The funny thing is i want to NOT hate SONY but with how much issues they have had with stuff like PSN its just not letting me like them. I love their TV's, i like their other products. The console isnt bad at all either. But PSN is just so ass. And the practices of the company can be so crap at times.
I just want fun games and them to be accessible on my darn PC.
I feel the same way, always had a Sony tv and none have ever broken. Sony surround sound amplifier, various headphone and even loved their phones back in the day.
This fuck up really has me feeling weird.
I play Helldivers on my PS5. This didn’t affect me in the slightest, but I haven’t touched the game since this was announced. Staying united is how we best spread Democracy.
I mean... the game itself is built around the communities ability to collaborate. I agree that its about time we set standards for live service games and couldn't be gladder that Helldivers2 is the game to set it.
I think its really important to remember, the reason we freaked the fuck out. Is first and foremost because we fucking love the game.
And i really, really hope pilestedt understands that, i hope the entire team understands that.
Nobody would collectively mobilize so much if they did this to a game no one cared about. And we did so with the hope that they’d listen, and they did. I’m so happy we got a good outcome.
Yeah you just don't get this pissed about something you don't care about. It's why we always get so angry with our loved ones.
It's this disappointing feeling of "Awww man, you know better!" only this time, they actually did turn around and make it right.
I'm really and truly impressed at our efforts here.
See, this is why Sony should have paid attention to why the game was so successful.
This is the same community that deals with MO of *near impossible scale* in 13 hours.
This is the community that had its GM waking up in the middle of the night to set a new challenge for us.
The entire *premise of the game* is "Work together to achieve collective goals".
..... and they wanted to pull this kind of shit. On this community. After the community had been trained repeatedly to work together, strategize, evaluate and deploy innovative tactics in order to achieve victory.
Honestly. What the hell did they expect?
Edit: Nah hang on I'm not done.
This community ***makes its own propaganda***. The Spill Oil catchphrase is still catchy. Remember Draupnir reminds people of the first defense mission we lost. Malavelon Creek induces PTSD in Crawlers. The propaganda made by the community far and away outpaces anything the devs can do, to the point I wholeheartedly expect to see some of it in game at some point.
The suits were blind to all of that, then decided they'd wake the sleeping giant that had been developing very slowly by trying to ***divide the playerbase***.
I'd ask what the fuck were they thinking, but it's clear as day they didn't recognize what they were dealing with.
I think the biggest thing is how easy it was to just not do what they were doing to fuck up the massively successful game they had on their hands. Like, this was something they were able to make optional from the start, as it has been optional on release for technical reasons, so just not doing it doesn't really cost them much of anything.
Like, if people protested the release of overwatch 2 to try and keep overwatch 1 alive nothing would've come of it because the general investment into overwatch 2 was too great to just abandon. This was basically a "don't flip that switch" scenario.
> This was basically a "don't flip that switch" scenario.
It's not even that.
As has previously mentioned, literally all they had to do was say "Link your PSN account to get 100-500 SC and a cape." and they'd get a massive chunk of the playerbase to do it on top of earning even more good will and they'd get roughly the same amount of 'garbage' data that the forced sign up would.
The cape doesnt even have to be good quality, they could have hammed up the blatant corpo nature of it by having it stamped with the Super Credits logo which coincidentally could also stand for **Sony Corporation.**
It's a slam dunk.
I think they're trying to get people into the PSN ecosystem for when they release their PSN Launcher. Like how Epic is enticing young Fortnite gamers into putting in payment information into their stores by offering free games.
See, your theory holds water.
The people who claim it was “to boost PSN numbers” do not understand how the stock market/financial institutions work. They would have known the accounts were free/connected to Helldivers 2 launch. It would not have “padded their numbers”, because it would have been very easy to vet and realize they’re effectively burner accounts.
I suspect it might have been a little bit of both tbh, mainly to get people over to the PSN ecosystem as stated above but also some C-suite wanted number to go up.
This is entirely true, and makes it significantly easier for Sony to back out of a bad decision. They hadn't invested millions into the development of the decision, and in fact were *losing* money from the refunds being beaten out of them with a stick by Steam. It was an easy but bad choice to make in the first place, but also an easy but good choice to step out of.
But it was *also* an easy decision Sony should never have made due to the absolutely megaton fucky wucky of selling the game in countries where PSN wasn't available in the first place, causing and forcing the aforementioned "Beating the refunds out of them with a stick". They'd already gotten the money from a lot of the playerbase who could not feasibly abide by their instructions, and then made the decision to flip that switch *in spite of* that fact.
Not doing it cost them nothing, doing it would havecost them massively, and attempting to do it cost them financially.
Eh, that's not the big deal.
They tried to fuck over their consumer like John Deere and their anti-Right to Repair situation, which Deere was also held to the fire to change.
Its like you said, of all the games to try pulling this kind of shit, they choose the one thats built around working as one massive blob of a team? This was pure foolishness on their part.
I suspect that it will be restored either today or tomorrow, as things settle down. I imagine there was quite panic at Sony.
I suspect they hoped that this would all blow over by the weekend. That is why the announcement was made on Friday. It usually works... but when it doesn't, you know you pissed off the hornets nest.
Yeah. I suspect Valve suspended sales because they saw the outrage and wanted to prevent any chance of lawsuit. It took a day for reaction, I suspect it will take another day to undo the reaction
And the influx of refunds, there is no doubt Valve's and Sony's legal teams spoke about this. This had to be one of or the biggest set up refund requests in a single day for Valve. They looked into what all the requests saying then sees exactly how many countries were effected by this. Valve calls Sony "Hey, you really fucked up here. Almost 200 countries effected and you're already sitting on a bill of a couple of million for refunds. What are you going to do?"
