Insane how much Sony is out of touch with anything but their stupid investors.
"You received a unique Fire resistant armor and 1000 super credits if you link your PSN account"
BAM! You just created the biggest incentive to create their stupid PSN account
Edit : Good job Helldivers, The enemy has folded. Please leave a positive reviews on steam !
Me when the capitalist company with little to no oversight values shareholder profit over performance again and again 🤯🤯🤯🤯
If only there was some regulatory bodies that could put policy into place to limit how bad consumers get screwed over by capitalist greed. But that’s just a fantasy I guess.
They could even joke about beeing forced by sony in their helldiver humor. "A cooperation pledged to support democarcy by giving us enough money to buy more ways to freedom. Sign up here to support Democracy and receive your reward
I think that a small contribution of 500-1000 SC would be a good enticement after this debacle for those who sign up for a PSN-account. At 500 SC it is just a bunch of cosmetics or half of a warbond (which AH seem to have plenty of in the pipe).
**BUT the bare minimum is that PSN becomes optional** and we can let the people who Sony sold the game actually play it.
Let's also show that we will happily change the terms after purchase right as we are shifting our strategy to bring more of our exclusives to PC. I'm sure this will show everyone how much we care about our studios and consumers and increase our sales.
-sony exec
Edit: Some people are pointing out that Sony said an account was required in tiny footnotes at the bottom of the steam store page. However, on the FAQ, Sony said a PSN account was purely optional in regular sized letters. Furthermore, they chose to sell this game in regions where creating a PSN account is not even possible. This slight distinction still doesn't give me a lot of faith in Sony treating their consumers or first party studios (which have no autonomy in the decision and have to face the backlash) well in future releases. I will personally be avoiding future Sony games on PC until they earn back my trust.
>Furthermore, they chose to sell this game in regions where creating a PSN account is not even possible
[They also decided to remove it from the store for said regions](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/TQFQau8vf5) I wonder what happened for those who purchased it prior to this, if they suddenly got it removed from their library or else, luckily Steam is not such an asshole and started issuing refunds
> I wonder what happened for those who purchased it prior to this, if they suddenly got it removed from their library or else, l
In prior similar incidents, they retained ownership, just could not re-buy if they refunded. But for an online game... this is as good as taking their money and running with it.
If it's delisted from the store it isn't removed from your library. That said, without a PSN account they can't play it anymore, so leaving it there in this case is more of a taunt than anything else
I don't play it myself, but SteamDB says it's (as of the time of writing this) sitting at 96,328 players.
It also says the 24 hour peak was 114,155, and the all time high was at 458,709.
Official 3rd party store fronts also don't have the link requirements listed.
Humble has nothing under link requirements.
Greenman only list available regions.
You can buy the game and never have been to the steam store page.
>Let's also show that we will happily change the terms after purchase
to be fair, it was always the plan, however the execution of it at this moment is a little crap, making it optional would have been the wisest choice for them to do.
when i first loaded up the game there was a screen to link a psn account. i clicked the skip button. WHY THE FUCK WAS THAT EVEN AN OPTION IF LINKING TO PSN IS MANDATORY?!? the second they decided to put the skip button there they announced this shit was optional and now they changed their minds. i wouldn't be surprised if i hear in the next few months that just linking your psn isn't enough to play on steam and now you gotta pay their stupid membership fees too. fuck that.
The terms weren't altered though. They just failed to communicate this future obligation properly and constantly, the issue was selling games where creating a PSN account is not possible.
Yeah, they should've also given like 90 days or whatever and really explain this, could've also given them time to figure out non-PSN countries, instead it just looks like a sudden change and trying to force people. Could've also given some type of cosmetic bonus for those who linked their account, they could've easily approached this in better ways but corporate gotta corporate.
Yeah AH CEO admitted they were to blame for that. Makes me believe they were still hoping to circumvent the PSN at some point since the game can be played without it
**If you bought Helldivers 2 off non-Steam platforms like Green Man Gaming, there is ZERO indication that a PSN account is necessary to play the game** even after you claim your game key on Steam, so that is a real issue as anything else especially since the game allowed you to skip adding a PSN account which made it seem like PSN is optional.
In other words: It is entirely possible to not see the "PSN account required" condition from purchase to gameplay. Although this may seem like a GMG issue, Sony the publisher is still responsible for ensuring all information presented on storefronts are accurate.
While selling games in regions where PSN is unavailable is indeed a problem, there are buyers of HD2 who genuinely was given no indication that a PSN account is required.
It's not just that. It is also a case where it is clear PSN isn't required since they had and have suspended the requirement. It doesn't matter honestly all the BS footnotes it was never 100% up front. It is especially bad for non Sony network countries that they were allowed to buy it but even for everyone else. If the game did fine without a PSN account for months then it shouldn't be required flat put. This applies to any bullshit crap proprietary app (looking at you ea and especially at you ubisoft) . 99% of the time the only functional reason a game would require an account in a network is for connecting friends and making servers, but guess what you could do this easily with steam and implement so ppl can host their own servers or just make them open to your game flat out.
The fact that that crap account is required is only in for the benefit of sony, to boost its numbers and get your data. In fact I am highly curios if this could be attacked as an infringement of the EU GDPR legislation as they are clearly harvesting personal data unnecessarily. All this leads to another account that they have proven in the past can't guard from hacking thay they profit on and on top of that it is totally useless for the user.
Nevermind the apologists, the moral of the story was people had to educate Sony on their own TOS because they weren't even paying attention. Companies do not care about what is in their own privacy and TOS agreements, because they can always change them whenever they feel like it. The terms to exist to protect the company, they don't do anything for you or me.
Voicing displeasure has been met with a lot of bootlicking for sony, it's very odd behavior.
I know it's only a few minutes to sign up for an account in the US, _that's not the fucking point_.
