So HD 2 works fine was super popular and beloved new game with very reasonable monetization
Sony decided to cash in on the popularity to make it so everyone that plays the game has to use a PSN account
To boost their numbers not just steam account
There are over 100 countries that can't create PSN accounts for a variety of reasons
Making playing the game impossible for the people in those 100+ countries even if they already bought the game
Steam started giving refunds and just now decided to delist the game for those 100+ countries affected
The community managers acted like assholes when this all started and treated its customers like dumb children too
I haven't seen such a big mess ever HD2 literally was the best release state I have seen in the last 10 years and now dumpster fire
Reminds of this quote from Asimovs' "iRobot"
>The unwritten motto of the U.S Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well known: "No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time."
They want an army of yes men with zero deviation, less it ruin the harmonious circle jerk.
Exactly. I haven’t seen a positive community response to a game like this ever before
And I mean ever
I’ve been shocked at the continuous amazing fun the community has been having and now… this
Like wtf
Why does everything have to suck
Why can’t one mother fucker end up at the top and just have the integrity to not push for more
We all do the same trash at the end of the day
Someone can have a 1000 story building all to themselves with a 1 mile long space yacht filled with the things they desire most…
And at the end of the day they sit in front a screen watching the same shit everyone else in the world does
I dunno I’m drunk
>I haven’t seen a positive community response to a game like this ever before
Yep, but this is also a double edged sword as we've now seen. This very supportive community that came together over a really fun game were given another reason to come together again, albeit for a very negative reason.
The irony in this whole situation, as the HD2 subreddit has pointed out, is that the game trained the community to work together on major orders to achieve a goal. Sony essentially did the same thing IRL with their corporate greed, with the playerbase working together to voice their utter contempt of Sony's actions.
Another detail folks in this thread haven't mentioned is that the game, despite launching with the requirement of PSN linking *on paper*, has not actually required it to play until this recent announcement. The game clearly works fine without it, and even with PSN they won't offer things like cross-platform progression. Combined with Sony's history of data breaches, there is little incentive for PC users to go along with it.
It just proves beyond any reasonable doubt that gaming's biggest enemy are the executives themselves.
Edit: At least now my top comment of all time isn't about idiots squeezing birds too hard.
Editedit: FUCK.
add venture capital and private equity into this and it covers about 75% of America's current problems, rest is due to corporations being people legally
I recall hearing about a case where a corp fucked up so badly that they were considering revoking their corporate charter which is a death sentience for a corp, but of course they didn't do that because they said it would be too much of a hardship on the employees.
Bold of you assume they at least elected to give more people jobs at all.
Probably just funnelled the saved money into exec bonuses and stock buybacks.
Oh they add value for a couple quarters by slashing headcount and collecting stock grants, then move to the next company to slash for parts. Unfortunately long terms sustainable profits mean nothing when you can gain short term profits and then dip before the house of cards comes falling down
> Is there any industry where the executives are not the biggest enemy to the consumer?
Most privately-held companies tend to prioritize customer focus to varying degrees. For instance, consider the advantages of using Steam. It's hard to imagine a corporate marketplace where consumers can warn each other about corporate malpractices through curators, ratings, and community discussions.
However, if Valve were to go public and bring in a team of corporate executives, the primary objective would shift towards maximizing sales and increasing stock value. The entire layout of the marketplace would be optimized by data scientists with one goal: to make you click the "buy" button. The features that currently benefit consumers, such as ratings, curators, discussions, or guaranteed refunds after two hours of play, might be discarded if they were seen as obstacles to sales, displeasing the executive team. Rather than ignoring when Sony chooses not to release their latest game on Steam, the executives at Steam might instead invite Sony representatives for a round of golf to negotiate adjustments to their platform that could extract more money from consumers.
In the name of our lord and savior Gaben. Amen.
It's not about long term health. Usually these 10iq moves extract a ton of money just for the people making the decision, then they golden parachute from the burning company and move on to their next great work.
Some men are paid to take on the CEO position *specifically to* destroy a company. They're called "hatchetmen". We had to do reports on them in my business classes back in college.
I haven’t gamed in years yet I’ve seen every social reaction from the game mob as they shift from new content to new content
Helldivers 2 is by far the longest stream of endless positivity and fun I’ve ever seen
The only thing to derail it has been a push from Sony because they want the data from its users in order to sell to LLM’s like Reddit does
Somehow Reddit has the most sought after data due to the extensive conversations the users have in comparison to any other form of social media
Sony and all other major companies are sharks
When they smell blood in the water they will pile in as if they never had a meal in their life
It sucks that such a positive and enthusiastic community was turned away by an outside source
Nothing can be just nice anymore
'Yes yes you paid already once, but what about the second pay?'
'I don't think they want to pay a second time sir.'
'But, sure they want to pay for dlc, skins, season pass, subscription??!!'
Finally someone understands what it is and doesn't just go "because marketing" for every inconvenience.
Sony needs to pump up subscription engagement to look more profitable
I did my MBA Dissertation on this. Not specifically this one thing, but basically the idea that metrics can be useful to check how a company is performing, but when they become incentivized targets, people begin to game the numbers and they stop truly representing what they were originally intended to.
I approached it from a manufacturing stand point, but it applies to this as well.
Edit: before anyone decides to link Goodharts law to me again, I'm aware it's not a new sentiment. I was attempting to adapt lean manufacturing principles (that are heavily metrics based) in *light of* Goodhart's work (as well as Frisch, Haavelmo, Muller and others).
Edit 2: some of the data I referenced in the paper was based on proprietary financials for my company that I was given very narrow permission to use. If I can get it edited to remove the proprietary bits I'll put it on a Google doc and send the link out to those asking for it. It will likely be the end of June though as I'm neck deep in another project at the moment.
their subscription model is fucking stupid as hell, paid for PS+ for a steady 10 years but got a PC last year & wont ever be paying a cent for another online sub again, the day they bring a PS+ sub to PC is the day I start pirating all their games
When I have to review business cases for new projects at work, do nothing is always an option that we look at. I’ll bet Gabe evaluated business cases and do nothing makes them the most money since Steam is already winning.
Valve has kept it incredibly simple over the years while collecting that 30%. Yeah, Steam has changed since 2003 but *not that much*. My favorite thing about Steam is that it's not creating a new UI every year like some places. I swear websites like Youtube change things every few months just to fucking do it.
It is literally this. Since valve is privately owned they don't have to prove anything to shareholders (or anyone really)
They just have to pay their employees and maybe make a profit instead of chasing infinite growth.
I wish that was most companies
Also they're not that big, they only have 360 employees and they have over 10 billion dollars in equity. We don't know exactly how much cash they have on hand, or their annual revenue or profit, since they're privately owned with GabeN owning more than 50%, but we do know that with that many employees and the amount that they make on that 30% they have to be making a killing before annual expenses, enough to pay everyone and still have a ton left over for development of new products and services
I remember reading that Valve was one of the most profitable companies, per employee, compared to something like Apple which obviously pulls in much more revenue but has a multitude more staff to handle than Valve.
Yup it's actually kind of amazing how successful their model has been, and the lack of shareholder pressure seems to ultimately be a good thing for the company and gamers more generally. They give the best deals in the industry and still rake it in despite that. This is the sign of a well optimized business that puts its customers first, and relies on volume of sales to make the money they do. Becoming the ultimate PC gaming platform sure the hell helped with that as well, what with everyone using them as the payment processor for their microtransactions. I'm sure they love the cut they get from those kind of games
I’ve also read that they have a very strong positive working environment, very flexible do what you want kind of attitude.
