be in, you end up having to justify yourself to every minor toxic part of the community. And their response (refund, give bad reviews, yolo) isn't the mature one, imo. They knew this was coming, they could have said something about it before (to both the players and Sony). And Sony had bet on them for a long time and supported them in transforming a niche top-down shooter to a full-blown TPS GAAS. We don't know how this would end up without the playstation machine behind it, so I don't really get the feeling of "Arrowhead should just ditch'em asap"
It's a shitshow all around.
I'm sry but are u high
I guarantee every large pub is foaming to give arrowhead a fat bag to make them a GaaS success like HD2
Hell I'm sure Phil Spencer been knocking down that door trying to buy them
We do know the code wasn't properly made for the amount of players that came on. Luckily during the beginning AH were very open on what they were doing. They had to readjust something on their backend because they said just adding more servers wouldn't solve the overflow issue they had due to not expecting so many people to play the game at once. They even put caps on how many people could be on at a time... which had other issues because then people went idle and didn't leave the game so people couldn't get in.
My game is already linked to PSN, so I do not have issue with that. I do have issue that some of friends will not be able to play anymore if Sony is dumb enough to check that their accounts are not from their original country.
Indeed. No matter what your views on this issue, it is a absolutely a GREAT thing that PC users have the ability to provide open critique through Steam user reviews and to also vote with their wallets through the refund process in an easier way compared to consoles.
No, we don't. Countless Steam players would gladly trade PSN sign-up for Bloodborne on PC.
Sony launcher would be different, and not everyone feels like me… but equally, not everyone feels like you.
Seriously don't think I've ever seen a thread here with so many "The Noble Publisher should have more thoroughly dictated every decision to these shifty developers, whose autonomy must be curtailed" takes. Wild that anybody thinks the multibillion dollar megacorp is the unfair victim of uppity developers and "hypocritical" customers
Sony launcher, and especially exclusive storefront are dealbreakers to me. Sony has shown time and time again that they can't secure customer account information to save their lives.
I don't have any inherent issues with account linking, but...way to shoot yourself in the foot by making it forced
It's a silly argument in general. You're actually allowed to give one corporation your private information one day and then decide to tell a different corporation to fuck off into the sun for wanting similar info the next. Nobody owes Sony or any other corp some kind of "equal" willingness to fork over their data, and signing up for one account certainly doesn't obligate you to willingly sign up for an account with anyone else who wants you to do so forever afterwards.
It's perfectly fine and reasonable to get sick of corporations demanding this stuff, or to decide you particularly don't trust one corporation over another
The list of major publishers that would work with Arrowhead after this is the list of major publishers. No one is gonna hesitate to because of this incredible Sony-initiated fumble.
I didn't expect it to beat Cities: Skylines 2 for the negative reviews on Steam. Helldiver 2 still a good game though.
Yeah they could've opted to have account linking be a requirement from the jump or just not do it at all. But doing it after release, after the popularity makes it look suspicious, like a play to basically hoover up player data after the fact by blocking access, hence the blowback.
A large amount of people seem to think PC players have an inherent hatred for checks notes, Sony?
This is why in the grand scheme of things there will be no impact. Sony and Arrowhead will still be working with each other because thus far it's been successful. The game is still selling and its future still looks bright, so no biggie.
He said it was their call, that doesn't mean it doesn't require approval. Devs aren't just granted the ability to turn off and turn on account link at their authority.
Ok, but whose code? PSN's or AH's? There are multiple components in a network and if any of those components fail, potentially even the whole network can collapse. Indeed, just adding more servers on their own doesn't work plus it's unnecessarily more expensive which makes it a no-go. Your code must be written to take advantage of those extra resources plus all the supporting elements must be taken into account too. From what you're telling me I fail to see how this proves that there was a PSN problem specifically and of what nature. Related to this, during this time was still posible to link PSN accounts, even if not mandatory?
Regarding unsopported PSN accounts, I already said and agree that is was a massive and serious mistake from Sony to sell the game in those countries. Ideally, they should officially support them, if not offer a (temporary) exception for them and if this is also not possible/not wanted, then offer a refund to those affected while stopping to sell the game in there. Which seems to be what they (or Valve?) are currently doing.
Agree with this.
On Sony's end they would have provided them with a set of requirements as part of the publishing relationship long ago. There's a high probability that Arrowhead knew that this was neccesary years before the game shipped.