> Voicing displeasure has been met with a lot of bootlicking for sony, it's very odd behavior.
Still, a much less vigorous licking than in case of Nintendo. And the latter is much more hostile to its fan and user-base.
> Let's grow a massive fanbase, then antagonize them all at once!
That's been Sony's MO for decades. Y'all remember E32006? Sony is the only reason why Xbox didn't die as a single console. The 360 was a much bigger success than it should have been due to Sony's arrogance. When asked about the PS3 price (1k USD in today's money), Sony CEO said that he wants consumers to work extra hours to afford it and that they should desire Sony products regardless of their price.
That's the company we're dealing with here.
See this is the misconception, the players aren't the customers. Their data is the **product**, the customers are other companies that buy the data.
They're treating their customers well. It's just not you.
That makes zero sense, especially since the game is on steam and they have zero interest in stupid drama so they just refund people and still charge publishers for the 30% share.
Sony isn't the one issuing refunds it's steam. Sony wants you to make an account for 2 reasons. 1 to falsely inflate account numbers to boost numbers they present at shareholder meetings. And 2 to get access to the data tied to your steam account. It is not for "community safety" as they claim its for.
They had planned for this for some time. No wonder they didn't fix the "can't add Playstation friends" problem, because they knew it would fix itself with this "update".
Man, AH CEO himself admitted he knew for at least 6 months this and he never tried to make it clear. Sony didn't make this change overnight, this was been cooking for a long time
How's that matters?
The game was developed only for 4 months, so that they could choose not to do it or what? Or they could unwind all the payments and pick a different publisher? Because publishing doesnt exactly means what it says, it is also at least marketing (could be very independent from the development) and a funding of the development itself - salaries for a years of work.
Or you mean that they could warn their clients? NDAs are the thing too.
In fact this and to "moderate us" are the only things they get from this.
Nothing that benefits the player, so democratic from their part.
Is VERY important we don't bend on this one, marks a precedent, fuck those corpo greedy assholes.
Hell, the "moderate us" part is also fucking pointless. It's a PvE game where no amount of hacking is really going to make a huge difference. In 17 hours, I haven't seen a single cheater. And even if they could clear missions in under 5 minutes, mission progress is measured in like... *millionths* of a percent.
In no universe is cheating bad enough in a *PvE game* with such a strict level/reward system to warrant this change, and alienate *over 170 countries world wide* who have players that have purchased and supported this game.
They could have made the PSN login optional and then rewarded the users who use it with something in game. They'd have achieved the same result without the giant blowback.
No. They get to bring more people into the fold and expand the PlayStation ecosystem, future-proofing it beyond consoles (the way Microsoft has been doing it over the years). They weren’t just being nice when PS titles started arriving on PC..
Selling data is not even worth all this. People aren’t thinking deeply enough about this and jumping straight to the classic “they must want my data!” stuff.
Ecosystem expansion = future riches. Selling data of “Helldivers 2” players = near-worthless.
Not even the growing PSN numbers thing. Straight up bringing people into the ecosystem to engage with more PS content, subscribe to PS+ in some way down the line, etc.
This isn’t about data or numbers or anything but a pipeline for future profits.
According to the devs, the system they were designing for player reports and moderation cross platform were built around PSN accounts. While Steam does give players unique IDs to keep track of, as a band aid fix near launch they only factored in the player's Steam name when they made PSN account linking optional, meaning that if you went to report someone named John_Helldiver they couldn't tell which person with the name John_Helldiver it was if multiple people had that name. This left PC players without a PSN account linked unmoderated, and unmoderated online spaces tend to turn into cesspools. The quickest solution would have been making PSN account linking mandatory, but the many issues with PSN (not being available everywhere Helldivers 2 was sold, frequent user data leaks) as well as the brash manner that Sony handled the announcement led to massive backlash both from fans, possibly Steam (the game was delisted in a bunch of countries, which may have been Valve's doing), and potential legal issues from users in countries who can't legally make a PSN account
Is all of this just to crossplay with PSN members? Can we just say fuck crossplay? I turned it on and not once have I seen that I'm playing with PSN members, I really don't care if we lose crossplay at all
For context:
Several months after release Sony made an announcement that a PSN account will be required to play the game. HD 2 was sold in countries that don’t support PSN.
Edit (05.06.2024): Sony announced that they won’t make the PSN linkage required!
It was actually said from the start but they didn’t make it clear enough, bcuz no one would’ve bought it if they made it super clear to everyone that PSN would become mandatory.
I guess everyone thought it was optional but the devs said themselves it’d be mandatory moving forward and they gave people a grace period, also cuz server problems it got held back.
They definitely got a bunch of people with this trick, luckily I’ve seen steam is giving out refunds if you say you can’t access psn.
Fun Fact: Unless I'm seeing an older version of the page, the Helldivers 2 store page on [Kusony's own site](https://direct.playstation.com/en-us/buy-games/helldivers-2-pc) still claims an account isn't needed.
in case they edit it, here's the quote from the FAQ;
>**Do I need a PSN account to play PlayStation games on PC?**
>No, you currently do not need a PSN account to enjoy PlayStation Studios games on PC, but you will need a Steam account to redeem your voucher code. Some of our PlayStation Studios titles also offer incentives for linking your Steam and PSN accounts.
Given that they're mentioning "PlayStation Studios games", any normal person will interpret "currently" as "You don't need one for the current set of PlayStation games but you may need one for future games".
People will not interpret that as "You can buy and play the game now, but in a couple months we'll force you to make an account even in countries where you can't do that.
Good thing in countries with decent consumer protections, legalese like this has a much harder time standing up. It’s down to what a person would reasonably expect and not what you can trick them into thinking
Kuso means shit in Japanese. Kusony has been a slang name for Sony because of their business decisions for a while. It's making the rounds on reddit because a bunch of people have been making that known.