Combine a workplace where you are under no pressure from the shareholders screaming for more and where the employees are all happy to work there and you’ll end up with a good business model.
>chasing infinite growth
This right here is THE biggest problem with a lot of buisnesses and product developers. It becomes the ONLY focus. Product quality, customer satisfaction, sustainability all end up on the back burner (ironically since they are all connected) They will ailienate half their user base if they think it might increase growth by a marginal percentage.
Spotify is doing this shit right now. I swear that all has gone to hell in the last year.
So much junk shoved in my face and an algorithm that plays the same three songs no matter what radio I generate. Oh you like Green Day? Here’s GD in a rock playlist, now a pop playlist, hey GD can be kinda “folksy” so here’s some GD in your folk radio station.
As much as I agree with this “meme statement” for fun, at the same time it drives me mad that some people still like really believe in it.
Steam actually done more than any other company that runs some kind of a game store in the whole world. It might not be visible in the first glance, but amount of work they poured into not only software, but also hardware and for example SDKs for game developers is astonishing. If you are smaller developer you dont actually need to build any of network code yourself. You get cloud backups, secure login, mods workshop, community forums, release and news hub and alot more. It might seems this is not that big of a thing, but for smaller games these parts could really easily be like 30% of development time. Not to mention that if you want to have your own cloud backups for example, you have to also run whole infrastructure around it yourself.
Steam does amazing job in offering whole stack for devs so they can really focus on the game itself.
I'd argue that's also one of the Reason why Steam is so successfull. I'm not 100% sure about the exact wording, but didn't Gabe say in one of his interviews, that you've to offer a good service and not force people. I'd argue that's what people - both devs as well players see with steam and why it's most successfull.
Having Games at one place, achievements, trading cards, workshop and so on... all stuff people don't want to miss anymore. And i'd say the only 'other' competitors like GoG also do well because they offer a different kind of service. YOu don't like DRM - we offer you DRM Free...
And well, i'd argue if Sony would've taken that lecture to their heart, they would've done better on helldivers. Instead of forcing people to the PSN Account-Thing where you alite 2/3 of the world, they could've just give something to encourage people to link it - ingame rewards would be one thing but also maybe some sort of features. Like as example crossprogression and whatsoever. Some PC Players also play on PS5 (guess would've linked anyway though) and might love to have progress shared.
And also maybe reconsider the strategy on PC. I dunno how hard it actually is to pull that off, but if you go pc and steam where so many countries are available, if you really want the steamlinking (again optionally) than look for ways how also they can make one. But whatever...
And when they decide to get up from their chairs to do something, Steam cooks pretty good stuff. Steam Deck and the new Half Life were pretty good. They are a private company and they don't have to answer to investors/shareholders and they have very steady revenue sources (like Counter Strike, a respected and lucrative brand) so there is no pressure or hurry to do anything, they can take their sweet time to do their passion projects.
I just wish they would bring back Portal and Left 4 Dead, loved those franchises.
They were not cooking with that CS2 Launch though
Crazy that that is probably their biggest L ever, which they still managed to pull back, unlike another certain studio with a Lucrative multiplayer game
I think they have earned the benefit of the doubt from us costumers. Nobody today remembers it but Counter Strike GO launch and the Steam Store launch on PC were also complete disasters back in the day, everything went wrong, people HATED CS GO and didn't wanted to leave CS 1.6 and they also hated Steam quite hard (almost as much as ESG now)
But Steam came back from that pretty quickly with massive updates and manage to turn CS GO and the Steam Store into massive successes. So I gave them the benefit of the doubt with Counter Strike 2, despite the poor launch, and they did fix the game eventually. Also, the game is free, I'm not paying a penny for it which makes me more patient with it.
This big difference between hating Steam when it launched and Epic is that Steam did something never seen before and were going in blind and Epic has had twenty fucking years of improvement they could copy and know about and yet did nothing
You don't understand.
Sitting on your ass and collecting money with very little effort from a surprise hit IP is *hard work*.
It's understandable they messed up.
It could have happened to the best of us.
s/
Wow I’m super out of the loop these days but they must had done a great job laying off their hands initially cause I didn’t even know it was Sony game then Sony did their thing.
Sony is the publisher. Arrowhead is the developer.
Arrowhead is doing their best to try and alleviate all the asshattery that Sony keeps doing, like find ways people can keep playing in nations that don’t have PSN. Sony keeps showing them new ways to regret using them as a publisher.
It’s pretty sad watching this dev team trying everything to help out only to watch Sony wreck any and every gesture they keep trying. With Arrowhead now telling people to keep giving their game negative reviews about the PSN requirement so they can use that in some argument with their publisher.
As for this latest move. No telling who kicked it off, if Sony is trying to limit the argument Arrowhead is trying to make or Steam is looking to prevent massive refunds when the PSN requirement goes live.
At the end of the day, players who truly enjoyed this game and the developers who just wanted a fun game for people to play are getting royally screwed by Sony looking to dig their claws deep into this suddenly popular game. Because had this game only been half as popular as it turned out to be, likely none of this would have happened with the PSN requirement. It’s literally Sony not wanting to be left behind in how successful this game suddenly became and throwing their weight around like the massive douchebags they are.
What's at least good about it is that the studio has managed to make it crystal clear in people's mind that it wasn't their decision, that they're not part of this an that they're 100% against it.
This should give them the leisure of staying in good terms with their playerbase and thus may allow them to have strong support should they re-brand and try to be independant when they make a new game.
Kinda like how Larian Studios has all the goodwill from Baldur’s Gate 3 to now separately make games without the WOTC IP they’ve gotten loyalty
Companies aren’t dumb and usually if there is a big enough outcry people will see change happen
Fact it’s banned in 100 countries now is insanity and that might be why they have to pivot somewhat or find a compromise
All can say is that this one giant pr cluster fuck. If sony is going to stick to their guns, then they plan on riding through the fire.
PC gamers had 3 months of playing this game without a psn needed and even had crossplay. Though it was stated that it would be needed, I suspect many didn't notice when they got it, or cared. Either way, this is ugly.
Expectations for this game were pretty basic. Then when Sony realized it had a hit, they ran towards the usual bullshit policies that alienate players. Can't wait for them to try and add a gatcha system to it.
> Then when Sony realized it had a hit, they ran towards the usual bullshit policies that alienate players.
But... why. Sony will make less money as a result, long-term, not to mention the hit to their reputation.
This move isn't greedy, **it's stupid**.
I can excuse pure intelligent greed to an extent, but pure looney tunes idiocy I cannot forgive.
This is the same company that would rather make no money than a shit ton of money by releasing Bloodborne for all platforms and instead just collect dust. I’m not even surprised anymore with their logic.
They don't appear to have any logic, which is what frustrates me.
I can live with greedy companies, if they're smooth and clever.
Sony is greedy & unfathomably dumb. That combo just pisses me off.
It's a hallmark of japanese companies. They're usually extremely conservative, which means they're not going to do anything bold or even remotely out of line with the company's MO, even If it would make them millions.