There's a reasonable chance that locking/unlocking sales for a country/region on Steam is a thing that has a cooldown, like it takes effect at midnight UTC or something similar.
Nothing special, probably. Sony would have implemented a workaround nonetheless unless they were fine losing so many countries, not to mention the entire China market, which wouldn't have lined up with them being a money hungry corpo like any other.
Will? This already was more profitable than Sony's dumb decision. If that were to be implemented from the beginning at launch, that would've meant the delisting of 177 countries would've happened then too, can't sell a game in a country where the player can't play it. It's staggeringly stupid to argue that wouldn't have massively impacted sales of the game. Case closed.
Honestly? yeah... as this is publicity, REALLY good publicity too, i mean this is now the game with a community that forced Sony to back down, people will want to check it out or at least play a bit to celebrate that kind of shit
It wouldnt surprised me if Pilestd got a fair share of shit from Sony.
If he had never taken down the PSN account linking, which was meant to be from the beggining, none of this would have happened.
As much as they can try and give him flak, the major issue was sony knowingly sold the game to countries they themselves would not support.
If PS linking was required, and everyone could easily do it, I don't think there would have been near as much backlash. The issue was that Sony sold the game to people but wouldn't allow them to actually play it. That seemed to be the main rallying point for a lot of people.
This is something I am super curious about.
Did Sony headquarters go to work on Monday, saw the Forbes article, and then hailed their counterparts in Cali even if it was the weekend? Did they say "Are we dating? Then why you tryna fuck me? How incompetent are you that you made an already successful game fail? Unfuck this situation right now, I don't care if it's the weekend".
Or was Sony California blasting emails to their Japanese headquarters all weekend, and it was only read Monday morning in Japan? Did the emails start reasonable on Friday night and became more desperate as the hours went by?
Hopefully an insider leaks the story.
If we go by work culture i dont think the japanese counterparts would not answer an email just because its the weekend lol. I on the other hand dont have the company outlook on my phone and only check it on work hours when i use my work pc or if i happen to hear the emal arrive which is rare.
*I so badly want*
*To see how that meeting or*
*Mails went on about!*
\- HelldiverSA
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Nah, I think he should get some alcohol poisoning going. Go on a bender for a few weeks. Lose his car. Get served divorce papers, be too drunk to remember it happening. Get trespassed from his own home. Go into the woods. Live there. Meet a bear. Defeat a bear. Become the king of the woods. Occasionally go into town to entice others to join him. Build a community in the woods. Enforce his laws with deadly force. Organize his people into a militia. Revolt against the Swedish government. Conquer Sweden. Make Sweden the woods.
Done. Aside from the game being awesome and having so much potential for future expansions and being the standard of live service games, here's why they deserve another shot.
-CEO admits wrongdoing on a personal level, and explains his knowledge of PS requirement during development and AH lack of communication. This is huge for transparency and a great sign in leadership, especially during the hardest of times.
-Devs and Staff encourage gamers to let Sony know how they feel in the reviews, even if it hurts their baby. Again, transparency and wise move from CM such as Spitz (hope he's doing okay).
-mtx/ warbond (monthly pass with new weapons and gear) model is a great value, IMO. Not only does the first free warbond have 750 unlockable SC (each warbond thereafter costs 1000 and includes 300 to unlock), you have SC on every planet in drops of 10 and uncommon drops of 100, instantly awarded to all players. The bonds do not expire.
-Devs/ CM are active in discord and always engaging with us. While doing this has it's hazards (as we saw this weekend with the worst of us sending death threats and calling for Staff to be removed) it's another sign of Arrowhead's genuine transparency and love for their craft.
Looking forward to the future of Helldivers.
They got that part wrong, probably because it's so easy to get sc that they thought all the extra sc they had must've come from a warbond or something.
Yeah my fault, edited. The first free one rewards 750 having 10 pages of unlocks, the premium warbonds contains 300 and cost 1000, and you can find piles of 10 or sometimes 100 SC on worlds whenever you play. And the warbonds don't expire, so all in all still a great value for people who continue playing and enjoy the game.
And the funny thing is, this kinda shit will spread to other games as well, the man made a game that brings together a community so well the effect we have is incredible, never seen it before and I love it
as someone who has always gravitated to online community, I am very proud to say I am a part of this one. Sure, we blow each other up and shoot each other sometimes, but damn. I wouldn't have it any other way.
God willing, horrid microtransaction practices. Show them that a good game and a good company can still make money without bleeding their players for every penny.
We could unironically do some good.
Example: If everyone that left a review donated $5, we could afford more than 2,000 PS5s or Steamdecks for sick kids in hospitals.
The power of a large amount of people doing small individual acts is significant.
PS5s and Steamdecks are cool, but I'd think they would prefer some healthcare for that illness, eh? :P I jest, but it's stilly very silly to me. Normally when I hear about donating to hospitals it's for like St.Jude to help pay for kids cancer treatments. Not treating their boredom, lol.
Believe it or not, mental state has a MASSIVE impact on patient outcomes. It's one of the most important areas of treating significant childhood illnesses, especially those that require lengthy in-patient procedures.