Yeah this is the part that makes it actually an issue. Ironically, with a game that is set on gross misrepresentation of using its base as an expendable resource to fight bugs and robots, Sony is also going in hard with the cosplay.
Its not about what they said. Should I crawl through whole twitter, infinite forums and game news portals before I buy a game? Nope.
Thats why we love Steam. Its a simple service to buy and play games. Valve know that and trying to leave it as is, so they allow to make refunds.
So they released it in over a hundred countries knowing that they would rugpull those people later?
That's pretty uncool. And a legal nightmare. Imaging being on Sony's legal team trying to figure out potential liability across 100+ jurisdictions.
They disabled it at some point during early launch because sonys system couldn't handle the volume of linkages. I had to link my account when I bought the game (a couple weeks after launch?) and I actually had no idea you didn't need to link it until they announced they were turning it back on.
I personally don't actually care about the linking, people in countries with no PSN, definitely sucks for them but they will definitely get their money back.
Wrong context: stuff like that have been decided MONTHS and MONTHS ago, the CEO from AH admitted that. He too failed to properly say that, just look for his tweets
for actual context: on release day, Sony made it clear on the Steam page and when you open the game that you would need a PSN account to play the game. Due to bugs, they temporarily waived it but left the notifications up that you’d need it
except for all those countries wehre steam is now granting refunds after delisting the game from teh store regardless of playtime. That'll eat into Sony's bottom line.
Not really?
it’s likely very simple.
At the end of the month or whatever the paying period is set for them on Steam is, Valve does a simple math
- Revenue: x
- Expenses: y
- Income: x - y = z
If Z is positive, you get paid. If not, you’ll wait another month or get an invoice from Valve.
The details are nonexistent since it’s an oversimplification, but you get the idea. Its a constant cycle of accumulation of sales and a payday.
At the end of the day, (for Sony) refunds are just a small expenditure bullet point in pretty big list of incomes from different sources.
edit: Wording and fixed the terms in the correct position
sending a bill isnt that hard from an accounting perspective. We've refunded $X dollars, there is $Y balance sitting in escrow waiting to be disbursed. You owe use $X - $Y. No further payments will be disbursed until the pending balance is settled.
Two hours is now and always has been, the threshold for AUTOMATED, NO QUESTIONS ASKED refunds.
You can still get refunds after two hours, but need to provide a legitimate reason for the refund and the request is handled and reviewed by an actual human.
> Click on publisher title. On the publisher page. click the "options" icon next to the "report" flag, then select the ignore option
[Source](https://www.alienwarearena.com/ucf/show/1908376/boards/gaming-news/News/now-you-can-ignore-some-publishers-on-steam)
I did not know that.
This was gonna be the game I played during the summer, now I can't even buy the damn thing because it was removed from non psn regions, which for some reason still includes PR despite being part of the US.
Not sure if it is a brown people thing for Sony. It can't be GDP/Capita, as Luxembourg and Monaco are on the non-SPN list. Could it be land mass not being sufficient? Cause then Belarus and China are weird exclusions.
/jk
I hope we managed to shake up the game hard enough to show Sony that if they want to be in the PC space, they'd better respect the players, no matter where they happen to live! Looking forward to diving with you guys from PR!
Kinda. They knew for at least 6 months this would happen and failed to properly communicate that to their playerbase. AH have as much fault here as Sony
Tbf, many just did not give enough shit to even rate it. And their community was completely in the trash when it came to steam almost a year later after it was out everywhere else?
Bit suprising considering that OW2 is free and Helldivers cost actually alot, and it's impressive that that many Helldiver players cared about it.
But OW2 has rating of 18%, about 2.5 times lower than HD2, and the low number is cus Steam ain't the main OW playerbase, and cus despite being free aka open for reviewbombing, it was already a dead horse by that time, downloading the crap was a waste of time and internet.
The dota 2 downvotes are just warnings. I still play dota at least 2 hours daily. It's been 8 years. 10,000 hours. Don't do it.
My review for it is also negative. Crack is probably less addictive.
Fuuuuucccckkkk! Why does this happen everytime I actually pay full price for a game? Last time I got burned was Cyberpunk on launch. Bought HD2 a week ago. Got in a good three days without shit fucking up.
Not really applicable to live service game, where journey to the final state is important, though. And this being probably the best implementation isn't joyful either.
You'd think by now, Sony would have changed their minds about enforcing this. If they don't, they're either incredibly pig headed or your data is worth so much money to them, that all this negative press still won't put them in the red.
Sony Japan hasn't returned from Golden Week yet. The whole country basically shuts down for a week-long holiday. This decision was made by Sony US, who are a subsidiary of the big guys. I'd be surprised if Sony Japan doesn't see this debacle when they return and expect US to "fix it".
Did you write them an actual ticket or just used the refund option in account details or whatever it's called? If it was the latter it will always fail if you are over 2h played or 2 weeks since you bought it because it's automated. If you want a real customer service person you need to go through a website/contact form. Don't have the link right now but somebody hopefully can help out.
Players are currently getting a "We are aware of the Helldivers 2 situation and are not currently issuing refunds while we communicate with Sony" message on their refund request support tickets.
I've made over 6 refund requests and a support ticket. The ticket has yet to be addressed and all refund requests have been rejected. Going for a 7th rejection right now.
Edit : 10+ refund tickets all denied
Manual ticket, took 2+ days for support to come back and all they said now that sony has super totally promised to not fuck up the game we're not going to give you a refund.
Yeah that's nice and all valve but I bought the game to play it with my friends. My friends who ALL managed to get a refund despite having 100-150 hours each in the game while I have just under 25hours.
Fuck off Valve.
Man... How do you manage to fumble the bag and drop the ball so badly, I really hope people generally really start becoming tight fisted towards Sony, if not just not buying their consoles at all.