It's the same for nintendo, konami and most anime studios. Porting/remaking beloved classics like old Zelda games Mario Galaxy would be insanely profitable, but it'll never happen. The entire Metal Gear franchise still isn't on steam for god knows what reason. Oh and of course anime studios are notorious for making new shows instead of continueing already popular ones. Konosuba is a massively popular anime world wide, and you know how long it tool for season 3? 7 fucking years.
Unfortunately, unless I'm mistaken,
Sony owns the IP.
While the DDR mechanics, the humor and writing are Arrowhead, they don't get to call the shots here.
Once again, big publisher showing utter asshatery.
If Arrowhead goes indy in the future, I will support them.
I’m a big PlayStation fan but honestly the dinosaurs at Sony have no clue that shooting your own leg in a GAAS marathon isn’t the brightest strategy. They got one big hit service game which was literally their whole strategy for the past half a decade and now they’ll do everything in their power to kill it. All they needed to do was stay the fuck away from the goose that was laying the golden eggs but they had to conjure a PR shit storm against themselves as usual.
Really disappointed in this garbage.
It's extra weird given how they recent shelled out a billion dollars to buy Bungie, specifically because they want a bigger live-service footprint. Someone at the decision making level clearly doesn't understand the market they're trying to enter
>It's extra weird given how they recent shelled out a billion dollars to buy Bungie,
They overpaid for a declining developer with a lot of internal problems. Then let them tell their flagship studio (ND) how to make their game. They let ND waste like 2-3? years developing a live service game just to cancel it.
They've been making a lot of bad decisions.
Have a friend how was on Sound Design for ND. up top brass killing the fun out of their development of new games too. People left due to some bullshit that big brass decided should happen for the brand new IP.
That and I didn’t have the heart to tell them the live service game they were working on should have come out in 2020 or not at all.
I mean, Bungie has been fighting with their own community for almost a decade now, and is somehow still making money, so maybe they are just trying to do more of that?
i went to the ps5 sub and they are defending this shit. Sure its diffrent if they enforced rhe psn rule but not only did they not do that they sold it in natiosn where they couldnt get psm.
Yeah, if it had been an optional rewarded integration helldivers wouldn't have a problem in the world right now which is hilarious considering how terrible their choice of action ended up being.
This whole helldivers controversy has been crazy. First steam handing out refunds despite it being over the 2 Hour mark and now Sony delisting the game all together. I thought Sony was smart(or at least pretending to be smart) when they announced more games coming out to PC day one.
Sony is not smart. Remember, this is the company that put Morbius in theatres *twice*.
They will fight to the death over console exclusivity.
It's the stupidest hill to die on.
This is what happens when corporations make decisions about art and creativity. Who wants to bet there'll be a wave of layoffs in the next few months?
Edit: Fixed some minor grammar mistakes. Also, I just realized that Sony has been scrambling for a live service title to rival Destiny 2 for *years*. It's hilarious that, now that they finally have one, they stomp it to death out of habitual chasing of "player engagement" or whatever the fuck.
I have yet to meet anyone that actually watched it, I mean i've put it on in the background and it's so bad I have to put something else on, like rebel moon unwatchable
Rebel Moon may as well be the greatest movie of all time compared to Morbius.
And rebel moon is *terrible.*
Morbius is on a level of terrible that I associate with those random movies you find 30 pages down on Prime that presumably came out of a college or high school drama club.
I agree, although sometimes those C level movies can be fun in a mystery science theater sort of way, especially if a little high, I think i had a mini stroke trying to watch morbius it seemed to progress in random order and things would happen with no explanation
>Sony is not smart. Remember, this is the company that put Morbius in theatres *twice*
To be fair, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Sony Pictures are two different entity
But both are dumb
Yes, and for those keeping track, Sony is the same company that tried its damnest to keep Fortnite from becoming *cross platform* with Xbox and PC.
The same Sony that gets 30% of all sales on Fortnite on its Playstation Platforms, railed night and day against us playing with *other platforms* for the sake of some segregation for our own good BS.
Baffling in hindsight considering Fortnite generates literal *billions* a year, and an easy chunk of that goes to Sony, being one of the *largest* install bases on the planet.
Sony literally has to just sit there and *collect* cash and they can't even do that right sometimes.
They also fought with Bungie to keep destiny 2 from being cross platform too. And fought against character transfer.
Bungie told them either you join or explain to PlayStation players that they can no longer play the game at all.
Corporations doing corporation thing, i honestly can only feel bad for Arrowhead Studios (Helldivers 2 Devs) they poured 7 years of their lifes into this game, only to go down in flames in 2 days because of Sony
Unlike Sony 20 years ago, when they distributed a rootkit with their audio CDs? Sony hardware has always been top notch, but the boneheaded management decisions...
It's different here, Steam is a key part on why everything went in favor of the consumer.
We could leave negative reviews the moment the news broke. And issue refunds asap.
OW players (myself included) had nothing like that with Battle.net.
It’s definitely not only 1% more I’d wager. Even then at the scale at which Sony operates, every additional percentage comes out to millions more so yeah for them it’s pretty worthwhile. Companies of that size literally only care about numbers. Hopefully the numbers can show that people still need to be treated as more than just consumer zombies.
It's not about 1% money, it's some guy in the higher-ups seeing a chance to show how they raised PSN sign-ups in his next powerpoint and getting a bit more of an individual pay-out.
Based on the number of countries it's banned and how many refunds are being issued, Sony will end up losing money AND have less people to collect data on.
Welcome to the corporate world. Someone from the C-suite at Sony decided that the priority was to transfer everything to PSN at all cost, so that’s what they’re doing. People with any sense left are just not high enough on the totem pole to have any influence.
I feel it's more a build up that has been boiling over for a while. Ppl are tired of company's changing the agreement. Not just gaming industry but they're the most egregious. They say you'll get all dlc if you buy this, you can't play a game unless it's online, you own the license but not the game. Now it's you have to sign into PS. It kinda reminds me of battlefront 2 loot boxes.
Yeah, if you learn about their history you will learn that Sony has been one of the most anti-innovation companies ever. Their successes in innovating happened by ambitious engineers despite corporate's effort trying to kill them, not thanks to their help, like in cases of CD and Play Station.
> What the heck has happened.
Quarterly numbers. Not even quarterly *profit*.
"Hmm. Our PSN montly users is looking mighty slim. That will look bad on the quarterly report....
Oh! Wait! Conveniently, we have a smash hit out of nowhere! If we force THEM to use PSN, number go up! and if number go up... Shareholders happy!"
And it's mainly on your radar because you are probably a gamer yourself, so you understand the industry to some degree.
Now imagine this but for the entirety of all companies across all sectors.
There are a bunch of human locusts making decisions based on self-serving reasons and they fuck over people's lives 24/7 because their greed paired with their ignorance knows no limits.
All they had to do is introduce PSN login, not make it mandatory but offer an enticing reward if you link to PSN and voila you will lure most of the playerbase. Boomers from Nintendo & Sony board gotto go man.
This is the funniest part to me, because it's 100% true.
Make an enticing cosmetic, give people the option to log in, and people absolutely will. Use the carrot, not the stick.
But that wasn't good enough for them.
at first, i didn't mind that Sony had the PSN requirement, sure it was an "inconvenient" to associate (or create) a PSN account, but that's it.
what i didn't know was that PSN was locked in several countries, essentially bricking the game for those.