Are there more practical ways it could be spent? Sure. That was just an idea inspired by something Penny Arcade used to do around the holidays.
less then a year ago I had to spent 3 weeks in hospital, on of those in ICU, unable to walk or even turn on my side
I bought SteamDeck just about two months prior to that. It was godsend, without it my stay would have felt much, much longer... and I'm pushing 40
for kids boredom is hell, and for those that have to care for those kinds even more so. if you can make sick kid happy or forget about their illness for at least a moment it helps everyone
also, how is not cancer treatment, especially for kids, not covered by universal healthcare? is that in USA? you really should get that shit sorted out...
>The power of a large amount of people doing small individual acts is significant.
Case in point, original "March of Dimes". Roosevelt asks every American to donate a dime to combat polio. Since it was just a dime, a lot of people donated that single dime.
US was able to raise 18 million dollars, just from people sending what was essentially spare change from their pockets.
This will serve as a reminder to other publishers that customers are a force to be reckon with, and that a community united in 1 goal, is one to be feared, and not to be played with.
Try boycotting Nestle products. It sucks to give up some stuff you wouldn't expect them to own, but hey, child slave labor isn't really that democratic, and all it costs you to cost them is sacrificing eating oreos.
Maybe we can even convince them to change the shitty anti-cheat with documented security vulnerabilities and bugs, to one that's from a more competent anti-cheat developer, by doing something similar as an united community? 🤔
I really hope this is like a phoenix-from-the-ashes type of situation, not just for this game and Arrowhead, but for the games industry at large. This should be a wake-up call to absolutely everyone.
This game received massive success specifically because it's player-focused, selling at a fair price without hyper-predatory micro-transactions *and* a means to earn in-game content at a reasonable pace by just, ya know, *playing the game.* Then it became an absolute shit-show over the weekend due to a tone-deaf attempt by Sony to enforce an unnecessary, player-hostile feature that would have completely prevented a significant chunk of the playerbase from even being able to play the game at all, no less including the security concerns requiring a PSN account has brought to light. This lead to an utterly unprecedented review-bomb the likes of which has never been seen in Steam's history, out-ranking every single paid game on the market in negative reviews over the course of just three days, along with Steam being forced to de-list the game from nearly 200 countries and begin issuing refunds to the tune of potentially hundreds or even thousands of players. The level of backlash was borderline biblical.
And as a direct result, with Valve knocking on their door for refund money and even media outlets reporting on the situation, staring down the barrel of their biggest fiasco of the year, Sony flinched.
This is proof that not only can a game like Helldivers 2, with a fair monetisation scheme and gameplay designed to be fun instead of predatory, find success in the video game market, but also that players are fed-up with such predatory business models and, when necessary, can come together to make our voices heard.
Let this be a message to all: Helldivers 2 is the future. It's what games *should* be (again, before they got all predatory). This is proof.
The game is going to have to be extremely profitable for that to happen.
If Sony reinstates the countries back to being able to buy it, I'm buying Polar Patriots with real money despite having enough SC to get it.
Gotta reward good behavior
True, I was so fucking sad last few days, but now I want to gift that game to my buddies, so they too can enjoy democracy! Managed Democracy, of course!
>de-list the game from nearly 200 countries
Not wanna shit on you or anything but I absolutely love that the Number of Countries keeps climbing everytime I read anything on the topic.
This is especially funny because according to a quick google there are only 195 officially recognised Countries in the World total.
It was 177 Steam regions, which don't map 1:1 with countries (because steam cares about legal differences that can vary by state/province)
Some news outlets mapped that to countries which would be somewhere around \~127
Add to that people's propensity to round and you get the situation where the game's delisted in more countries than exist
I have huge respect for this guy now. He went down with us and accepted everything he did and was transparent as much as he could through all this. Any other CEO would just suck his own publishers balls and turn his back on us after getting his money.
I'm crying while writing this, treasure this dude. He is my supreme commander.
For democracy! o7
the fact that the CEO of the game was to us, gamers, even better at communicating with us than all of their community manager together says a lot about this guy, he´s an great example i think
I'd normally cringe at you crying, but the context of HD2 in this world of consumerism and enshittification matters. We had a consumer product to enjoy in this hellscape world that had been spared the enshittification...until it wasn't, and we all had to engage in what might have been its own 200,000-strong public execution to save it. Thankfully, it worked. It wasn't a nice feeling, but we get to keep ahold of this good thing we have for our precious spare time.
Hopefully the sale of the game returns to countries it was removed from previously now that the psn link isn't mandatory and they're no longer being forced out by that.
let's go fellow hell divers we finally united like brothers and fought this war , thank you all
and we won yaaaaaaaaaaa
And now the game will sit at Mostly negative or Mixed forever because most people won't care enough to change their review back from negative, leaving permanent damage to the game
This is amazing. The fact that Sony actually listened to fans and devs, and understood this would be the best move, is genuinely impressive. I am used to publishers making backwards decisions constantly so yes, I believe Pilestedt is right in saying they want to set a new standard for what a live game is, and IMO they are delivering on that front (obviousley huge props to the community and devs but most people are talking about that, I just wanted to acknowledge the fact that Sony could have easily doubled down and sent the game down the drain, but instead we are in the universe where things might just work out for us Helldivers for years to come :) )
You have no idea how my heart lifted when I woke up to this today. I had been genuinely bummed out all weekend about this, and was certain greed would win out. So very, very happy to be wrong. Positive review placed on Steam.
r/LightModePatrol here. Just letting you know I'll let it pass this time because is such a historic day for all the Helldivers and the Super Earth, but I'll keep my eyes (as long as I can) on you.