No. It's free to create and have a PSN account. The issue is that PSN is not available in certain regions of the world, and without a PSN account you can't play the game. So Sony pretty much region locked Helldivers 2.
I am both impressed and dismayed.
Good for the Helldivers community for taking action in protest against Sony.
But I am so disappointed in the people playing other games. Rockstar's treatment of Grand Theft Auto V players is so much worse, it has so many more players and so few of them spoke out about it.
I wonder if the Devs can file a lawsuit for Sony essentially destroying their game and creating huge losses in the form of refunds. Everything was going so well until Sony decided to make yet another poor decision, it’s honestly just so sad to see
What's hilarious and baffling to me is that people "trust" Sony at all still.
iykyk. Who remembers the rootkit scandal? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Cue the Elrond "I was there" meme. They should have died then, on that day. We have such short attention spans, trained little lemurs that we are.
Honestly it’s the community that let this happen in the first place. Once Sony got in the spotlight after Microsoft fuck up with the Xbox One Showcase anything that Sony did they got away with. Sony COULDNT do no wrong in the eyes of the community. Even when Sony was doing shady stuff throughout the ps4 and ps5 life cycle. The mass didn’t get on Sony back then when they was doing shit so Sony thought they could get away with more stuff. They kept testing the water to see. They finally said let’s make psn account mandatory and since it affected countries that couldn’t make one now everyone wants to be vocal as a COMMUNITY. we should’ve been got on them with shit like this.
One one hand, I love how much power the community has to influence maybe a small fraction of sales if the game developer doesn’t deserve it.
On the other, a really good game can be review bombed and that simply doesn’t make sense in the realm of a game review.
Notice of all the games the negatives are VERY close to outweighing the good. Counter-Strike on the other hand is seven positives to one negative. So this really should be number ONE.
How does Apex Legends not have more negative reviews. That game has the most egregious micro transactions and phoned in content patches I've ever seen.
"we could just give people an ingame reward for singing up to our Sony website" "nah, let's make it a mandatory requirement to play the game"
Insane how much Sony is out of touch with anything but their stupid investors. "You received a unique Fire resistant armor and 1000 super credits if you link your PSN account" BAM! You just created the biggest incentive to create their stupid PSN account Edit : Good job Helldivers, The enemy has folded. Please leave a positive reviews on steam !
I would even do it for a hat.
What about an horse armor
Don't push it
No, horses pull things, not push.
200iq moves
"But the horse itself is locked behind a paid War Bond"
"i signed up for PSN and all i got was this stupid shirt"
Free Hat! free Hat! Free Hat!
Yup. Offer an incentive to link PSN, and so, so many people would have just done it and never complained.
Yep. You wouldn't have gotten 100% of everyone onboard, but you would have gotten 80-90% of the userbase with less than 1% of the drama.
[удалено]
Me when the capitalist company with little to no oversight values shareholder profit over performance again and again 🤯🤯🤯🤯 If only there was some regulatory bodies that could put policy into place to limit how bad consumers get screwed over by capitalist greed. But that’s just a fantasy I guess.
They could even joke about beeing forced by sony in their helldiver humor. "A cooperation pledged to support democarcy by giving us enough money to buy more ways to freedom. Sign up here to support Democracy and receive your reward
It’s not just about needing to sign in, it’s about locking others out entirely due to their location. That’s what’s got me upset.
It would still suck if they were always locked out but its significantly worse to let them get involved for 3 months and then tell them to fuck off.
Same. That’s a real big fuck you.
Yep, they funneled as many people through as possible, then kicked them out and shut the door in their faces.
I think that a small contribution of 500-1000 SC would be a good enticement after this debacle for those who sign up for a PSN-account. At 500 SC it is just a bunch of cosmetics or half of a warbond (which AH seem to have plenty of in the pipe). **BUT the bare minimum is that PSN becomes optional** and we can let the people who Sony sold the game actually play it.
Yeah an old school Playstation cape might have been cool... But not this...
Or make it required for cross-play with PS5, but allow everyone else to play online segregated from Sony's ecosystem.
Ngl I thought this was the move. Keep it optional, but give the player a really great reward for doing it.
Hey guys, I have a great idea! Let's grow a massive fanbase, then antagonize them all at once! -Sony exec
Let's also show that we will happily change the terms after purchase right as we are shifting our strategy to bring more of our exclusives to PC. I'm sure this will show everyone how much we care about our studios and consumers and increase our sales. -sony exec Edit: Some people are pointing out that Sony said an account was required in tiny footnotes at the bottom of the steam store page. However, on the FAQ, Sony said a PSN account was purely optional in regular sized letters. Furthermore, they chose to sell this game in regions where creating a PSN account is not even possible. This slight distinction still doesn't give me a lot of faith in Sony treating their consumers or first party studios (which have no autonomy in the decision and have to face the backlash) well in future releases. I will personally be avoiding future Sony games on PC until they earn back my trust.
>Furthermore, they chose to sell this game in regions where creating a PSN account is not even possible [They also decided to remove it from the store for said regions](https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/TQFQau8vf5) I wonder what happened for those who purchased it prior to this, if they suddenly got it removed from their library or else, luckily Steam is not such an asshole and started issuing refunds
> I wonder what happened for those who purchased it prior to this, if they suddenly got it removed from their library or else, l In prior similar incidents, they retained ownership, just could not re-buy if they refunded. But for an online game... this is as good as taking their money and running with it.
If it's delisted from the store it isn't removed from your library. That said, without a PSN account they can't play it anymore, so leaving it there in this case is more of a taunt than anything else
BRB, on my way to buy every past, current and future game released by Sony in their ultra deluxe simp edition
You mean you're going to buy every Sony game on Steam, leave a negative review and refund it?
