I bet it was the incoming refunds/lawsuits in the non-PSN countries that was the decision maker. The refunds or litigation wasn't worth the $$$. The normal gamers that were just angry didn't change shit. They are used to angry gamers, they don't care.
The requirement was in the TOS from the start, and it was explicitly stated when you bought the game that you needed a PSN account. People in PSN capable countries had no grounds to sue.
Was it in the ads? Nobody ever reads eulas. It's incredibly impractical to do so. Someone did the math once and it came up to something like 10,000 years worth of reading for the average person's Eulas combined.
I don't remember where, but I remember seeing it when I bought it. (Not in the TOS, who reads those). But I was digging up my old PSN account while it downloaded. I bought it a couple weeks after launch. When the prompt to sign in popped up, I signed in. I didn't even realize you could skip it but I didn't mind signing in, I bought the game so I could play with my buddies that are on Playstation. I guess it seemed reasonable, to me, to sign into a PSN account to play with PSN players, i honestlythoughtit was a requirementfor cross-platform. But I don't play a lot of cross-platform games so I am not familiar with what is normal I guess. Of the fuckery going on in the gaming industry and the internet in general this seemed like small potatoes.
At least that's a bit more reasonable warning, but it's still kinda crap. I think anything that isn't an MMO or ranked matchmaking should give up the publisher control. I also think that for everything that has ranked matchmaking, there should be a private server option.
For me, who has no idea about this, why Sony was so forceful with adding that PSN integration and what it would mean for the gamers, that they were so angry about it?
Edit: ok looks like Louis explained the POV of gamer to me: https://youtu.be/I2VA0eum6w4 though I still don't understand what was the motivation for Sony to start this shit show.
huge demand and server load make linking psn for PC players buggy and difficult
psn requirements are disabled "temporarily" around that time to ease the load
the game becomes even more successful, tens of thousands of players buy and install it, without ever being prompted to make a psn account
Sony has wording in their PC requirements that said linking to psn is optional for PC users
now, months later, Sony decides they want more psn users for their metrics, and make a psn account mandatory retroactively
huge amounts of players feel duped out of their product, especially those from regions steam serves, but Sony doesn't, because they will essentially lose access to their product completely. Others are mistrustful of Sony's data protection record, they got hacked with disturbing frequency over the years, and dont want to give them their data on principle, especially with the knowledge that the game ran perfectly fine for months without psn
Players are up in arms, barraging the arrowhead (who were forced by Sony to do this) community managers with hate
players review bomb the absolute shit out of the game on steam, causing it to go from mostly positive to mixed over the course of a day
Sony half heartedly rolls back the requirement after a weekend of huge community backlash, poor press coverage, and depressed arrowhead CEO tweets
If psn account was a requirement from the start why is it available for non psn countries/regions? Valve should have restricted the game from the start.
Certainly, though I suspect the sales outside their psn market were a significant factor in making them reconsider now. They likely didn't want to deal with the legal fallout of essentially arbitrarily taking away the product the customers already paid for, and played with. If it weren't for that I bet Sony would have just pushed on through, bad reviews be damned
It is still a corporation. Think of them like sauron in lotr, a sort of evil giant you can successfully defy with concerted effort, but you can't really defeat them without throwing the ring into mount doom (destroying capitalism and intellectual property in this case).
Years of cynicism got jumped by this announcement. Alongside with the community feedback, gotta give kudos to Arrowhead for dragging their feet with Sony instead of mindlessly becoming their sockpuppet and prioritise community goodwill.
Team effort where I trust the devs and be far more wary of Sony.
That ship has sailed due to being present since release and most people being ok with an intrusive anticheat since that has an intended positive purpose.
Thank god, that was one of the more idiotic decisions in modern gaming history. Like the time the flappy bird dev took the game down right when it reached it's peak. I dunno if HD2 will really recover from this blow, that might have been the high water mark for the game. I will probably give it a whirl again sometime, though.
Nice! Glad the devs listened and helped convince Sony they're dumbasses for this. I do hope Sony will realize this for their other games including Ghosts of Tsushima. Hell I hope all of these other dumbass publishers stop with the bullshit of external accounts and launches.
