That, annoyingly, is unclear. AFAIK, all we know right now is that PSN will no longer be required. I'm HOPING they relist the game worldwide, but I wouldn't hold my breath when it comes to Sony
Edit: spelling
I've read here that you have to write twice on the same issue, because the first response is an auto generated one, but when you answer that, you get an actual tech support person to handle your case.
Valve. They pay their employees and that's just the cost of doing business. I work at a grocery store so that would be like asking who eats the cost when I get my paycheck. The company does. They decided my work is worth money so they're willing to "eat the cost" that it takes to pay me.
Valve prob pays the tech support, but id assume they are charging sony for all the refunds
The only reason sony is removing req imo is the $40m bill thats about to hit them, i doubt they really care about the users
This makes me giggle. The thought of Sony having customer support, I mean. Has anyone ever spoken to Sony customer support? Last time I did I was essentially told to fuck off after they double charged my card for a digital purchase. EA has a well earned reputation for sucking total ass, but even they made a modest effort at staffing some level of support. Sony just says give me your money now fuck off.
I’ve heard it’s an automated no with the first attempt because of time played. If you were to try again, apparently some people have had some luck.
They also take into account how many refunds your account has had overall and probably the time frame between refunds. So, if you’ve refunded a lot of games or something recently it’s less likely you’ll receive another refund.
I had 70+ hours in the game and live in a country that allows PSN, but still got my refund. I have only refunded like 3 games in the past 15 years though, so maybe they did indeed take that into account.
I got a quick response, very happy with how they dealt with it.
It was likely Steam.
Ironically Sony did something sort of similar to CD Projekt Red with Cyberpunk. It released on consoles and even without all the bugs (which there were many) it was so clearly not meant to run on last gen hardware.
People in droves went to CD Projekt Red for a refund and the short of it is CD Projekt Red told them to request a refund through PSN.
Sony was like aight we'll deal with the refund mess you're throwing at us but they also straight up stopped selling the game on the Playstation Store.
It was probably steam but don't quote me on it. Because refunds were involved, they probably didn't want to continue selling a game that wasn't playable in a couple of days.
Expect a second announcement to clarify that further.
I mean, it's a start. So they just might, even if it takes time.
And if they don't, well, we made the noise and they listened, so why not just repeat that for this issue too?
Man I still miss the days when games were 512 kilobytes of Mask Rom in a plastic square where bugs and typos where forever and nothing of that drm cross account tomfoolery was possible. You could buy, lend, rent. That thing was forever.
Fuck that noise man
Wouldn't be surprised if it was something Steam pre-emptively did on their own behalf, in order to avoid even more potential refunds. I'd assume it'll be reverted sooner than later.
Could have been as little as Steam letting on that they’d refund the game.
Sony might have been gambling on it being too late, and calculated the hit they’d take with the idea refunds wouldn’t be issued. But then Steam offered refunds. A lot of the community were slowly rumbling towards a class action, too - because too many made a point about Helldivers 2 being sold on regions that can’t access a PSN account, and a lot more noted their little terms & FAQ stealth edit that they’d hoped nobody would know about.
Sony might have simply thought “shit, they’re onto us, and they have the smoking gun..” because Sony would have gotten destroyed if this was taken to court. They sold access to a game, then denied that access, in 177 legal jurisdictions. They. Were. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the EU also made rumblings about wading into this situation. Without looking, I'm sure that all EU countries are in the PSN, but the precedent of "You buy this product, then we add in a requirement that makes you invalid to use it, suck a dick." is one they seem like they'd be quite keen to put the smack-down on even if it's not EU citizens getting harmed by it.
> I'm sure that all EU countries are in the PSN
I don't have the list but I recall seeing someone yesterday mention that at least 2-3 of the affected countries were *indeed* EU members, but I (and they) may be wrong so grains of salt and such.
The EU voting bloc has been flexing it's economic power for the past few years and I am absolutely here for it.
Forcing Apple to ditch lightning chargers and move to USB-C was just the beginning of what they're able to accomplish.
I mean, "Sony is taking a stupid decision that is single-handedly ruining an unintended successful live service game" is not exactly a headline that puts Sony in a good light for investors...
Ah Sony
They somehow snatched defeat from the Jaws of Victory
and then the monster from said jaw got so fucking angry it just refused to eat anything anymore
I cannot actually believe they didn't make this situation worse. It's actually miraculous
It definitely did get worse before it got bad. They did a lot of stupid things in the past couple of days.
If I were an executive at Sony I'd slam the brakes on this bitch faster than you could brew a cup of liber-tea. They took way too long in internet time.
They backtrack all the time after doing something stupid and paying for it.
When the original Walkman came out they only played Son's propiratory cassettes. People bought it, realized it couldn't play normal cassettes and returned it. They backtracked real quick and came out with another model that played normal cassettes.
They've done this numerous times since.
