God of War Ragnarök has been one of the most highly anticipated PC launches in recent history, although the launch has been somewhat controversial. After launching on PC via Steam and Epic Games on September 19, players discovered that the single-player narrative-driven action-adventure game would require an online PSN account in order to play. This account requirement somewhat predictably resulted in significant backlash, which, in turn, resulted in a third-party mod to remove the account requirement.

Shortly after the launch of God of War Ragnarök, the game's Steam page became inundated with negative reviews because of the PlayStation Network account required to play the game. Less than a week after launch, God of War's rating on Steam is a solid "Mixed," with only 69% positive reviews. That is compared to Metacritic's user reviews that place the PS5 version of the game at 8.1/10. Shortly after the review bombs started, though, a free mod called NoPSSDK appeared on Nexus Mods and GitHub that removes the PSN account requirement from God of War Ragnarök.[Editor's note: Our in-depth performance review of God of War Ragnarök, with testing on 35 GPUs, is now live]

Interestingly, removing the PSN account requirement only seemingly required adding two DLL files to the game's install files. At the time of writing, NoPSSDK has only amassed 1,199 total downloads from Nexus Mods, while there are at least 4,362 reviews of the game on Steam. This isn't even the first time in recent memory that a PlayStation Network account requirement has caused a stir for PC ports of PS5 games. Earlier this year, Helldivers 2 added a PSN account requirement after players had already purchased and logged potentially hundreds of hours in-game. It's also worth noting that a PlayStation Network account is free, although the account does ask users for their date of birth, so it could be used as a means to prevent players under the 17+ age restriction from accessing the game. There are also likely at least a few gamers with privacy concerns, as well as those that simply don't like the idea of a single player game requiring an internet connection and an online account in order to play.

The biggest difference between how Sony handled the PSN account in Helldivers 2 and God of War Ragnarök is that players knew from the outset that it would be a requirement in God of War, while it was added to Helldivers 2 months after launch. There's also much more of an incentive for Sony to require a PSN account for Helldivers 2, which is exclusively played online, compared to God of War, which is a single-player, narrative-driven experience. Sony eventually also removed the account requirement for Helldivers 2, presumably as a result of the player backlash, but it seems unlikely that it will do the same for God of War Ragnarök—especially now that there is a third-party mod that removes the account requirement.

Update Sep 25th: It appears as though the God of War Ragnarök NoPSSDK mod has disappeared from Nexus Mods. In a post to the site's X page, Nexus Mods claims that the author of the mod removed it from the site, but there has been no comment from the mod creator. The creator had also previously committed to maintaining the mod, even if Sony tried break compatibility via an update to the game.

By the way: We've noticed that the popular PSN-bypass mod for God of War Ragnarök has been removed from our site by the author, and so we've reached out to find out why.