Still I'll add that I'll wait until there's and official announcement, after all it's still Sony and there may be some other side of the coin on this.
Yeah and I only want to buy it on PC for the MP expansion since I already played it on ps4 when it originally came out. So again, fingers crossed on that one but already wasn't going to buy it going in.
Yeah the reality was probably that someone thought it would be a good way to boost some numbers somewhere to justify their position or get a bonus for 'increasing the user count' or other nonsense.
I have a theory it's part of the same effort that's resulting in some Sony-published games getting PlayStation trophy support on PC. They probably want to eventually accomplish something similar to what Microsoft did with cross-platform services between the Microsoft store and Xbox.
In similar spirit, my theory is that this is part of how they fix the issue where PC players and PS5 players have issues making/accepting friend requests. Recently the players ID's were changed from being randomly generated to a set assigned ID, and I would have bet money that the PSN account linking could have been a way to resolve whatever issue was going on there.
I don’t think I’ve seen this happen since or before ID backpedaled on adding anti-cheat to DOOM Eternal, and even backpedaled on adding an entire multiplayer mode because the players hated the anti-cheat so much.
Leave it to the communities of hell divers to force corporations to bend to their will. Fuckin awesome man.
I suspect someone ran the numbers and realized they're likely to lose more money on reduced future sales and microtransactions than they would have gained through data scraping.
A win is a win, but don't fool yourself into believing Stony listens to anyone but the almighty dollar.
A little unfortunate that the first Helldivers game was review bombed as well, but looks like that even came out above with more positive reviews than the negative ones in the end:
Edit: more fun numbers.
Yesterday's number of Positive reviews: 2,217
Today's total positive reviews (at the time of this edit about 15 hours after PlayStation announced the news on twitter): 47,743
I really want to know why it was delayed in the first place. I’ve heard some rumors. One being the devs knew 6 months ahead but just messed up the deadline. Others said the servers were overloaded on launch. Does anyone know the answer? Maybe some sources?
It wasn't "delayed", it was temporarily waived. The function was there on launch and had the game not blown up it would have remained, and anyone not in psn regions would have simply refunded the game enthusiasts they learned of the requirement. Instead, because it got so big, the PSN linking was a part of what caused the really terrible server issues early on and so it was disabled. I don't have easy access to the messages but some of the CMs and the CEO both confirmed this - I think someone shared the messages a few days ago here on c/helldivers2.
Yeah i don't know. But i highly assume that they had no idea how popular the game would be and didn't care enough. Then they suddenly saw millions of potential psn users
LOL, what? The people that were upset with Sony are the people that didn't want to link their accounts or worse, lived in a country that did not even have a PSN. Imagine that. Imagine buying a game and then a month later, a notice says that to continue playing, you need to link your account. You go to link it and it says, "sorry, that service is not available in your country." That's just a massive middle finger and most certainly illegal in most of the countries Sony did this in.
The fundamental problem is developers and publishers have too much legal control. They can ban players without reason. They can make changes without answering to anything more than "bad reviews." The fact they can even make changes like this retroactively shows that digital rights are in the dark ages; favouring only big business, never the player.
Wow I didn't actually think they would backpedal
Right? I thought they were getting ready to dog their heels in and suck it up
I bet it was the incoming refunds/lawsuits in the non-PSN countries that was the decision maker. The refunds or litigation wasn't worth the $$$. The normal gamers that were just angry didn't change shit. They are used to angry gamers, they don't care.
PSN hates refunds so I can see that being a large influence.
Idk if you already know this but angry is why lawsuits.
The requirement was in the TOS from the start, and it was explicitly stated when you bought the game that you needed a PSN account. People in PSN capable countries had no grounds to sue.
Was it in the ads? Nobody ever reads eulas. It's incredibly impractical to do so. Someone did the math once and it came up to something like 10,000 years worth of reading for the average person's Eulas combined.