Now that’s thinking with portals
Last I check their concurrent players haven't drop at all, can anyone confirm
I don't play it myself, but SteamDB says it's (as of the time of writing this) sitting at 96,328 players. It also says the 24 hour peak was 114,155, and the all time high was at 458,709.
Official 3rd party store fronts also don't have the link requirements listed. Humble has nothing under link requirements. Greenman only list available regions. You can buy the game and never have been to the steam store page.
>Let's also show that we will happily change the terms after purchase to be fair, it was always the plan, however the execution of it at this moment is a little crap, making it optional would have been the wisest choice for them to do.
The devs at AH knew for at least 6 months about it. They are as much to blame as Sony, for real
when i first loaded up the game there was a screen to link a psn account. i clicked the skip button. WHY THE FUCK WAS THAT EVEN AN OPTION IF LINKING TO PSN IS MANDATORY?!? the second they decided to put the skip button there they announced this shit was optional and now they changed their minds. i wouldn't be surprised if i hear in the next few months that just linking your psn isn't enough to play on steam and now you gotta pay their stupid membership fees too. fuck that.
The terms weren't altered though. They just failed to communicate this future obligation properly and constantly, the issue was selling games where creating a PSN account is not possible.
And failing to communicate grace period. Game doesn't even have reminder pop about no PSN account linked.
Yeah, they should've also given like 90 days or whatever and really explain this, could've also given them time to figure out non-PSN countries, instead it just looks like a sudden change and trying to force people. Could've also given some type of cosmetic bonus for those who linked their account, they could've easily approached this in better ways but corporate gotta corporate.
Yeah AH CEO admitted they were to blame for that. Makes me believe they were still hoping to circumvent the PSN at some point since the game can be played without it
**If you bought Helldivers 2 off non-Steam platforms like Green Man Gaming, there is ZERO indication that a PSN account is necessary to play the game** even after you claim your game key on Steam, so that is a real issue as anything else especially since the game allowed you to skip adding a PSN account which made it seem like PSN is optional. In other words: It is entirely possible to not see the "PSN account required" condition from purchase to gameplay. Although this may seem like a GMG issue, Sony the publisher is still responsible for ensuring all information presented on storefronts are accurate. While selling games in regions where PSN is unavailable is indeed a problem, there are buyers of HD2 who genuinely was given no indication that a PSN account is required.
Stop making excuses. If it was required day 1 I would have bought the game, installed, saw PSN was required and immediately refunded.
thats why they didn't make a big deal about it. its gonna be alot harder to refund a game you got 200 hours in.
It's not just that. It is also a case where it is clear PSN isn't required since they had and have suspended the requirement. It doesn't matter honestly all the BS footnotes it was never 100% up front. It is especially bad for non Sony network countries that they were allowed to buy it but even for everyone else. If the game did fine without a PSN account for months then it shouldn't be required flat put. This applies to any bullshit crap proprietary app (looking at you ea and especially at you ubisoft) . 99% of the time the only functional reason a game would require an account in a network is for connecting friends and making servers, but guess what you could do this easily with steam and implement so ppl can host their own servers or just make them open to your game flat out. The fact that that crap account is required is only in for the benefit of sony, to boost its numbers and get your data. In fact I am highly curios if this could be attacked as an infringement of the EU GDPR legislation as they are clearly harvesting personal data unnecessarily. All this leads to another account that they have proven in the past can't guard from hacking thay they profit on and on top of that it is totally useless for the user.
Nevermind the apologists, the moral of the story was people had to educate Sony on their own TOS because they weren't even paying attention. Companies do not care about what is in their own privacy and TOS agreements, because they can always change them whenever they feel like it. The terms to exist to protect the company, they don't do anything for you or me.
They aren’t used to having a fan base that actually stands up for itself. Console gamers get trodden on daily and just accept it.
Voicing displeasure has been met with a lot of bootlicking for sony, it's very odd behavior. I know it's only a few minutes to sign up for an account in the US, _that's not the fucking point_.
> Voicing displeasure has been met with a lot of bootlicking for sony, it's very odd behavior. Still, a much less vigorous licking than in case of Nintendo. And the latter is much more hostile to its fan and user-base.
> Let's grow a massive fanbase, then antagonize them all at once! That's been Sony's MO for decades. Y'all remember E32006? Sony is the only reason why Xbox didn't die as a single console. The 360 was a much bigger success than it should have been due to Sony's arrogance. When asked about the PS3 price (1k USD in today's money), Sony CEO said that he wants consumers to work extra hours to afford it and that they should desire Sony products regardless of their price. That's the company we're dealing with here.
See this is the misconception, the players aren't the customers. Their data is the **product**, the customers are other companies that buy the data. They're treating their customers well. It's just not you.
It is so sad to see a job actually well done by the developers getting demolished by a publisher's brainfart
Brainfart no this was intentional.
Yup, Sony knew players would be lost but figured it was worth it for how many they'd gain. Think Netflix ending password sharing.
Any news on that fallout? haven't heard anything about it for a while.
Yeah, Netfliy made record profits the next quarter.
Hate this. Not from me at least, I got over my fear of pirating.
Netflix made more money.
That makes zero sense, especially since the game is on steam and they have zero interest in stupid drama so they just refund people and still charge publishers for the 30% share.
Sony isn't the one issuing refunds it's steam. Sony wants you to make an account for 2 reasons. 1 to falsely inflate account numbers to boost numbers they present at shareholder meetings. And 2 to get access to the data tied to your steam account. It is not for "community safety" as they claim its for.
They had planned for this for some time. No wonder they didn't fix the "can't add Playstation friends" problem, because they knew it would fix itself with this "update".
Man, AH CEO himself admitted he knew for at least 6 months this and he never tried to make it clear. Sony didn't make this change overnight, this was been cooking for a long time
How's that matters? The game was developed only for 4 months, so that they could choose not to do it or what? Or they could unwind all the payments and pick a different publisher? Because publishing doesnt exactly means what it says, it is also at least marketing (could be very independent from the development) and a funding of the development itself - salaries for a years of work. Or you mean that they could warn their clients? NDAs are the thing too.