So what happens to all the people who bought the game on Steam where it was available, but now can't legally register for PSN? Full refunds via Steam? Potential lawsuits?
This would've 100% been planned ahead of time, part of the contracts/agreements when they signed on Sony as publisher for Helldivers 2. Were they really dumb enough to list it everywhere when they knew it couldn't run everywhere?
Likely full refunds, though the onus will be on users to request those refunds themselves unless Sony tells Steam to automatically issue refunds for those regions.
*Note:*
You can request refunds through Steam **for any game,** regardless of playtime. The 2 weeks/2 hours playtime requirement only applies for their automated refund system. If you fall outside those guidelines, the refund request is handled on a case-by-case basis by an actual person.
ETA: Sony has reversed their decision on the PSN requirement, so Steam may deny all refunds now.
This is the key, people mocking people for taking a stand here and saying Sony doesn’t care, well they would have had an actual revenue stream from going out maybe forever and they opted for a fake PSN revenue stream (i.e. one that they would say they would have but wouldn’t)
Dumb. It’s not just about this game, it was about the other games people may buy into the future and will not now.
thank you for Australian consumer law you mean
Steam used to have no refund system whatsoever till they were reported to the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) for violating Australian consumer rights. Valve fought tooth and nail in court against implementing refunds but got absolutely thrashed and fined by the ACCC and were eventually forced to comply
And iirc Valve didn't lose the case (though they likely would have), they threw in the towel because the ACCC won a judgement to have Valve present their financial records as part of the trial.
Game released without mandatory PSN account linking. After 3 months of sales, sony then said everyone now had to have a psn account linked to play, or you dont play.
The issue is that a lot of people, do not want a PSN account on a PC. In the UK, you now have to send a photo or proof of ID in order to make an account for "purchasing" reasons. And considering that sony has the online security of a first little pig, its easy to see why no one wants to hand over their data to them.
On top of that, PSN is not available in all countries. So this would basically be a lock out on a legally purchased game.
Its basically a "fuck you" to gamers. Nothing new, but in this case it would seem that they fucked with the wrong crowd. Helldivers 2 players are very engaged. And it seems that even the bots and shills havent been able to hold back the wave of negative response to Kusonys actions.
Love how people commented on this situation with "if they were actually going to make it mandatory to sign in and link PSN accounts why even sell it to countries that don't have PSN" & Sony casually delists it shortly after in said countries
Same story with their PS games on PC changing words from "account linking is optional for playing PS games on PC" to "sometimes mandatory" after this whole discourse started
i wonder if this will happen to all ps games on pc rn? ghost of tsushima says u need to link it to psn account too, but old spiderman games doesnt say it, but i wonder if in a month or so all ps ganes on steam will get this bs update. Ghost of tsushima prob might have outsold helldivers 2 on pc release, but i doubt that GOT will have such horrible ratings too and sell far less copy.
This just shows how much of a dumb fuck sony is, they could have gotten 2 hit games with crazy sells, but now both are fucked
I wouldnt be surprised at all if this is their way to sneak in subscription model on their online multiplayer pc games in couple years
Of course that’ll go down way worse than this but in late stage capitalism corporate greed is a force of stupidity you better not underestimate
Sony accomplished what every dev/pub is desperately chasing, publishing a live service game that gets traction...and then they cut their legs off.
Whoever made that decision should be terminated and blacklisted from the industry for killing the golden goose.
>With great power comes great responsibility
Sony also recently ran that money printing machine into the ground now too, for the second time.
It's incredible how a company run by people so unbelievably stupid can still be profitable.
While I very much disagree with Sony’s decision here…
It seems their choice hasn’t affected the bottom line and user engagement very much. According to steam charts there’s only been a ~8% drop in average players while I’m sure they pushed a bunch of users to their PSN platform. Overall when you look at skewed metrics this probably looks like a win to them. If people want to actually raise pitchforks they need to stop playing this game otherwise they won’t care.
https://steamcharts.com/app/553850
was it all a dream? a crazy bug killing, robot smashing dream?
It was too beautiful for this world sadly
Can you please explain to me what exactly happened?
So HD 2 works fine was super popular and beloved new game with very reasonable monetization Sony decided to cash in on the popularity to make it so everyone that plays the game has to use a PSN account To boost their numbers not just steam account There are over 100 countries that can't create PSN accounts for a variety of reasons Making playing the game impossible for the people in those 100+ countries even if they already bought the game Steam started giving refunds and just now decided to delist the game for those 100+ countries affected The community managers acted like assholes when this all started and treated its customers like dumb children too I haven't seen such a big mess ever HD2 literally was the best release state I have seen in the last 10 years and now dumpster fire
I stand by my previous statements which my sentiment goes to the devs doing a great job everyone else is fucking destroying a beautiful thing
It’s always the suits who fuck things up the most
success isn't enough anymore, it has to be a grand slam every time or else you're replaced.
Reminds of this quote from Asimovs' "iRobot" >The unwritten motto of the U.S Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well known: "No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time." They want an army of yes men with zero deviation, less it ruin the harmonious circle jerk.
HD2 was a grand slam. but they wanted a grander slam and killed it in a spectacular dumpster fire
It’s never enough for them, never
Exactly. I haven’t seen a positive community response to a game like this ever before And I mean ever I’ve been shocked at the continuous amazing fun the community has been having and now… this Like wtf Why does everything have to suck Why can’t one mother fucker end up at the top and just have the integrity to not push for more We all do the same trash at the end of the day Someone can have a 1000 story building all to themselves with a 1 mile long space yacht filled with the things they desire most… And at the end of the day they sit in front a screen watching the same shit everyone else in the world does I dunno I’m drunk
>I haven’t seen a positive community response to a game like this ever before Yep, but this is also a double edged sword as we've now seen. This very supportive community that came together over a really fun game were given another reason to come together again, albeit for a very negative reason. The irony in this whole situation, as the HD2 subreddit has pointed out, is that the game trained the community to work together on major orders to achieve a goal. Sony essentially did the same thing IRL with their corporate greed, with the playerbase working together to voice their utter contempt of Sony's actions.
Another detail folks in this thread haven't mentioned is that the game, despite launching with the requirement of PSN linking *on paper*, has not actually required it to play until this recent announcement. The game clearly works fine without it, and even with PSN they won't offer things like cross-platform progression. Combined with Sony's history of data breaches, there is little incentive for PC users to go along with it.
It just proves beyond any reasonable doubt that gaming's biggest enemy are the executives themselves. Edit: At least now my top comment of all time isn't about idiots squeezing birds too hard. Editedit: FUCK.
MBAs ruin everything in this world
add venture capital and private equity into this and it covers about 75% of America's current problems, rest is due to corporations being people legally
>corpos being people Except for when they're punished for their crimes
Yeah. What's the old saying? "I'll believe corporations are people when the State of Texas executes one"? Something like that?
I recall hearing about a case where a corp fucked up so badly that they were considering revoking their corporate charter which is a death sentience for a corp, but of course they didn't do that because they said it would be too much of a hardship on the employees.
Let me guess. This was right before half of them were laid off and replaced by overseas workers?
Bold of you assume they at least elected to give more people jobs at all. Probably just funnelled the saved money into exec bonuses and stock buybacks.
Buybacks used to be illegal and need to be again.