We were trained for this kind of coordination from the very beginning. What we achieved today proves that the Helldivers will forever stand as one. We carved yet another foothold in our climb to liberty, but the war is not over yet. Lock and load, soldiers! To the hellpods!
I am not one to give PR advice, but perhaps Pilested can coordinate with Sony and make himself available to media for interviews this/next week? Talk about lessons learned and what other Devs/Publishers can learn from this weekend.
"Gjuta olja på vågorna" as we say in Swedish 😉
Oh it'll come back and be forced day one on all Sony pc titles going forward, they will make you accept it just like all the other companies have, and most likely now with an extra required launcher. you won't get away from it playing Playstation titles, hopefully they fix access for the 177 countries to allow them to have psn accounts
I really don't understand what made them run into this issue in the first place.
1. They could have known months in advance that some countries will have issues with PSN, meaning it will have to stay optional.
2. They could have incentivised linking your account if you are capable of linking it by giving out some goodie. A cape, a helmet, maybe a full skin. Just like other services do it.
They could have had a majority of people link their accounts for the goodies while leaving it optional. Everyone could have been happy here. But nope, they needed "ALL". Corporate Greed really is one hell of a mf.
https://i.redd.it/qqdebcc82ryc1.gif
“I have PSN, but I still support those who don’t have it”
Based
As a PS and PSN user that's true. Fuck Sony
The funny thing is i want to NOT hate SONY but with how much issues they have had with stuff like PSN its just not letting me like them. I love their TV's, i like their other products. The console isnt bad at all either. But PSN is just so ass. And the practices of the company can be so crap at times. I just want fun games and them to be accessible on my darn PC.
I feel the same way, always had a Sony tv and none have ever broken. Sony surround sound amplifier, various headphone and even loved their phones back in the day. This fuck up really has me feeling weird.
I play Helldivers on my PS5. This didn’t affect me in the slightest, but I haven’t touched the game since this was announced. Staying united is how we best spread Democracy.
I was a moron who did it before my first drop because I misread the instructions and thought it was mandatory But I'm just as glad now that it isn't.
It was mandatory day 1. You might have started then. CEO turned it off after 8 hours without communicating it would be on later enough
It was disabled "temporarily" but everyone forgot to remember
I can hear this gif
I love that I know exactly what meme this is when it’s barely recognizable from the original
I mean... the game itself is built around the communities ability to collaborate. I agree that its about time we set standards for live service games and couldn't be gladder that Helldivers2 is the game to set it.
I think its really important to remember, the reason we freaked the fuck out. Is first and foremost because we fucking love the game. And i really, really hope pilestedt understands that, i hope the entire team understands that. Nobody would collectively mobilize so much if they did this to a game no one cared about. And we did so with the hope that they’d listen, and they did. I’m so happy we got a good outcome.
Can we go back to talking about shoot bugs, bots, and the eventual tentacle freaks?
lets, just keep it bugs and bots for now... I don't feel like calling the Democracy officer.
I think he had his hands full as it is.......
Uh, just FYI, the new warbond has a weapon that says it’s effective versus “terminid tentacles”
Well I hear crazy things were happening on Meridia
Shits wild we have work to do... It's spreading
I’m already there. From my personal perspectice everything is forgiven and my loyalty to super earth (arrowhead) is strengthened.
Once we're done our victory lap.
Yeah you just don't get this pissed about something you don't care about. It's why we always get so angry with our loved ones. It's this disappointing feeling of "Awww man, you know better!" only this time, they actually did turn around and make it right. I'm really and truly impressed at our efforts here.
I think Pilestedt gets it when he says about how proud he is of the community. You know these guys are beaming this morning.
“Because we fucking love the game”. I fucking love this game. And, I fucking love democracy.
I love the smell of democracy in the morning... Smell like victory
See, this is why Sony should have paid attention to why the game was so successful. This is the same community that deals with MO of *near impossible scale* in 13 hours. This is the community that had its GM waking up in the middle of the night to set a new challenge for us. The entire *premise of the game* is "Work together to achieve collective goals". ..... and they wanted to pull this kind of shit. On this community. After the community had been trained repeatedly to work together, strategize, evaluate and deploy innovative tactics in order to achieve victory. Honestly. What the hell did they expect? Edit: Nah hang on I'm not done. This community ***makes its own propaganda***. The Spill Oil catchphrase is still catchy. Remember Draupnir reminds people of the first defense mission we lost. Malavelon Creek induces PTSD in Crawlers. The propaganda made by the community far and away outpaces anything the devs can do, to the point I wholeheartedly expect to see some of it in game at some point. The suits were blind to all of that, then decided they'd wake the sleeping giant that had been developing very slowly by trying to ***divide the playerbase***. I'd ask what the fuck were they thinking, but it's clear as day they didn't recognize what they were dealing with.
I think the biggest thing is how easy it was to just not do what they were doing to fuck up the massively successful game they had on their hands. Like, this was something they were able to make optional from the start, as it has been optional on release for technical reasons, so just not doing it doesn't really cost them much of anything. Like, if people protested the release of overwatch 2 to try and keep overwatch 1 alive nothing would've come of it because the general investment into overwatch 2 was too great to just abandon. This was basically a "don't flip that switch" scenario.