Sony might be accountable for the higher-level decision but Arrowhead are responsible for the delivery of this aspect of the game, and it could have been something that was accepted if it was communicated properly before the game released.
And it does matter, you'd be naive to think that it doesn't. Something like this is a big part of Sony's growth strategy on PC and Arrowhead not delivering it obviously affects their publishing relationship. It's possible, for instance that without being able to provide the online PSN requirement Sony either wouldn't have published the game, or would have wanted a different revenue split from the game. So if Arrowhead aren't able to deliver this feature then it's no wonder that ends up being a major point of tension with the publisher.
I don't think the requirement itself is especially unreasonable. Though I do think Sony should support their games in all platforms, Sony are likely only legally a equipped to deliver games in the platforms that they support via PSN. I agree with the idea that Sony should be capable of delivering their games on more platforms but there are logistical reasons they haven't in relation to how their software is traditionally tied to hardware. That doesn't mean that that issue is unsolvable or shouldn't be solved but it's the way these businesses operate and it's hard to believe that wouldn't have been made clear to Arrowhead far before now.
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All of this said, as the issue stands I think Sony and Arrowhead should revert the change. Sony can take a softer approach to getting people signed in with PSN accounts. They could offer a PSN exclusive Warbond or something like that. I know this would upset the player base too, but it is what it is. It's a game published by PlayStation and they want users signed up to their service and agreeing to their terms.
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Can you imagine the uproar though if Helldivers 2 released and simply wasn't available to purchase in all these countries?
That would be a disaster too.
It's "their" code. They support and maintain it. If they wanted, tomorrow the game would just stop working. Which is to say, they have the ability to disable the account linking without ever talking with Sony about it. I say "their" because I'm guessing technically the code is property of Sony.
That would be much better. Selling the game in unsupported areas is morally and ethically wrong. Not selling the game wouldn't be.
The whole "but others mandate their account as well!!!" bit is extremely disingenuous and goes over the fact that those "others" had a working infrastructure in place to support that, while all this shitshow is solely caused by the fact that Sony did NOT have a working infrastructure then (to the point of having to disable the integration) and STILL DOES NOT have a working infrastructure now because their account system is officially available ONLY in """tier 1""" (how I hate that term) countries, after months of selling the game worldwide. They deserve all the shit they're getting and some more.
The crazy thing about this is how many countries PSN is not available in. Didn't realize it was so many
This is the best solution and a good way to regain trust with the community. Then expand PSN log ins/accounts to every country they want to sell their games on PC, like many other accounts do on PC, so they can service and have customer support everywhere they sell the game.
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But they didn't need to let it go - they could have just handled it much better. None of this is new/unique for service games - nuking progress, removing accounts from 'invalid' regions, introducing new account ID linking - it happens all the time (and I've witnessed all of these 1st hand - not just speaking observationally) and more importantly it usually gets handled without uproar or upset communities too.
Sony/Arrowhead mishandling this speaks more to how badly they understand GaaS than anything else.
And yet, it would still be a disaster.
Sony hasn't thought this through at all.
Oh okay I didn't know they could just tell their publisher to eat ass like that. So developers decide to allow or not launchers and account links?
I really went from "what's the big deal" to "oh so they're evil" overnight... What on earth is sony thinking with a change like this
Well, I'll grant you that the comment by the CEO it's ambiguous but that is how I'm honestly reading it. I will also grant you that it is a strange way for a developer to behave but then again, developers don't usually throw their publishers to the wolves like they just did either.
If at any point he specifies any further to the contrary, I will retract myself and apologize.
Cross-play has various issues, certain Steam accounts don't work, the friend code system is cumbersome and unreliable, etc.
The whole MAU stuff is just baseless speculation based on no real information. But if you actually actually think about how Sony is trying to increase their investment in publishing on PC, it makes perfect sense that they want to build up a consistent infrastructure for customer service, friends lists, cross-play, cross-progression, etc. based on their current network that can be reused across all their games. Having each new developer launching a PC version spend resources to reinvent the wheel each time would just be a waste.
You don't have to apologize. I don't remotely think a developer is going so rogue that they can unilaterally turn on/off account link and or launcher, that is my point. It ain't happening.
What this entire debacle tells me is that Sony/PSN is nowhere near ready to competently engage with GAAS as a global business priority.
It's fine. They have Bungie giving them advice with their GAAS efforts.
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