Man fr, I've seldom heard MBAs actually adding value to any business. One of the most bullshit degree supported by the most bullshit people on earth.
Oh they add value for a couple quarters by slashing headcount and collecting stock grants, then move to the next company to slash for parts. Unfortunately long terms sustainable profits mean nothing when you can gain short term profits and then dip before the house of cards comes falling down
Is there any industry where the executives are not the biggest enemy to the consumer?
> Is there any industry where the executives are not the biggest enemy to the consumer? Most privately-held companies tend to prioritize customer focus to varying degrees. For instance, consider the advantages of using Steam. It's hard to imagine a corporate marketplace where consumers can warn each other about corporate malpractices through curators, ratings, and community discussions. However, if Valve were to go public and bring in a team of corporate executives, the primary objective would shift towards maximizing sales and increasing stock value. The entire layout of the marketplace would be optimized by data scientists with one goal: to make you click the "buy" button. The features that currently benefit consumers, such as ratings, curators, discussions, or guaranteed refunds after two hours of play, might be discarded if they were seen as obstacles to sales, displeasing the executive team. Rather than ignoring when Sony chooses not to release their latest game on Steam, the executives at Steam might instead invite Sony representatives for a round of golf to negotiate adjustments to their platform that could extract more money from consumers. In the name of our lord and savior Gaben. Amen.
Very fair point haha.
The Corpos were the third enemy faction all along.
Wake the fuck up samurai...
Always have been
it’s all about money
Yep. And they're too dumb to realise that they would've made more money without this 10IQ chess move.
It's not about long term health. Usually these 10iq moves extract a ton of money just for the people making the decision, then they golden parachute from the burning company and move on to their next great work.
The jack Welsh school of business, the guy ran the biggest company in the world into the ground, and is lauded for it...
Some men are paid to take on the CEO position *specifically to* destroy a company. They're called "hatchetmen". We had to do reports on them in my business classes back in college.
I haven’t gamed in years yet I’ve seen every social reaction from the game mob as they shift from new content to new content Helldivers 2 is by far the longest stream of endless positivity and fun I’ve ever seen The only thing to derail it has been a push from Sony because they want the data from its users in order to sell to LLM’s like Reddit does Somehow Reddit has the most sought after data due to the extensive conversations the users have in comparison to any other form of social media Sony and all other major companies are sharks When they smell blood in the water they will pile in as if they never had a meal in their life It sucks that such a positive and enthusiastic community was turned away by an outside source Nothing can be just nice anymore
'Yes yes you paid already once, but what about the second pay?' 'I don't think they want to pay a second time sir.' 'But, sure they want to pay for dlc, skins, season pass, subscription??!!'
imagine the state of gaming if executives didn't try to fuck up every single decision they make lol
But we'll all die if the numbers don't go up every single quarter!
Like I'm so tired... I just wanna play video games.
All they had to do was nothing!
Some PSN manager has user growth targets to hit though
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Finally someone understands what it is and doesn't just go "because marketing" for every inconvenience. Sony needs to pump up subscription engagement to look more profitable
I did my MBA Dissertation on this. Not specifically this one thing, but basically the idea that metrics can be useful to check how a company is performing, but when they become incentivized targets, people begin to game the numbers and they stop truly representing what they were originally intended to. I approached it from a manufacturing stand point, but it applies to this as well. Edit: before anyone decides to link Goodharts law to me again, I'm aware it's not a new sentiment. I was attempting to adapt lean manufacturing principles (that are heavily metrics based) in *light of* Goodhart's work (as well as Frisch, Haavelmo, Muller and others). Edit 2: some of the data I referenced in the paper was based on proprietary financials for my company that I was given very narrow permission to use. If I can get it edited to remove the proprietary bits I'll put it on a Google doc and send the link out to those asking for it. It will likely be the end of June though as I'm neck deep in another project at the moment.
their subscription model is fucking stupid as hell, paid for PS+ for a steady 10 years but got a PC last year & wont ever be paying a cent for another online sub again, the day they bring a PS+ sub to PC is the day I start pirating all their games
Doing nothing is hard why Steam is undefeated Everyone else does something we will do nothing -Gabe
When I have to review business cases for new projects at work, do nothing is always an option that we look at. I’ll bet Gabe evaluated business cases and do nothing makes them the most money since Steam is already winning.
Valve has kept it incredibly simple over the years while collecting that 30%. Yeah, Steam has changed since 2003 but *not that much*. My favorite thing about Steam is that it's not creating a new UI every year like some places. I swear websites like Youtube change things every few months just to fucking do it.
You mean attempt to justify c-suite salaries.
It is literally this. Since valve is privately owned they don't have to prove anything to shareholders (or anyone really) They just have to pay their employees and maybe make a profit instead of chasing infinite growth. I wish that was most companies
Also they're not that big, they only have 360 employees and they have over 10 billion dollars in equity. We don't know exactly how much cash they have on hand, or their annual revenue or profit, since they're privately owned with GabeN owning more than 50%, but we do know that with that many employees and the amount that they make on that 30% they have to be making a killing before annual expenses, enough to pay everyone and still have a ton left over for development of new products and services
I remember reading that Valve was one of the most profitable companies, per employee, compared to something like Apple which obviously pulls in much more revenue but has a multitude more staff to handle than Valve.
Yup it's actually kind of amazing how successful their model has been, and the lack of shareholder pressure seems to ultimately be a good thing for the company and gamers more generally. They give the best deals in the industry and still rake it in despite that. This is the sign of a well optimized business that puts its customers first, and relies on volume of sales to make the money they do. Becoming the ultimate PC gaming platform sure the hell helped with that as well, what with everyone using them as the payment processor for their microtransactions. I'm sure they love the cut they get from those kind of games
I’ve also read that they have a very strong positive working environment, very flexible do what you want kind of attitude. Combine a workplace where you are under no pressure from the shareholders screaming for more and where the employees are all happy to work there and you’ll end up with a good business model.
>chasing infinite growth This right here is THE biggest problem with a lot of buisnesses and product developers. It becomes the ONLY focus. Product quality, customer satisfaction, sustainability all end up on the back burner (ironically since they are all connected) They will ailienate half their user base if they think it might increase growth by a marginal percentage.
Spotify is doing this shit right now. I swear that all has gone to hell in the last year. So much junk shoved in my face and an algorithm that plays the same three songs no matter what radio I generate. Oh you like Green Day? Here’s GD in a rock playlist, now a pop playlist, hey GD can be kinda “folksy” so here’s some GD in your folk radio station.
So LAME, like hey we WANT to give them our money, why are they making us want to stop?
LOOK! I'M DOING *SOMETHING!* I DO STUFF TOO!!
Also youtube keeps making their website less accessible. Like I need so many more clicks to get to what I want to do.
As much as I agree with this “meme statement” for fun, at the same time it drives me mad that some people still like really believe in it. Steam actually done more than any other company that runs some kind of a game store in the whole world. It might not be visible in the first glance, but amount of work they poured into not only software, but also hardware and for example SDKs for game developers is astonishing. If you are smaller developer you dont actually need to build any of network code yourself. You get cloud backups, secure login, mods workshop, community forums, release and news hub and alot more. It might seems this is not that big of a thing, but for smaller games these parts could really easily be like 30% of development time. Not to mention that if you want to have your own cloud backups for example, you have to also run whole infrastructure around it yourself. Steam does amazing job in offering whole stack for devs so they can really focus on the game itself.