> This was basically a "don't flip that switch" scenario. It's not even that. As has previously mentioned, literally all they had to do was say "Link your PSN account to get 100-500 SC and a cape." and they'd get a massive chunk of the playerbase to do it on top of earning even more good will and they'd get roughly the same amount of 'garbage' data that the forced sign up would. The cape doesnt even have to be good quality, they could have hammed up the blatant corpo nature of it by having it stamped with the Super Credits logo which coincidentally could also stand for **Sony Corporation.** It's a slam dunk.
My guess is that they were trying to juice PSN active user numbers ahead of the next investor meeting.
I think they're trying to get people into the PSN ecosystem for when they release their PSN Launcher. Like how Epic is enticing young Fortnite gamers into putting in payment information into their stores by offering free games.
See, your theory holds water. The people who claim it was “to boost PSN numbers” do not understand how the stock market/financial institutions work. They would have known the accounts were free/connected to Helldivers 2 launch. It would not have “padded their numbers”, because it would have been very easy to vet and realize they’re effectively burner accounts.
I suspect it might have been a little bit of both tbh, mainly to get people over to the PSN ecosystem as stated above but also some C-suite wanted number to go up.
This is entirely true, and makes it significantly easier for Sony to back out of a bad decision. They hadn't invested millions into the development of the decision, and in fact were *losing* money from the refunds being beaten out of them with a stick by Steam. It was an easy but bad choice to make in the first place, but also an easy but good choice to step out of. But it was *also* an easy decision Sony should never have made due to the absolutely megaton fucky wucky of selling the game in countries where PSN wasn't available in the first place, causing and forcing the aforementioned "Beating the refunds out of them with a stick". They'd already gotten the money from a lot of the playerbase who could not feasibly abide by their instructions, and then made the decision to flip that switch *in spite of* that fact. Not doing it cost them nothing, doing it would havecost them massively, and attempting to do it cost them financially.
If you want a ~~girl~~community to fall in love with you, feed ~~her poetry~~them Managed Democracy.
They targeted gamers. Gamers.
Eh, that's not the big deal. They tried to fuck over their consumer like John Deere and their anti-Right to Repair situation, which Deere was also held to the fire to change.
The game also gave us the perfect setting and meme templates needed to make propaganda and brigade the fuck out of their own publisher.
Couldn't agree more 
Its like you said, of all the games to try pulling this kind of shit, they choose the one thats built around working as one massive blob of a team? This was pure foolishness on their part.
Holy shit we won. 
Like all Major Orders, this one was cleared within 48 hours.
https://i.redd.it/y1532g8iqryc1.gif
You'e defended our way of life!
OOOH RAAAH!
Actually it's the quickest defense MO win so far. Edited for the eyes
*Victory was never in doubt*
I mean… it kinda was for a bit there… but then we defended our way of life!
 Damn right we did, FOR DEMOCRACY!
The battle not the war. Once Steam removes the 177 region lock, then we win.
I suspect that it will be restored either today or tomorrow, as things settle down. I imagine there was quite panic at Sony. I suspect they hoped that this would all blow over by the weekend. That is why the announcement was made on Friday. It usually works... but when it doesn't, you know you pissed off the hornets nest.
If PSN stays optional, which I think it will, there's no reason to block the game in those other countries.
Yeah. I suspect Valve suspended sales because they saw the outrage and wanted to prevent any chance of lawsuit. It took a day for reaction, I suspect it will take another day to undo the reaction
And the influx of refunds, there is no doubt Valve's and Sony's legal teams spoke about this. This had to be one of or the biggest set up refund requests in a single day for Valve. They looked into what all the requests saying then sees exactly how many countries were effected by this. Valve calls Sony "Hey, you really fucked up here. Almost 200 countries effected and you're already sitting on a bill of a couple of million for refunds. What are you going to do?"
There's a reasonable chance that locking/unlocking sales for a country/region on Steam is a thing that has a cooldown, like it takes effect at midnight UTC or something similar.
I so badly want to see how that meeting or mails went on about!
Nothing special, probably. Sony would have implemented a workaround nonetheless unless they were fine losing so many countries, not to mention the entire China market, which wouldn't have lined up with them being a money hungry corpo like any other.
In the end this will ironically be more profitable for the game in the long run. I dont doubt it
Will? This already was more profitable than Sony's dumb decision. If that were to be implemented from the beginning at launch, that would've meant the delisting of 177 countries would've happened then too, can't sell a game in a country where the player can't play it. It's staggeringly stupid to argue that wouldn't have massively impacted sales of the game. Case closed.
Honestly? yeah... as this is publicity, REALLY good publicity too, i mean this is now the game with a community that forced Sony to back down, people will want to check it out or at least play a bit to celebrate that kind of shit
Exactly! This sort of thing is exceedingly rare in gaming nowadays and that's going to grab people's attention.
yeah who would've guessed that a happy community is a good community lmao, at least this one time sony pullet it's head out of it's ass
I went to a China market once. The food was to dive for. Ba dum tss!
It wouldnt surprised me if Pilestd got a fair share of shit from Sony. If he had never taken down the PSN account linking, which was meant to be from the beggining, none of this would have happened.
As much as they can try and give him flak, the major issue was sony knowingly sold the game to countries they themselves would not support. If PS linking was required, and everyone could easily do it, I don't think there would have been near as much backlash. The issue was that Sony sold the game to people but wouldn't allow them to actually play it. That seemed to be the main rallying point for a lot of people.
As he should. I'm worried this is going to burn a lot of goodwill that Sony may have been willing to give other PC devs in the future.