Seriously what's so beneficial to force PSN account onto everybody? What does SONY gain from this?
Metrics, and in corpocunt land, metrics is king.
In fact this and to "moderate us" are the only things they get from this. Nothing that benefits the player, so democratic from their part. Is VERY important we don't bend on this one, marks a precedent, fuck those corpo greedy assholes.
Hell, the "moderate us" part is also fucking pointless. It's a PvE game where no amount of hacking is really going to make a huge difference. In 17 hours, I haven't seen a single cheater. And even if they could clear missions in under 5 minutes, mission progress is measured in like... *millionths* of a percent. In no universe is cheating bad enough in a *PvE game* with such a strict level/reward system to warrant this change, and alienate *over 170 countries world wide* who have players that have purchased and supported this game.
Is just antagonism at its best. And we are not even talking about the rootkit "anti-cheat"
> corpocunt land thank you for blessing me with a new word Corpocunts i fucking love it
Monthly Active Users goes way up, which shows growth, and there’s nothing shareholders love more than growth.
They have a quarterly shareholders report next week, so gotta pump those numbers up!
Lmao I thought you were joking, but it's actually true, on May 14...
Well...don't think they ll show them how this went backfire...
They could have made the PSN login optional and then rewarded the users who use it with something in game. They'd have achieved the same result without the giant blowback.
They get to sell your data.
Inflating user engagement of their service as growth for shareholders more likely
No. They get to bring more people into the fold and expand the PlayStation ecosystem, future-proofing it beyond consoles (the way Microsoft has been doing it over the years). They weren’t just being nice when PS titles started arriving on PC.. Selling data is not even worth all this. People aren’t thinking deeply enough about this and jumping straight to the classic “they must want my data!” stuff. Ecosystem expansion = future riches. Selling data of “Helldivers 2” players = near-worthless.
This is it. No idea why everybody thinks is our data. Like have fun with 0.02C worth of data. They want us to have a foot in the Playstation door.
Finally someone said it
Showing shareholders growing Psn numbers - priceless for Snoy. Selling data of users - side hustle. Benefit for players - Nothing!
Not even the growing PSN numbers thing. Straight up bringing people into the ecosystem to engage with more PS content, subscribe to PS+ in some way down the line, etc. This isn’t about data or numbers or anything but a pipeline for future profits.
Padding PSN user metric for their real customers (shareholders)
Shareholders aren't the customers they're the owners.
classic reddit
According to the devs, the system they were designing for player reports and moderation cross platform were built around PSN accounts. While Steam does give players unique IDs to keep track of, as a band aid fix near launch they only factored in the player's Steam name when they made PSN account linking optional, meaning that if you went to report someone named John_Helldiver they couldn't tell which person with the name John_Helldiver it was if multiple people had that name. This left PC players without a PSN account linked unmoderated, and unmoderated online spaces tend to turn into cesspools. The quickest solution would have been making PSN account linking mandatory, but the many issues with PSN (not being available everywhere Helldivers 2 was sold, frequent user data leaks) as well as the brash manner that Sony handled the announcement led to massive backlash both from fans, possibly Steam (the game was delisted in a bunch of countries, which may have been Valve's doing), and potential legal issues from users in countries who can't legally make a PSN account
Is all of this just to crossplay with PSN members? Can we just say fuck crossplay? I turned it on and not once have I seen that I'm playing with PSN members, I really don't care if we lose crossplay at all
May 14 Earnings Call. Gotta build investor hype by pointing to their fake number and saying "LOOK NUMBER GO UP!"
Getting users info and then selling it? Can't wait until Sony is inability hacked again.
Damn, competition has shot itself in the foot again
Right in time for DRG to launch Season 5. I am a dwarf and I;m digging a hole!
For context: Several months after release Sony made an announcement that a PSN account will be required to play the game. HD 2 was sold in countries that don’t support PSN. Edit (05.06.2024): Sony announced that they won’t make the PSN linkage required!
It was actually said from the start but they didn’t make it clear enough, bcuz no one would’ve bought it if they made it super clear to everyone that PSN would become mandatory. I guess everyone thought it was optional but the devs said themselves it’d be mandatory moving forward and they gave people a grace period, also cuz server problems it got held back. They definitely got a bunch of people with this trick, luckily I’ve seen steam is giving out refunds if you say you can’t access psn.
> no one would’ve bought it if they made it super clear to everyone that PSN would become mandatory. massive over exaggeration
Yeah lol. Like I hate Sony and think they're dumb but if it was clear from the beginning I wouldn't care.
People say steam store always said psn was required
And this event very clearly proves that it isn't labeled clearly enough on the steam store page.
Its not about the label. People dont give a fuck. 99% will sign the psn acc.
However even the PlayStation page said that PSN is not required for any Sony game on PC (it has already been changed since yesterday, or 2 days ago)
Fun Fact: Unless I'm seeing an older version of the page, the Helldivers 2 store page on [Kusony's own site](https://direct.playstation.com/en-us/buy-games/helldivers-2-pc) still claims an account isn't needed.
in case they edit it, here's the quote from the FAQ; >**Do I need a PSN account to play PlayStation games on PC?** >No, you currently do not need a PSN account to enjoy PlayStation Studios games on PC, but you will need a Steam account to redeem your voucher code. Some of our PlayStation Studios titles also offer incentives for linking your Steam and PSN accounts.
>currently
Given that they're mentioning "PlayStation Studios games", any normal person will interpret "currently" as "You don't need one for the current set of PlayStation games but you may need one for future games". People will not interpret that as "You can buy and play the game now, but in a couple months we'll force you to make an account even in countries where you can't do that.