I don't remember where, but I remember seeing it when I bought it. (Not in the TOS, who reads those). But I was digging up my old PSN account while it downloaded. I bought it a couple weeks after launch. When the prompt to sign in popped up, I signed in. I didn't even realize you could skip it but I didn't mind signing in, I bought the game so I could play with my buddies that are on Playstation. I guess it seemed reasonable, to me, to sign into a PSN account to play with PSN players, i honestlythoughtit was a requirementfor cross-platform. But I don't play a lot of cross-platform games so I am not familiar with what is normal I guess. Of the fuckery going on in the gaming industry and the internet in general this seemed like small potatoes.
At least that's a bit more reasonable warning, but it's still kinda crap. I think anything that isn't an MMO or ranked matchmaking should give up the publisher control. I also think that for everything that has ranked matchmaking, there should be a private server option.
For me, who has no idea about this, why Sony was so forceful with adding that PSN integration and what it would mean for the gamers, that they were so angry about it?
Edit: ok looks like Louis explained the POV of gamer to me: https://youtu.be/I2VA0eum6w4 though I still don't understand what was the motivation for Sony to start this shit show.
The timeline is this:
Within the first ~hour of release
If psn account was a requirement from the start why is it available for non psn countries/regions? Valve should have restricted the game from the start.
Certainly, though I suspect the sales outside their psn market were a significant factor in making them reconsider now. They likely didn't want to deal with the legal fallout of essentially arbitrarily taking away the product the customers already paid for, and played with. If it weren't for that I bet Sony would have just pushed on through, bad reviews be damned
lol
rootkits, you say?
To security shreds, you say?
But they are free 👉👈🥺
Am I the only one that reads "for now" between the lines?
It is still a corporation. Think of them like sauron in lotr, a sort of evil giant you can successfully defy with concerted effort, but you can't really defeat them without throwing the ring into mount doom (destroying capitalism and intellectual property in this case).
I came into this thread to say exactly that. "...for now."
I have no doubt Sony will try this again at a later date when the outrage calms down.
Exactly. Their intentions have been shown. They will find another way before they change those intentions.
Years of cynicism got jumped by this announcement. Alongside with the community feedback, gotta give kudos to Arrowhead for dragging their feet with Sony instead of mindlessly becoming their sockpuppet and prioritise community goodwill.
Team effort where I trust the devs and be far more wary of Sony.
I can't say I will stop being pessimistic about publishers being publishers in the future, mybe a tiny little bit, but this news made my day
Great! Can we do something about kernel-level rootkits now?
Linux. The "kernel" isn't a kernel when you're using Proton.
It still amazes me the game works under proton given that. So many other kernel-level anticheats (EA) don't work with proton so it's really surprising
That ship has sailed due to being present since release and most people being ok with an intrusive anticheat since that has an intended positive purpose.
Thank god, that was one of the more idiotic decisions in modern gaming history. Like the time the flappy bird dev took the game down right when it reached it's peak. I dunno if HD2 will really recover from this blow, that might have been the high water mark for the game. I will probably give it a whirl again sometime, though.
I mean afaik the Flappy Bird Dev felt bad about how addictive his game was and took it down because of that. Wouldn't call that idiotic.
Yep they were the last major trend stakeholder which actually gave a shit about people
sony been thirsty for a live service cashcow made by them and when they accidentally have one they attempt to sabotage it
yeah
Nice! Glad the devs listened and helped convince Sony they're dumbasses for this. I do hope Sony will realize this for their other games including Ghosts of Tsushima. Hell I hope all of these other dumbass publishers stop with the bullshit of external accounts and launches.
Still I'll add that I'll wait until there's and official announcement, after all it's still Sony and there may be some other side of the coin on this.
On Ghost of Tsushima, according to developer Sucker Punch recently, MP will require PSN while SP will not.
Yeah and I only want to buy it on PC for the MP expansion since I already played it on ps4 when it originally came out. So again, fingers crossed on that one but already wasn't going to buy it going in.
Nice! I haven't done anything but bitch on the internet so far but I'm going to go write a steam review in celebration right now.
I gave it a negative yesterday, just switched it back to positive.
Going to wait until it's official on the steam page before I flip back
Don't flip the reviews until the changes are actually made.
Reviews can always be changed back to negative again.
They absolutely will change ToS is it says you must have a playstation account to play on steam
They didnt require a psn account for Helldivers 1, I wonder why they thought it would be a good idea now.