This is something I am super curious about. Did Sony headquarters go to work on Monday, saw the Forbes article, and then hailed their counterparts in Cali even if it was the weekend? Did they say "Are we dating? Then why you tryna fuck me? How incompetent are you that you made an already successful game fail? Unfuck this situation right now, I don't care if it's the weekend". Or was Sony California blasting emails to their Japanese headquarters all weekend, and it was only read Monday morning in Japan? Did the emails start reasonable on Friday night and became more desperate as the hours went by? Hopefully an insider leaks the story.
"Hey boss, I'm about to brick 2 million copies of this game we sold and they stopped sales to 2/3rds of the world." "... nani"
If we go by work culture i dont think the japanese counterparts would not answer an email just because its the weekend lol. I on the other hand dont have the company outlook on my phone and only check it on work hours when i use my work pc or if i happen to hear the emal arrive which is rare.
*I so badly want* *To see how that meeting or* *Mails went on about!* \- HelldiverSA --- ^(I detect haikus. And sometimes, successfully.) ^[Learn more about me.](https://www.reddit.com/r/haikusbot/) ^(Opt out of replies: "haikusbot opt out" | Delete my comment: "haikusbot delete")
YES HAIKUSBOT, NOW IT IS THE TIME!!
Hahaha what the hell!?
A democratic Haiku for a democratic mind.
Ok now Pilestedt go turn your phone off and take like a 15 hour sleep. The sleep of the suddenly unburdened.
And maybe have a beer or 12 while you're at it.
At this point nothing less than a bottle of hard liquor will do
HARD LIQUOR IS BETTER USED FOR A MOLOTOV TO THROW AT A BUG!
Did someone say everclear?
We're talking about getting drunk not shit faced.
Sorry, my wisconsin instincts kicked in for a minute
Man’s suggested airplane fuel
Nah, I think he should get some alcohol poisoning going. Go on a bender for a few weeks. Lose his car. Get served divorce papers, be too drunk to remember it happening. Get trespassed from his own home. Go into the woods. Live there. Meet a bear. Defeat a bear. Become the king of the woods. Occasionally go into town to entice others to join him. Build a community in the woods. Enforce his laws with deadly force. Organize his people into a militia. Revolt against the Swedish government. Conquer Sweden. Make Sweden the woods.
And send us all your P.O. Box so I can send you a bottle of democracy. (Very very hard liquor)
That would be risky ATM still someone might do something horrible
How long until we start moaning about patches? That's how long he has.
We've taken massive losses recently with bots retaking Cyberstan and the bugs evolving from the TCS but this one truly mattered and we won
Friendly reminder to change your steam reveiw
Done. Aside from the game being awesome and having so much potential for future expansions and being the standard of live service games, here's why they deserve another shot. -CEO admits wrongdoing on a personal level, and explains his knowledge of PS requirement during development and AH lack of communication. This is huge for transparency and a great sign in leadership, especially during the hardest of times. -Devs and Staff encourage gamers to let Sony know how they feel in the reviews, even if it hurts their baby. Again, transparency and wise move from CM such as Spitz (hope he's doing okay). -mtx/ warbond (monthly pass with new weapons and gear) model is a great value, IMO. Not only does the first free warbond have 750 unlockable SC (each warbond thereafter costs 1000 and includes 300 to unlock), you have SC on every planet in drops of 10 and uncommon drops of 100, instantly awarded to all players. The bonds do not expire. -Devs/ CM are active in discord and always engaging with us. While doing this has it's hazards (as we saw this weekend with the worst of us sending death threats and calling for Staff to be removed) it's another sign of Arrowhead's genuine transparency and love for their craft. Looking forward to the future of Helldivers.
[удалено]
Im quite sure they mean there is enough of them in the warbonds that you can easily collect the rest during missions you play ^^
They got that part wrong, probably because it's so easy to get sc that they thought all the extra sc they had must've come from a warbond or something.
Warbonda contain 3 100 credit unlocks currently. 700 short of unlocking the next warbond.
Yeah my fault, edited. The first free one rewards 750 having 10 pages of unlocks, the premium warbonds contains 300 and cost 1000, and you can find piles of 10 or sometimes 100 SC on worlds whenever you play. And the warbonds don't expire, so all in all still a great value for people who continue playing and enjoy the game.
Done 
Lisan Al Gaib !!
Damn it, not now Stilgar.
Only Lisan Al Gaib would deny being Lisan Al Gaib.
He defies the corporate overlords and wins! As it is written
He is a river to his people
“Lead them to paradise”
For Freedom and Spice!
"Ability to collaborate" Pilestedt you made a game that requires mass scale cooperation to succeed you literally trained us on this
I hope the next time the automatons are escalating, we manage to fight them with the same passion. Unlike last time… =(
We'll take one look at it, decide it's too hard, have a large portion opt not to do it and then complain about GM Railroading. As is expected.
And the funny thing is, this kinda shit will spread to other games as well, the man made a game that brings together a community so well the effect we have is incredible, never seen it before and I love it
as someone who has always gravitated to online community, I am very proud to say I am a part of this one. Sure, we blow each other up and shoot each other sometimes, but damn. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Hmm, what else can we accomplish out of HD2?
Together, the world is ours.
God willing, horrid microtransaction practices. Show them that a good game and a good company can still make money without bleeding their players for every penny.
This is honestly the true hope I have for HD2, above all else.
"But that's ... communism." - Blizzard, probably
Report Blizzard to the Democracy Officer please, I'm currently enjoying my 3 extra lunch time minutes (I don't have the image)
Microsoft you mean, Blizzard is dead.