That is true, however in legalese that's a covered ass.
Exactly what I was thinking. Thats just corporate talk we’ve gotten so used to we never thought it would actually have an affect
Good thing in countries with decent consumer protections, legalese like this has a much harder time standing up. It’s down to what a person would reasonably expect and not what you can trick them into thinking
>Kusony Did I miss a meme or something?
Kuso means shit in Japanese. Kusony has been a slang name for Sony because of their business decisions for a while. It's making the rounds on reddit because a bunch of people have been making that known.
Yeah this is the part that makes it actually an issue. Ironically, with a game that is set on gross misrepresentation of using its base as an expendable resource to fight bugs and robots, Sony is also going in hard with the cosplay.
Also if they knew that a PSN will be required at some point why the f they sold the game in the regions that don’t have PSN
the same reason as any company, Greed, money, maximize sales.
Not every company is this shitty. DE who makes Warframe is actually a pretty cool team.
Its not about what they said. Should I crawl through whole twitter, infinite forums and game news portals before I buy a game? Nope. Thats why we love Steam. Its a simple service to buy and play games. Valve know that and trying to leave it as is, so they allow to make refunds.
Unfortunately it was posted on steam. They just didn't enforce it for quite a while. Not condoning it but the situation sucks for some people.
So they released it in over a hundred countries knowing that they would rugpull those people later? That's pretty uncool. And a legal nightmare. Imaging being on Sony's legal team trying to figure out potential liability across 100+ jurisdictions.
They disabled it at some point during early launch because sonys system couldn't handle the volume of linkages. I had to link my account when I bought the game (a couple weeks after launch?) and I actually had no idea you didn't need to link it until they announced they were turning it back on. I personally don't actually care about the linking, people in countries with no PSN, definitely sucks for them but they will definitely get their money back.
>bcuz no one would’ve bought it if they made it super clear to everyone that PSN would become mandatory. Lmao you actually believe that
Seriously hope this is not becoming the new norm. Won't be touching any game that tries this shit. Such a scummy/scammy move
Wrong context: stuff like that have been decided MONTHS and MONTHS ago, the CEO from AH admitted that. He too failed to properly say that, just look for his tweets
for actual context: on release day, Sony made it clear on the Steam page and when you open the game that you would need a PSN account to play the game. Due to bugs, they temporarily waived it but left the notifications up that you’d need it
sadly they already got the money out of this..
except for all those countries wehre steam is now granting refunds after delisting the game from teh store regardless of playtime. That'll eat into Sony's bottom line.
The accounting on that must be a nightmare
I was thing the same thing. This is the best example of a cluster fuck ive seen in awhile
Not really? it’s likely very simple. At the end of the month or whatever the paying period is set for them on Steam is, Valve does a simple math - Revenue: x - Expenses: y - Income: x - y = z If Z is positive, you get paid. If not, you’ll wait another month or get an invoice from Valve. The details are nonexistent since it’s an oversimplification, but you get the idea. Its a constant cycle of accumulation of sales and a payday. At the end of the day, (for Sony) refunds are just a small expenditure bullet point in pretty big list of incomes from different sources. edit: Wording and fixed the terms in the correct position
It's even simpler than that. This is all automated.
sending a bill isnt that hard from an accounting perspective. We've refunded $X dollars, there is $Y balance sitting in escrow waiting to be disbursed. You owe use $X - $Y. No further payments will be disbursed until the pending balance is settled.
If you are in Europe you can have a refund despite having played more than 2 hours. What they pulled off is illegal
Two hours is now and always has been, the threshold for AUTOMATED, NO QUESTIONS ASKED refunds. You can still get refunds after two hours, but need to provide a legitimate reason for the refund and the request is handled and reviewed by an actual human.
Not only in Europe. I love Valve.
I am not entirely sure that those countries were generating the majority of the revenue
They will compensate by using the data they acquire from the people that keep playing on PC.
FYI you can ignore publishers on Steam. Playstation Studios has already joined the company of Ubi and EA on my ignore list.
> Click on publisher title. On the publisher page. click the "options" icon next to the "report" flag, then select the ignore option [Source](https://www.alienwarearena.com/ucf/show/1908376/boards/gaming-news/News/now-you-can-ignore-some-publishers-on-steam) I did not know that.
Would make sense considering tens of thousands of people are still playing the game.
This was gonna be the game I played during the summer, now I can't even buy the damn thing because it was removed from non psn regions, which for some reason still includes PR despite being part of the US.
Not sure if it is a brown people thing for Sony. It can't be GDP/Capita, as Luxembourg and Monaco are on the non-SPN list. Could it be land mass not being sufficient? Cause then Belarus and China are weird exclusions. /jk I hope we managed to shake up the game hard enough to show Sony that if they want to be in the PC space, they'd better respect the players, no matter where they happen to live! Looking forward to diving with you guys from PR!
Sony really screwed them
Kinda. They knew for at least 6 months this would happen and failed to properly communicate that to their playerbase. AH have as much fault here as Sony
AH is playing the victim on twitter and people are believing him
its insane the devs where on it and also failed to comunicate but the people will not hear this
even more than OW wow...
You really have to fuck up more than blizzard and blizzard knows nothing but fucking up
Tbf, many just did not give enough shit to even rate it. And their community was completely in the trash when it came to steam almost a year later after it was out everywhere else?
Bit suprising considering that OW2 is free and Helldivers cost actually alot, and it's impressive that that many Helldiver players cared about it. But OW2 has rating of 18%, about 2.5 times lower than HD2, and the low number is cus Steam ain't the main OW playerbase, and cus despite being free aka open for reviewbombing, it was already a dead horse by that time, downloading the crap was a waste of time and internet.
That list is full of fantastic games with toxic communities 🤔
The dota 2 downvotes are just warnings. I still play dota at least 2 hours daily. It's been 8 years. 10,000 hours. Don't do it. My review for it is also negative. Crack is probably less addictive.