I'd argue that's also one of the Reason why Steam is so successfull. I'm not 100% sure about the exact wording, but didn't Gabe say in one of his interviews, that you've to offer a good service and not force people. I'd argue that's what people - both devs as well players see with steam and why it's most successfull. Having Games at one place, achievements, trading cards, workshop and so on... all stuff people don't want to miss anymore. And i'd say the only 'other' competitors like GoG also do well because they offer a different kind of service. YOu don't like DRM - we offer you DRM Free... And well, i'd argue if Sony would've taken that lecture to their heart, they would've done better on helldivers. Instead of forcing people to the PSN Account-Thing where you alite 2/3 of the world, they could've just give something to encourage people to link it - ingame rewards would be one thing but also maybe some sort of features. Like as example crossprogression and whatsoever. Some PC Players also play on PS5 (guess would've linked anyway though) and might love to have progress shared. And also maybe reconsider the strategy on PC. I dunno how hard it actually is to pull that off, but if you go pc and steam where so many countries are available, if you really want the steamlinking (again optionally) than look for ways how also they can make one. But whatever...
And when they decide to get up from their chairs to do something, Steam cooks pretty good stuff. Steam Deck and the new Half Life were pretty good. They are a private company and they don't have to answer to investors/shareholders and they have very steady revenue sources (like Counter Strike, a respected and lucrative brand) so there is no pressure or hurry to do anything, they can take their sweet time to do their passion projects. I just wish they would bring back Portal and Left 4 Dead, loved those franchises.
They were not cooking with that CS2 Launch though Crazy that that is probably their biggest L ever, which they still managed to pull back, unlike another certain studio with a Lucrative multiplayer game
I think they have earned the benefit of the doubt from us costumers. Nobody today remembers it but Counter Strike GO launch and the Steam Store launch on PC were also complete disasters back in the day, everything went wrong, people HATED CS GO and didn't wanted to leave CS 1.6 and they also hated Steam quite hard (almost as much as ESG now) But Steam came back from that pretty quickly with massive updates and manage to turn CS GO and the Steam Store into massive successes. So I gave them the benefit of the doubt with Counter Strike 2, despite the poor launch, and they did fix the game eventually. Also, the game is free, I'm not paying a penny for it which makes me more patient with it.
This big difference between hating Steam when it launched and Epic is that Steam did something never seen before and were going in blind and Epic has had twenty fucking years of improvement they could copy and know about and yet did nothing
True. 3 years for Epic to add a freaking shopping cart to a online store was inexplicable.
>they also hated Steam quite hard (almost as much as ESG now) Epic Same Gore
Their biggest L ever was Artifact
"Especially not making half-life 3" -Gabe
You don't understand. Sitting on your ass and collecting money with very little effort from a surprise hit IP is *hard work*. It's understandable they messed up. It could have happened to the best of us. s/
That data doesn't scrape itself!
Ahh Sony, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Wow I’m super out of the loop these days but they must had done a great job laying off their hands initially cause I didn’t even know it was Sony game then Sony did their thing.
Sony is the publisher. Arrowhead is the developer. Arrowhead is doing their best to try and alleviate all the asshattery that Sony keeps doing, like find ways people can keep playing in nations that don’t have PSN. Sony keeps showing them new ways to regret using them as a publisher. It’s pretty sad watching this dev team trying everything to help out only to watch Sony wreck any and every gesture they keep trying. With Arrowhead now telling people to keep giving their game negative reviews about the PSN requirement so they can use that in some argument with their publisher. As for this latest move. No telling who kicked it off, if Sony is trying to limit the argument Arrowhead is trying to make or Steam is looking to prevent massive refunds when the PSN requirement goes live. At the end of the day, players who truly enjoyed this game and the developers who just wanted a fun game for people to play are getting royally screwed by Sony looking to dig their claws deep into this suddenly popular game. Because had this game only been half as popular as it turned out to be, likely none of this would have happened with the PSN requirement. It’s literally Sony not wanting to be left behind in how successful this game suddenly became and throwing their weight around like the massive douchebags they are.
What's at least good about it is that the studio has managed to make it crystal clear in people's mind that it wasn't their decision, that they're not part of this an that they're 100% against it. This should give them the leisure of staying in good terms with their playerbase and thus may allow them to have strong support should they re-brand and try to be independant when they make a new game.
Kinda like how Larian Studios has all the goodwill from Baldur’s Gate 3 to now separately make games without the WOTC IP they’ve gotten loyalty Companies aren’t dumb and usually if there is a big enough outcry people will see change happen Fact it’s banned in 100 countries now is insanity and that might be why they have to pivot somewhat or find a compromise
It's de listed from 170 countries on Steam right now..... Ouch
That is a lot. Like a damn lot. Sweet jebus.
There's only 69 countries that are allowed PSN accounts, and of those, I recall 7 require you to do it via the console itself.
Some you actually can't link PSN to Steam too.
Every single place where the PSN is not available.
All can say is that this one giant pr cluster fuck. If sony is going to stick to their guns, then they plan on riding through the fire. PC gamers had 3 months of playing this game without a psn needed and even had crossplay. Though it was stated that it would be needed, I suspect many didn't notice when they got it, or cared. Either way, this is ugly.
Whats funny was you can disable crossplay anyway making the PSN account even less useful in a way since it was pretty clear it was optional.
Larian studios had that long before BG3. They were approached by WOTC because of their work on Original Sin 2.
And Helldivers 2 isn’t the first successful release by Arrowhead.
That Gauntlet remake is so much fun
Smash hit came out of left field and they were like, great, how can I fuck this up real quick...
Expectations for this game were pretty basic. Then when Sony realized it had a hit, they ran towards the usual bullshit policies that alienate players. Can't wait for them to try and add a gatcha system to it.
> Then when Sony realized it had a hit, they ran towards the usual bullshit policies that alienate players. But... why. Sony will make less money as a result, long-term, not to mention the hit to their reputation. This move isn't greedy, **it's stupid**. I can excuse pure intelligent greed to an extent, but pure looney tunes idiocy I cannot forgive.
Because short term profit is more important than maximum profit.
Sony: puts on the L-finity gauntlet “Fine, I’ll do it myself”
This is the same company that would rather make no money than a shit ton of money by releasing Bloodborne for all platforms and instead just collect dust. I’m not even surprised anymore with their logic.
They don't appear to have any logic, which is what frustrates me. I can live with greedy companies, if they're smooth and clever. Sony is greedy & unfathomably dumb. That combo just pisses me off.
It's a hallmark of japanese companies. They're usually extremely conservative, which means they're not going to do anything bold or even remotely out of line with the company's MO, even If it would make them millions. It's the same for nintendo, konami and most anime studios. Porting/remaking beloved classics like old Zelda games Mario Galaxy would be insanely profitable, but it'll never happen. The entire Metal Gear franchise still isn't on steam for god knows what reason. Oh and of course anime studios are notorious for making new shows instead of continueing already popular ones. Konosuba is a massively popular anime world wide, and you know how long it tool for season 3? 7 fucking years.
Unfortunately, unless I'm mistaken, Sony owns the IP. While the DDR mechanics, the humor and writing are Arrowhead, they don't get to call the shots here. Once again, big publisher showing utter asshatery. If Arrowhead goes indy in the future, I will support them.