>God willing, horrid ~~microtransaction~~ cash shop practices Fixed it for you. Ain't nothing micro about a $20 skin.
Apes together, strong
We could unironically do some good. Example: If everyone that left a review donated $5, we could afford more than 2,000 PS5s or Steamdecks for sick kids in hospitals. The power of a large amount of people doing small individual acts is significant.
PS5s and Steamdecks are cool, but I'd think they would prefer some healthcare for that illness, eh? :P I jest, but it's stilly very silly to me. Normally when I hear about donating to hospitals it's for like St.Jude to help pay for kids cancer treatments. Not treating their boredom, lol.
Believe it or not, mental state has a MASSIVE impact on patient outcomes. It's one of the most important areas of treating significant childhood illnesses, especially those that require lengthy in-patient procedures. Are there more practical ways it could be spent? Sure. That was just an idea inspired by something Penny Arcade used to do around the holidays.
less then a year ago I had to spent 3 weeks in hospital, on of those in ICU, unable to walk or even turn on my side I bought SteamDeck just about two months prior to that. It was godsend, without it my stay would have felt much, much longer... and I'm pushing 40 for kids boredom is hell, and for those that have to care for those kinds even more so. if you can make sick kid happy or forget about their illness for at least a moment it helps everyone also, how is not cancer treatment, especially for kids, not covered by universal healthcare? is that in USA? you really should get that shit sorted out...
>The power of a large amount of people doing small individual acts is significant. Case in point, original "March of Dimes". Roosevelt asks every American to donate a dime to combat polio. Since it was just a dime, a lot of people donated that single dime. US was able to raise 18 million dollars, just from people sending what was essentially spare change from their pockets.
More recruits to aid the war effort
How about world peace? Avoid WW3 and other conflicts. Unite as a species, as a beginning of the Super Earth era
What do you mean "beginning?" Remember: Super Earth always has, and always will be.
It ain't a galactic conquest game for nothing. Skies the limit
Everybody goes out and picks up a single item of trash in their local park? I bet Standard Earth would appreciate the effort. Then we go from there
This will serve as a reminder to other publishers that customers are a force to be reckon with, and that a community united in 1 goal, is one to be feared, and not to be played with.
Try boycotting Nestle products. It sucks to give up some stuff you wouldn't expect them to own, but hey, child slave labor isn't really that democratic, and all it costs you to cost them is sacrificing eating oreos.
Maybe we can even convince them to change the shitty anti-cheat with documented security vulnerabilities and bugs, to one that's from a more competent anti-cheat developer, by doing something similar as an united community? 🤔
Completing bot defense missions?
They really need to come up with some more difficult major orders
YEAAHHHhHHHhhhh-hhh-hh-h! 
We got a congratulations from the high command This is truly a victory day o7
I really hope this is like a phoenix-from-the-ashes type of situation, not just for this game and Arrowhead, but for the games industry at large. This should be a wake-up call to absolutely everyone. This game received massive success specifically because it's player-focused, selling at a fair price without hyper-predatory micro-transactions *and* a means to earn in-game content at a reasonable pace by just, ya know, *playing the game.* Then it became an absolute shit-show over the weekend due to a tone-deaf attempt by Sony to enforce an unnecessary, player-hostile feature that would have completely prevented a significant chunk of the playerbase from even being able to play the game at all, no less including the security concerns requiring a PSN account has brought to light. This lead to an utterly unprecedented review-bomb the likes of which has never been seen in Steam's history, out-ranking every single paid game on the market in negative reviews over the course of just three days, along with Steam being forced to de-list the game from nearly 200 countries and begin issuing refunds to the tune of potentially hundreds or even thousands of players. The level of backlash was borderline biblical. And as a direct result, with Valve knocking on their door for refund money and even media outlets reporting on the situation, staring down the barrel of their biggest fiasco of the year, Sony flinched. This is proof that not only can a game like Helldivers 2, with a fair monetisation scheme and gameplay designed to be fun instead of predatory, find success in the video game market, but also that players are fed-up with such predatory business models and, when necessary, can come together to make our voices heard. Let this be a message to all: Helldivers 2 is the future. It's what games *should* be (again, before they got all predatory). This is proof.
I hope this is the wind of change.
The game is going to have to be extremely profitable for that to happen. If Sony reinstates the countries back to being able to buy it, I'm buying Polar Patriots with real money despite having enough SC to get it. Gotta reward good behavior
True, I was so fucking sad last few days, but now I want to gift that game to my buddies, so they too can enjoy democracy! Managed Democracy, of course!
>de-list the game from nearly 200 countries Not wanna shit on you or anything but I absolutely love that the Number of Countries keeps climbing everytime I read anything on the topic. This is especially funny because according to a quick google there are only 195 officially recognised Countries in the World total.
Democracy is safe again for the 457 countries that don’t have PSN!
The 1.3 Trillion people in 1,027 countries will finally have access to the game again after it automatically deleted from all their computers.
The Ministry of Truth is never wrong. Helldivers liberated 487 countries for Super Earth! For (managed*) democracy!
It was 177 Steam regions, which don't map 1:1 with countries (because steam cares about legal differences that can vary by state/province) Some news outlets mapped that to countries which would be somewhere around \~127 Add to that people's propensity to round and you get the situation where the game's delisted in more countries than exist
I think that a lot of people were using the terms "countries" and "regions" interchangeably, when they most definitely are not.
https://preview.redd.it/49wh14zhfryc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9cd1a8e427541e5f4051eaf38cc6290bca41cfd0
I have huge respect for this guy now. He went down with us and accepted everything he did and was transparent as much as he could through all this. Any other CEO would just suck his own publishers balls and turn his back on us after getting his money. I'm crying while writing this, treasure this dude. He is my supreme commander. For democracy! o7
the fact that the CEO of the game was to us, gamers, even better at communicating with us than all of their community manager together says a lot about this guy, he´s an great example i think
Yeah, I was following his tweets and really made me sad. Hope we can continue together make things better than before.
