Man I'd be so pissed if I worked for Arrowhead. One of the biggest feel good stories in gaming in a long time and suddenly someone else goes and fucks it up for you for no reason.
Yeah, must be pretty frustrating to have another party effectively cast their shadow over your efforts and not really have a way to course correct without their decision making.
I've said this in threads Before but Sony would not want to invest in PC unless it fits in with a wider growth strategy.
In the short term I imagine this will be mandatory accounts, but in the longer term they will pursue their own launcher. Their business model thrives off of the 30% cut that they receive from third parties, they would not forgo that unless they anticipated wider growth. It might be 10 years from now but they will have their own launcher.
Also the PSN account requirement is super weird when it's applied post-hoc like this, really poor optics but I do suspect it has a lot of benefits when it comes to cross platform play and interaction, as well as cross save. Playing with PC players on PS5 has not been without its issues, and features like their upcoming invite link feature designed for discord will work much better with people under one ID system. I think the main issue here is how this is being handled post release.
Lots of these companies have switched back to being on Steam whilst having account linking to effectively meet the players they can't reach where they are already, for as frictionless a process as they can vs how the older "launchers" approach has failed. I think only Ubi and RSSC are left on that front.
Account linking is their route for both attaching these players to their wider ecosystem and trying to retain them.
I'm certain they will have their own app/launcher along the way same as MS and many others, and find ways to offer recurring revenue services/subs and games through there, but it will ultimately be an additional option rather than the "launchers" of old attempting exclusivity, which hasn't worked out on PC.
That's why account linking is at is currently is.
For this current topic though, it's pretty irrelevant. The whole issue is around player response to a sudden change which isn't documented particularly well.
I myself didn't even know account linking was shut off. I just assumed it was working since I previously linked my account.
For my friends in Isle of Man and Guernsey, it was working so no one questioned it. Now they might not be able to play, but we don't really know that yet.
To me it seems more a poor communication issue. Also seems at least from some of the reviews, some people don't even know what data would be involved.
From my perspective I'm mostly fine with account linking so long as I have some control over what is sent and whatever implementation is used is light and frictionless - which has been my experience to date with PS games on PC at least. With account linking in Steam, from the Steam side at least the data given out is pretty limited. From the game itself however iirc it's just "minimal / diagnostic" or "full" as your choices.
store.steampowered.com