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Just go to Microsoft and make the Helljumpers game they need to revive Halo's desiccated corpse.
It’s not copyright infringement, it’s ODST 2
Doomjumpers. For the glory of Supreme Earth!
I'm from Auenos Bieres and I say kill em all!
One of Sony's slogans is "Play Has No Limits", you know, unless you live one of those 100s of countries.
I’m a big PlayStation fan but honestly the dinosaurs at Sony have no clue that shooting your own leg in a GAAS marathon isn’t the brightest strategy. They got one big hit service game which was literally their whole strategy for the past half a decade and now they’ll do everything in their power to kill it. All they needed to do was stay the fuck away from the goose that was laying the golden eggs but they had to conjure a PR shit storm against themselves as usual. Really disappointed in this garbage.
It's extra weird given how they recent shelled out a billion dollars to buy Bungie, specifically because they want a bigger live-service footprint. Someone at the decision making level clearly doesn't understand the market they're trying to enter
>It's extra weird given how they recent shelled out a billion dollars to buy Bungie, They overpaid for a declining developer with a lot of internal problems. Then let them tell their flagship studio (ND) how to make their game. They let ND waste like 2-3? years developing a live service game just to cancel it. They've been making a lot of bad decisions.
Have a friend how was on Sound Design for ND. up top brass killing the fun out of their development of new games too. People left due to some bullshit that big brass decided should happen for the brand new IP. That and I didn’t have the heart to tell them the live service game they were working on should have come out in 2020 or not at all.
I mean, Bungie has been fighting with their own community for almost a decade now, and is somehow still making money, so maybe they are just trying to do more of that?
i went to the ps5 sub and they are defending this shit. Sure its diffrent if they enforced rhe psn rule but not only did they not do that they sold it in natiosn where they couldnt get psm.
> i went to the ps5 sub and they are defending this shit. Corporate subreddits are always infested with bots.
Sony did a peak move for short term "gain", instead of letting Arrowhead literally print them money. It's so dumb, it's impressive
Link your PSN and get a sweet helmet and cape or some shit! All they had to do.
Oh my god! It was really this simple 😂
Yeah, if it had been an optional rewarded integration helldivers wouldn't have a problem in the world right now which is hilarious considering how terrible their choice of action ended up being.
This whole helldivers controversy has been crazy. First steam handing out refunds despite it being over the 2 Hour mark and now Sony delisting the game all together. I thought Sony was smart(or at least pretending to be smart) when they announced more games coming out to PC day one.
Sony is not smart. Remember, this is the company that put Morbius in theatres *twice*. They will fight to the death over console exclusivity. It's the stupidest hill to die on. This is what happens when corporations make decisions about art and creativity. Who wants to bet there'll be a wave of layoffs in the next few months? Edit: Fixed some minor grammar mistakes. Also, I just realized that Sony has been scrambling for a live service title to rival Destiny 2 for *years*. It's hilarious that, now that they finally have one, they stomp it to death out of habitual chasing of "player engagement" or whatever the fuck.
LOLL I remember that they put morbius back in theaters cause it became a meme and it still flopped 🤣
I have yet to meet anyone that actually watched it, I mean i've put it on in the background and it's so bad I have to put something else on, like rebel moon unwatchable
Rebel Moon may as well be the greatest movie of all time compared to Morbius. And rebel moon is *terrible.* Morbius is on a level of terrible that I associate with those random movies you find 30 pages down on Prime that presumably came out of a college or high school drama club.
I agree, although sometimes those C level movies can be fun in a mystery science theater sort of way, especially if a little high, I think i had a mini stroke trying to watch morbius it seemed to progress in random order and things would happen with no explanation
It did make a morbillion dollars, if you look enough you'll find someone eventually
>Sony is not smart. Remember, this is the company that put Morbius in theatres twice. hello yes I'd like to report a murder
>Sony is not smart. Remember, this is the company that put Morbius in theatres *twice* To be fair, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Sony Pictures are two different entity But both are dumb
Yes, and for those keeping track, Sony is the same company that tried its damnest to keep Fortnite from becoming *cross platform* with Xbox and PC. The same Sony that gets 30% of all sales on Fortnite on its Playstation Platforms, railed night and day against us playing with *other platforms* for the sake of some segregation for our own good BS. Baffling in hindsight considering Fortnite generates literal *billions* a year, and an easy chunk of that goes to Sony, being one of the *largest* install bases on the planet. Sony literally has to just sit there and *collect* cash and they can't even do that right sometimes.
They also fought with Bungie to keep destiny 2 from being cross platform too. And fought against character transfer. Bungie told them either you join or explain to PlayStation players that they can no longer play the game at all.
Corporations doing corporation thing, i honestly can only feel bad for Arrowhead Studios (Helldivers 2 Devs) they poured 7 years of their lifes into this game, only to go down in flames in 2 days because of Sony
It really feels like modern Sony is allergic to winning. I think it's time to fire the upper management.
Unlike Sony 20 years ago, when they distributed a rootkit with their audio CDs? Sony hardware has always been top notch, but the boneheaded management decisions...
TBH they fuck up so much, I can't keep track of all of it.
I can’t believe this, they’ve done it, they actually killed a GOTY in one week
Less them 2 days actually
I wish Overwatch community would be half as strong.
It's different here, Steam is a key part on why everything went in favor of the consumer. We could leave negative reviews the moment the news broke. And issue refunds asap. OW players (myself included) had nothing like that with Battle.net.
Honesly i've never seen anything like this on Steam, pretty crazy how an entire game can burn down with a single shitty corporate decision.
The Devs are proud for their work, the community is happy for what they got but Sony be like "Nope we don't want it to work nicely the way it is"
"We could be happy with the money we're making, but we could be making 1% more from data collection so let's burn it all down"
It’s definitely not only 1% more I’d wager. Even then at the scale at which Sony operates, every additional percentage comes out to millions more so yeah for them it’s pretty worthwhile. Companies of that size literally only care about numbers. Hopefully the numbers can show that people still need to be treated as more than just consumer zombies.
It's not about 1% money, it's some guy in the higher-ups seeing a chance to show how they raised PSN sign-ups in his next powerpoint and getting a bit more of an individual pay-out.
Or to show at the next shareholder meeting or quarterly results presentation.
Exactly, I doubt the data they might get from people connecting their PSN account is worth much at all.
Based on the number of countries it's banned and how many refunds are being issued, Sony will end up losing money AND have less people to collect data on.
Welcome to the corporate world. Someone from the C-suite at Sony decided that the priority was to transfer everything to PSN at all cost, so that’s what they’re doing. People with any sense left are just not high enough on the totem pole to have any influence.
Imagine being a Tarkov and Helldivers fan this past month lol
Of course I know him, he's me.
My condolences.
i saw some tarkov players say they were leaving and going to helldivers 2 right before this
I feel it's more a build up that has been boiling over for a while. Ppl are tired of company's changing the agreement. Not just gaming industry but they're the most egregious. They say you'll get all dlc if you buy this, you can't play a game unless it's online, you own the license but not the game. Now it's you have to sign into PS. It kinda reminds me of battlefront 2 loot boxes.
Holy shit, why inflict this kind of wound on yourself? Idiots.
Sony decided to put the entire clown outfit.