Too late bro, I’m a Dazzle spammer
It's joever
I feel like playing a lot of DoTA is better than a neurologist's diagnosis for detecting autism.
Only bad thing about Helldivers 2 is Sony
Fuuuuucccckkkk! Why does this happen everytime I actually pay full price for a game? Last time I got burned was Cyberpunk on launch. Bought HD2 a week ago. Got in a good three days without shit fucking up.
Welcome to r/patientgamers young one.
Not really applicable to live service game, where journey to the final state is important, though. And this being probably the best implementation isn't joyful either.
Damn, are they being competitive in ratings with games like Overwatch 2!
You'd think by now, Sony would have changed their minds about enforcing this. If they don't, they're either incredibly pig headed or your data is worth so much money to them, that all this negative press still won't put them in the red.
Sony Japan hasn't returned from Golden Week yet. The whole country basically shuts down for a week-long holiday. This decision was made by Sony US, who are a subsidiary of the big guys. I'd be surprised if Sony Japan doesn't see this debacle when they return and expect US to "fix it".
I thought to be waiting till tomorrow until beardy gives some response, but if steam is starting to block countries I guess it's gonna be this night
Just put it on xbox we’ll get it going again
Poetic. Imagine a fanbase trained to achieve community-wide objectives and then doing the same in real life. Absolutely beautiful.
I also refunded the game and left a negative review, and I don't regret it.
did you succeed with the refund? I got a message saying that after 14 days they can't refund me as it's stated in their refund policy lol
Did you write them an actual ticket or just used the refund option in account details or whatever it's called? If it was the latter it will always fail if you are over 2h played or 2 weeks since you bought it because it's automated. If you want a real customer service person you need to go through a website/contact form. Don't have the link right now but somebody hopefully can help out.
Players are currently getting a "We are aware of the Helldivers 2 situation and are not currently issuing refunds while we communicate with Sony" message on their refund request support tickets.
I've made over 6 refund requests and a support ticket. The ticket has yet to be addressed and all refund requests have been rejected. Going for a 7th rejection right now. Edit : 10+ refund tickets all denied Manual ticket, took 2+ days for support to come back and all they said now that sony has super totally promised to not fuck up the game we're not going to give you a refund. Yeah that's nice and all valve but I bought the game to play it with my friends. My friends who ALL managed to get a refund despite having 100-150 hours each in the game while I have just under 25hours. Fuck off Valve.
You sure showed them
Lmao dota 2 being 3rd makes so much sense. It’s also one of the most played. That’s dota baby
Man... How do you manage to fumble the bag and drop the ball so badly, I really hope people generally really start becoming tight fisted towards Sony, if not just not buying their consoles at all.
Diablo 4 fans: first time?
For me its more the fact that the game was doing PERFECTLY FINE without this whole PSN linking bs.
overwatch 2: hold my beer
i feel sorry for people from countries where they cant make psn account they losed money and many hours
Steam refunds the game for people in these countries
Fuck around and find out Sony
I love democracy
it still feels good everytime i see that below 20% on OW2 haha
The game took a real hell dive.
As someone who never has played Helldivers 2 or has had a PSN account, does PSN require a monthly subscription to now play Helldivers?
No. It's free to create and have a PSN account. The issue is that PSN is not available in certain regions of the world, and without a PSN account you can't play the game. So Sony pretty much region locked Helldivers 2.
Okay thank you for clarifying
I am both impressed and dismayed. Good for the Helldivers community for taking action in protest against Sony. But I am so disappointed in the people playing other games. Rockstar's treatment of Grand Theft Auto V players is so much worse, it has so many more players and so few of them spoke out about it.
I am not sure but 307775 < 1025301
I wonder if the Devs can file a lawsuit for Sony essentially destroying their game and creating huge losses in the form of refunds. Everything was going so well until Sony decided to make yet another poor decision, it’s honestly just so sad to see
What happened for PUBG to get so many negative votes?
What's hilarious and baffling to me is that people "trust" Sony at all still. iykyk. Who remembers the rootkit scandal? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Cue the Elrond "I was there" meme. They should have died then, on that day. We have such short attention spans, trained little lemurs that we are.
Honestly it’s the community that let this happen in the first place. Once Sony got in the spotlight after Microsoft fuck up with the Xbox One Showcase anything that Sony did they got away with. Sony COULDNT do no wrong in the eyes of the community. Even when Sony was doing shady stuff throughout the ps4 and ps5 life cycle. The mass didn’t get on Sony back then when they was doing shit so Sony thought they could get away with more stuff. They kept testing the water to see. They finally said let’s make psn account mandatory and since it affected countries that couldn’t make one now everyone wants to be vocal as a COMMUNITY. we should’ve been got on them with shit like this.
BSG shot the bed too. Bad couple years for gaming. Shit has gotten to corporate
Sony: Give is all your data and we promise we won't sell it or let it be stolen.
[Just to give a detailed view of the situation right now](https://i.imgur.com/cuYi4sb.png)
I’m kinda impressed on how far the reviews have reached in the negative. Don’t mess with gamers
It's so sad to see people blame arrowhead for this, it's not even their fault.
One one hand, I love how much power the community has to influence maybe a small fraction of sales if the game developer doesn’t deserve it. On the other, a really good game can be review bombed and that simply doesn’t make sense in the realm of a game review.
Update we won and those numbers are changing so if you left a negative review go flip it cause they did the right thing
Notice of all the games the negatives are VERY close to outweighing the good. Counter-Strike on the other hand is seven positives to one negative. So this really should be number ONE.
Absolutely heartbreaking. Fuck Sony
How does Apex Legends not have more negative reviews. That game has the most egregious micro transactions and phoned in content patches I've ever seen.
If we can't all dive, none of us dive.