Sony Reverses Decision of Mandatory PSN Account for Helldivers 2 After Negative Feedback

[TechLurker]

Not another game like this? Caveat that I don't play, but it looks for all the world like the love child of HD1 and Deep Rock Galactic (which is itself the love child of Left4Dead and Minecraft). There's also Darktide, plus Starship Troopers Extermination in the pipeline. None of those are an exact analog and STE is admittedly an Early Access dumpster fire right now, but HD2 isn't exactly un-replicable. If it does implode, somebody else will pick up the formula and release something that scratches the same itch within a year or two. Hell, that's exactly how we ended up with Cities: Skylines in the wake of SimCity's hard flop.

Indeed, not another game like this, where the Devs actively manipulate the lore/story/in-game events, giving the illusion that the game is really evolving or adapting to players' actions. The rest of the game is nothing new, and like you mention, could be found on some level in other games, esp. extraction shooters. But actively evolving according to player performance and a steadily shifting narrative to keep players engaged? There aren't really any games putting out that level of proactive engagement.

Who knew complaining would actually do something. I sure didn't see this coming. Sony is usually pretty tone-deaf, for many reasons too... not just PlayStation related.
What a big victory this was, and best of all - it didn't take 1 year for them to fix the issue.

It's a very small victory. Modern Sony can be surprisingly stubborn, and have shown in the past that they can and will eventually get their way when it comes to things like enforcing PSN accounts. But it's very much true that SIE has been extremely tone-deaf, and it's only gotten worse when everything got centralized and led to an overall reduction in game output and other poor decisions. On the other hand, the rest of Sony is slow to adapt, due to their slow and steady culture in Japan, which leads to its own kind of issues. It also doesn't help that SIE is currently seeking a new CEO; the interim one is the 2nd in command of Sony's entire business, and he's focused more on growth, and assisting with managing the entirety of Sony. SIE is just a temporary CEO position for him.

 

[Merluz]

I have a bit of a doomer take on this. I don't think Sony learned anything from this and I don't think it will change anything in gaming. People can make a big fuss about the game all they want, and talk about how horrible Sony is. When the next Spider-Man game comes out. They will all be preordering it. All Sony did to appease players was rollback a horrible decision. That is not enough for them to gain my trust. Sony did not make any promises about future games, or even apologize directly for it.

there are a lot of gamers that only cares about good games (or just games that they like) and doesn't follow any of the news about corporations making bad decisions and so on, expecially if those bad decisions are about a game that they don't even play.
most of the times people will drop a "series" of games after one bad experience (or not so good one), but ignoring the eventually bad corps that are behing the game itself.

 

[Chomiq]

Based.

Note: not actual ingame item, just concept from reddit.

 

[chrcoluk]

I think it’s already dead. Too many people take steam reviews as the gospel (they review bombed it because of policy not gameplay)

It’s not like those 200k people will delete their reviews. It would also be up to steam to retro actively re add the game to the 170 countries it delisted from ( I wouldn’t given this amount of drama)

It wouldn’t surprise me if this was a sacrifice as is. It will never get the attention it properly deserves from anyone that didn’t follow the story because now it just looks like another bad game.

Shit I did and I don’t know anything about this series but I’ll never buy it; I don’t like the drama or the twitter play by plays by the studio it’s too much.

This game wasnt the first to do this nonsense, it just looks like the tipping point got reached and it took the brunt of the push back. People are sick of having to sign/link up here there and everywhere to use a product/service.

Every time now when I get asked to buy something from some unknown online retailer, there is of course no guest checkout, and by default I am on some kind of mailing list, even when I click opt out. Same type of thing.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Had it just been people screaming. I'm sure sony would have just ignored and carried on, but when Steam started issuing refunds they could no longer carry on laughing their way to the bank.

The fact that it took them this long to reverse it says it all really. They'll probably mandate a PSN account for their games moving forward so you'll get to choose if you want to buy the game or not rather than buying it and them changing the ToS after the sale