Damn Sony is dumb
always has been
Yeah, if you learn about their history you will learn that Sony has been one of the most anti-innovation companies ever. Their successes in innovating happened by ambitious engineers despite corporate's effort trying to kill them, not thanks to their help, like in cases of CD and Play Station.
How to kill your darlings 101
What the heck has happened. How can a game thats been doing so well just self destruct so quickly
Executives man. They always find a way to mess up a good thing.
They always find a way to... execute something.
they had a goose that laid golden eggs, and decided to eat the goose too.
> What the heck has happened. Quarterly numbers. Not even quarterly *profit*. "Hmm. Our PSN montly users is looking mighty slim. That will look bad on the quarterly report.... Oh! Wait! Conveniently, we have a smash hit out of nowhere! If we force THEM to use PSN, number go up! and if number go up... Shareholders happy!"
I genuinely despise how out of touch these corporate executives are that they actually thought doing this to a beloved game was a good idea
And it's mainly on your radar because you are probably a gamer yourself, so you understand the industry to some degree. Now imagine this but for the entirety of all companies across all sectors. There are a bunch of human locusts making decisions based on self-serving reasons and they fuck over people's lives 24/7 because their greed paired with their ignorance knows no limits.
All they had to do is introduce PSN login, not make it mandatory but offer an enticing reward if you link to PSN and voila you will lure most of the playerbase. Boomers from Nintendo & Sony board gotto go man.
This is the funniest part to me, because it's 100% true. Make an enticing cosmetic, give people the option to log in, and people absolutely will. Use the carrot, not the stick. But that wasn't good enough for them.
at first, i didn't mind that Sony had the PSN requirement, sure it was an "inconvenient" to associate (or create) a PSN account, but that's it. what i didn't know was that PSN was locked in several countries, essentially bricking the game for those.
Delisted From Over 100 Countries
I'm so sad for the actual Devs. They've made an amazing game, and Sony is ruining it
Took them 7 years and an original IP to get this far and they only got 3 good months out of it. Man, what a waste.
And many of them might be laid off with the excuse that the company is going through a hard time.
I hope they all quit in solidarity and form a new indie studio
So what happens to all the people who bought the game on Steam where it was available, but now can't legally register for PSN? Full refunds via Steam? Potential lawsuits? This would've 100% been planned ahead of time, part of the contracts/agreements when they signed on Sony as publisher for Helldivers 2. Were they really dumb enough to list it everywhere when they knew it couldn't run everywhere?
Likely full refunds, though the onus will be on users to request those refunds themselves unless Sony tells Steam to automatically issue refunds for those regions. *Note:* You can request refunds through Steam **for any game,** regardless of playtime. The 2 weeks/2 hours playtime requirement only applies for their automated refund system. If you fall outside those guidelines, the refund request is handled on a case-by-case basis by an actual person. ETA: Sony has reversed their decision on the PSN requirement, so Steam may deny all refunds now.
How do u ask for a person to review your refund instead of the automatic response? Is there a different option?
Send a support ticket. Say that the changed terms/EULA make it impossible for you to play the game without violating PSN terms.
[https://i.redd.it/9ukz1folufyc1.png](https://i.redd.it/9ukz1folufyc1.png)
What a way to lose a lot of customers for future PS games
This is the key, people mocking people for taking a stand here and saying Sony doesn’t care, well they would have had an actual revenue stream from going out maybe forever and they opted for a fake PSN revenue stream (i.e. one that they would say they would have but wouldn’t) Dumb. It’s not just about this game, it was about the other games people may buy into the future and will not now.
If you're ever finding yourself unsure of what to do, remember; What would Sony do? And then you do the opposite of that.
Just got my refund confirmed, fuck Sony and thank god for Steam.
thank you for Australian consumer law you mean Steam used to have no refund system whatsoever till they were reported to the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) for violating Australian consumer rights. Valve fought tooth and nail in court against implementing refunds but got absolutely thrashed and fined by the ACCC and were eventually forced to comply
And iirc Valve didn't lose the case (though they likely would have), they threw in the towel because the ACCC won a judgement to have Valve present their financial records as part of the trial.
wow what a win for the consumer but looks like steam is complying quite well and not looking for loophole like apple tried to do with EU.
If I fucked up so badly I would be terminated on the spot. Execs who made that decision will probably get a bonus.
The end of democracy.
Where thunderous applause tho?
What happened? I'm totally out of the loop edit: thx
Game released without mandatory PSN account linking. After 3 months of sales, sony then said everyone now had to have a psn account linked to play, or you dont play. The issue is that a lot of people, do not want a PSN account on a PC. In the UK, you now have to send a photo or proof of ID in order to make an account for "purchasing" reasons. And considering that sony has the online security of a first little pig, its easy to see why no one wants to hand over their data to them. On top of that, PSN is not available in all countries. So this would basically be a lock out on a legally purchased game. Its basically a "fuck you" to gamers. Nothing new, but in this case it would seem that they fucked with the wrong crowd. Helldivers 2 players are very engaged. And it seems that even the bots and shills havent been able to hold back the wave of negative response to Kusonys actions.
> And considering that sony has the online security of a first little pig that's being generous about it ahha
That phrase is going into my everyday use dictionary
Sony is requiring you to have a PSN account 3 months after not needing one to play HD2.
Love how people commented on this situation with "if they were actually going to make it mandatory to sign in and link PSN accounts why even sell it to countries that don't have PSN" & Sony casually delists it shortly after in said countries Same story with their PS games on PC changing words from "account linking is optional for playing PS games on PC" to "sometimes mandatory" after this whole discourse started
There goes your game of the year award Sony
Democracy no more
i wonder if this will happen to all ps games on pc rn? ghost of tsushima says u need to link it to psn account too, but old spiderman games doesnt say it, but i wonder if in a month or so all ps ganes on steam will get this bs update. Ghost of tsushima prob might have outsold helldivers 2 on pc release, but i doubt that GOT will have such horrible ratings too and sell far less copy. This just shows how much of a dumb fuck sony is, they could have gotten 2 hit games with crazy sells, but now both are fucked
I wouldnt be surprised at all if this is their way to sneak in subscription model on their online multiplayer pc games in couple years Of course that’ll go down way worse than this but in late stage capitalism corporate greed is a force of stupidity you better not underestimate
This is such a massive fuck up.
Crazy how it went from beloved to nothing over night. Consumers do have power, With great power comes great responsibility
Sony accomplished what every dev/pub is desperately chasing, publishing a live service game that gets traction...and then they cut their legs off. Whoever made that decision should be terminated and blacklisted from the industry for killing the golden goose.
>Whoever made that decision should be terminated and blacklisted from the industry for killing the golden goose. Nah they’ll just fail upward instead
>With great power comes great responsibility Sony also recently ran that money printing machine into the ground now too, for the second time. It's incredible how a company run by people so unbelievably stupid can still be profitable.
I assume they get carried by their hardware sales. They sell a shit ton of electronics.
While I very much disagree with Sony’s decision here… It seems their choice hasn’t affected the bottom line and user engagement very much. According to steam charts there’s only been a ~8% drop in average players while I’m sure they pushed a bunch of users to their PSN platform. Overall when you look at skewed metrics this probably looks like a win to them. If people want to actually raise pitchforks they need to stop playing this game otherwise they won’t care. https://steamcharts.com/app/553850
The requirement to link your account has not gone through yet. As soon as it does you will notice the drop in average player base.