Supposedly it was for 'player safety' which is a load of crap since steam already handles that.
Yeah the reality was probably that someone thought it would be a good way to boost some numbers somewhere to justify their position or get a bonus for 'increasing the user count' or other nonsense.
I have a theory it's part of the same effort that's resulting in some Sony-published games getting PlayStation trophy support on PC. They probably want to eventually accomplish something similar to what Microsoft did with cross-platform services between the Microsoft store and Xbox.
In similar spirit, my theory is that this is part of how they fix the issue where PC players and PS5 players have issues making/accepting friend requests. Recently the players ID's were changed from being randomly generated to a set assigned ID, and I would have bet money that the PSN account linking could have been a way to resolve whatever issue was going on there.
Alas, no way to confirm this now haha!
That would be a smart move. And it would be in line with typical Corpo thought - Bury a good idea under a bunch of bad ones lol.
Sony and safety do not go together. PS credit card leaks and Sony email leaks show they don't care about security.
I thought the rootkit on my computer was for that.
I don’t think I’ve seen this happen since or before ID backpedaled on adding anti-cheat to DOOM Eternal, and even backpedaled on adding an entire multiplayer mode because the players hated the anti-cheat so much.
Leave it to the communities of hell divers to force corporations to bend to their will. Fuckin awesome man.
Yeah... I don't like the idea of PSN having my information when they have had numerous hacks/breaches in the past. The 2011 PlayStation Network outage being well known.
Also, who the heck wants to sign in to one more launcher/platform just to play a game? I don't speak for everyone, but I sure as heck don't want it.
Now this is what liberty looks like. Well done Helldivers.
Nice, I look forward to changing my negative review and enjoying the game again.
Whoa a thing happened
@reddit look, sony is capable of listening
I feel like listening is a strong word.
I suspect someone ran the numbers and realized they're likely to lose more money on reduced future sales and microtransactions than they would have gained through data scraping.
A win is a win, but don't fool yourself into believing Stony listens to anyone but the almighty dollar.
I feel like reddit is doing worse for having lost humans and good will. Wish someone ran the numbers there.
Pretty impressive. Congrats
Pretty cool to see the swing happen.
Only 2-3 hours after Sony's announcement:
Compared to now:
A little unfortunate that the first Helldivers game was review bombed as well, but looks like that even came out above with more positive reviews than the negative ones in the end:
Edit: more fun numbers.
Yesterday's number of Positive reviews: 2,217
Today's total positive reviews (at the time of this edit about 15 hours after PlayStation announced the news on twitter): 47,743
I really want to know why it was delayed in the first place. I’ve heard some rumors. One being the devs knew 6 months ahead but just messed up the deadline. Others said the servers were overloaded on launch. Does anyone know the answer? Maybe some sources?
It wasn't "delayed", it was temporarily waived. The function was there on launch and had the game not blown up it would have remained, and anyone not in psn regions would have simply refunded the game enthusiasts they learned of the requirement. Instead, because it got so big, the PSN linking was a part of what caused the really terrible server issues early on and so it was disabled. I don't have easy access to the messages but some of the CMs and the CEO both confirmed this - I think someone shared the messages a few days ago here on c/helldivers2.
Yeah i don't know. But i highly assume that they had no idea how popular the game would be and didn't care enough. Then they suddenly saw millions of potential psn users
This is blowing up my feed, and I couldn't be happier. Hopefully Sony remembers this for a while.
Amazing news. Already changed my review! Can't wait to dive back in tomorrow.
LOL, what? The people that were upset with Sony are the people that didn't want to link their accounts or worse, lived in a country that did not even have a PSN. Imagine that. Imagine buying a game and then a month later, a notice says that to continue playing, you need to link your account. You go to link it and it says, "sorry, that service is not available in your country." That's just a massive middle finger and most certainly illegal in most of the countries Sony did this in.
The fundamental problem is developers and publishers have too much legal control. They can ban players without reason. They can make changes without answering to anything more than "bad reviews." The fact they can even make changes like this retroactively shows that digital rights are in the dark ages; favouring only big business, never the player.
Too bad arrowhead and PSN let their masks slip.
This is a shitty money grab and nothing else.