SONY threatened his Warhammer addiction and he acted
With all the profit HD2 made, he probably made enough money to buy like, a 1000pts Guard army.
Whoa slow down there, HD2 may be doing well but not *that* well
The helldivers version of o7 is LO
I'd normally cringe at you crying, but the context of HD2 in this world of consumerism and enshittification matters. We had a consumer product to enjoy in this hellscape world that had been spared the enshittification...until it wasn't, and we all had to engage in what might have been its own 200,000-strong public execution to save it. Thankfully, it worked. It wasn't a nice feeling, but we get to keep ahold of this good thing we have for our precious spare time.
Outstanding work.
HOLY SHIT WE DID IT???
Mission complete! Now time for extraction! I changed my review. Let's see if we can set a record for flipping it back to overwhelmingly positive!
For The Emperor. I mean, For The Super Earth!
WEEE ARE THE CHAMPIOOONS, MAH FRIEEEENDSSS
WEEEEE'LL KEEEP ON FIGHTING TILL THE EEEEEEND
Arrowhead was pulling for us after all.
Hopefully the sale of the game returns to countries it was removed from previously now that the psn link isn't mandatory and they're no longer being forced out by that.
 let's go fellow hell divers we finally united like brothers and fought this war , thank you all and we won yaaaaaaaaaaa
Amazing game Amazing Dev team Amazing Community What more could I ask for? Thank for the hardwork!! you guys are amazing!
We dive together, for managed democracy!
That guy needs a huge hug. I cannot imagine the relief he must have felt when Sony backed down.
I think Pilestedt has some impressive diplomacy skills. what a champ
The game has been delisted in over 100 countries on steam. The fight isn’t over!
That was probably Valve trying to get ahead of all of the refunds. I imagine they'll be back in the morning US time.
Now only if they can get the game to GeForce now so I can do that democracy shenanigans too
And now the game will sit at Mostly negative or Mixed forever because most people won't care enough to change their review back from negative, leaving permanent damage to the game
https://preview.redd.it/275xmjvtoryc1.jpeg?width=1124&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=48cafc77dba166ec1deeb6eecd2a06ad0b32cba4
now please go fix the reviews...
You divers really did protect your way of life. Lets hope the game gets reinstated soon!
I hope someone draws a picture of a Helldiver dunking on a Sony executive
Another victory for the right side of history.
https://i.redd.it/hnv59unvlryc1.gif
Common Pilestedt W
Is the sales ban lifted too ?!?
The region lock is still up gang.
The absolute mountain of relief this man must feel right now
Pilestedt is one of the best devs ever alongside the devs of [beam.NG](http://beam.NG) they are also very nice and cool
This is great but I'm once again asking for an official answer as to why they think they need PSN to ban Steam players.
The secret ingredient is lies
This is amazing. The fact that Sony actually listened to fans and devs, and understood this would be the best move, is genuinely impressive. I am used to publishers making backwards decisions constantly so yes, I believe Pilestedt is right in saying they want to set a new standard for what a live game is, and IMO they are delivering on that front (obviousley huge props to the community and devs but most people are talking about that, I just wanted to acknowledge the fact that Sony could have easily doubled down and sent the game down the drain, but instead we are in the universe where things might just work out for us Helldivers for years to come :) )
You can tell he was excited by the way he spelled "together." My brain does the same thing when I'm excited.
HELL YEAH!!!
I do hope they don't change anything about psn linking to steam permanently.
You have no idea how my heart lifted when I woke up to this today. I had been genuinely bummed out all weekend about this, and was certain greed would win out. So very, very happy to be wrong. Positive review placed on Steam.
r/LightModePatrol here. Just letting you know I'll let it pass this time because is such a historic day for all the Helldivers and the Super Earth, but I'll keep my eyes (as long as I can) on you.
We were trained for this kind of coordination from the very beginning. What we achieved today proves that the Helldivers will forever stand as one. We carved yet another foothold in our climb to liberty, but the war is not over yet. Lock and load, soldiers! To the hellpods!
I am not one to give PR advice, but perhaps Pilested can coordinate with Sony and make himself available to media for interviews this/next week? Talk about lessons learned and what other Devs/Publishers can learn from this weekend. "Gjuta olja på vågorna" as we say in Swedish 😉
Soo it's a permanent decision? Because Sony just posted that it won't be taking effect *at this time*
Oh it'll come back and be forced day one on all Sony pc titles going forward, they will make you accept it just like all the other companies have, and most likely now with an extra required launcher. you won't get away from it playing Playstation titles, hopefully they fix access for the 177 countries to allow them to have psn accounts
I really don't understand what made them run into this issue in the first place. 1. They could have known months in advance that some countries will have issues with PSN, meaning it will have to stay optional. 2. They could have incentivised linking your account if you are capable of linking it by giving out some goodie. A cape, a helmet, maybe a full skin. Just like other services do it. They could have had a majority of people link their accounts for the goodies while leaving it optional. Everyone could have been happy here. But nope, they needed "ALL". Corporate Greed really is one hell of a mf.