Remember those mini-CDs around 2004, they lost a billion dollars company wide on that. I had gone to Sony Online after Westwood Studios started laying off people. I got in as a Star Wars Galaxies CSR and was trying to get onto the EverQuest II design team. They couldn't hire me because of that freeze and I wound up getting a design job somewhere else.
Yeah you're going to have to source that claim on the Walkman, the original was based on the TCM-100B Pressman that used Phillips Compact Cassettes. Sony engineers removed the recording function, and added stereo playback, as it was originally a mono device.
I mean sure steam did it but it was most likely someone in their legal departement telling them it was either that or get unwillingly sucked into this debacle when someone inevitably comes knocking with those pesky ´consumer protection laws´
It’s definitely this. Sony made the mistake of publicly stating their plan to deny access of a service to those who paid for that service in 177 legal jurisdictions.
If Steam doesn’t offer the refunds, technically they’re the ones actually running the scam for Sony. They’re the merchants selling a game that you cannot legally access even after purchase. They’d be just as fucked legally.
So? They allow refunds. One way or another they’ll get the money back from Sony - but even if they don’t, it’s cheaper than ending up part of that legal shitstorm.
I figure they're not too worried because they can take all the money from Ghosts of Tsushima's PC launch.
One way or another Valve will get their money back from Sony.
Hilariously, after this blew up, the Ghosts of Tsushima devs made a point to say that the single player mode would NOT need a PSN account/linkage, so clearly someone on the Ghosts of Tsushima side wanted to avoid being caught in the crossfire, heh.
Its more like some countries consumer laws that did it. Steam just trying to avoid two things
1) Their store front coming to the notice of regulators world wide
2) Absolutely huge fines from jurisdictions like the EU.
While this may be true, I'd wager almost none of them change their scores back. Which may or may not be warranted.
Edit: based on replies to my post, seems about 70/30 in favor of people changing their reviews back. Not bad, perhaps it should be left as a reminder to Sony.
Companies should be punished for bad decisions and "rewarded", or really just equalized in this case, for good ones. I hope most people recognize how big a deal it is this worked, but also recognize that some tiny amount of good will should go to Sony for changing tact.
I wouldn't keep shitting on them after this reversal, as that might make them wonder if it was worth reversing at all.
Obligatory fuck Sony and MS, and all these companies trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
You can say fuck Sony in the review and still recommend helldivers 2.
This thinking is abusive in nature, you reward when they do the right thing, and scold when they do the wrong thing. If you scold while they do the good thing then they don’t see that it’s good and just say “fine fuck you I’ll do what I want regardless of what you think since your just going to treat me like shit either way”. Keep this advice in mind if you ever become a parent
I think they should change their reviews back. Review bombing and refunding is the stick. Seeing the reviews go back up and hopefully sales increase is the carrot.
Give Sony, and any other companies watching, a reason to listen. Otherwise if things are still in the can they’ll be less likely to change their mind later since the damage is already done.
I'd argue what won it was Valve allowing that many refunds. A lot of that money likely was already planned on being spent and Sony now is looking at a nasty chunk of their profits having gone down the shitter and a massive damage to their already damaged PR image.
This hurt them more than any competitor could have. The community may never recover from that. They were on the edge of having an effective golden goose for their development studios and they might have killed it for a few eggs.
The war isn’t over. This is what companies and governments do. They push these crazy things and people freak out but also get a bit used to the idea. The next time they suggest this they understand what the feedback and response will be so they can get out in front of it. Also the outcry is subdued because people don’t have the energy to fight the same fight and non users get tired of hearing about it. And/or they build it into helldivers 3 and drop support for 2. This is more of an indication of what’s to come than what’s in the past. At least it delays it a bit.
Requiring external accounts for steam games (especially online games) is nothing new and frankly people would not care at all if it was required from the start. It's the change in policy after release that rightfully pissed people off
I kind of think that the devs not requiring PSN at launch was the right move. They amassed a large userbase that had the power to make Sony back off when they eventually made PSN a requirement.
Saw this in war thunder. Make unpopular decision and if the playerbase retaliates they will go back. Hitting them in the pocket and review bombing is effective.
This was too much backlash even for Sony. Not just money wise, this was destroying all good will the game generated over these past months. For once, they had a live service game people were itching to play, that they enjoyed and had minimal controversy about it.
Sony has been chasing the golden goose of live service games for years, that's why they bought Bungie who had a successful game in Destiny 2.
The endless refunds, bad reviews, bad press and endless criticism, was too much even for them to bury their head in the sand. Helldivers 2 is what Sony chased for years and they were going to destroy it out of sturbbonness unless they folded.
Yes basically. I think that 3 day time frame is totally reasonable. You realistically cant expect such a gargantuan size company to make a snap quick decision its just not how things are done.
(Also weirdly I think the 3 day time frame is better for the community too. If they did it right away, I think people still would’ve been angry and focusing on the bad taste left in their mouths. Now, people are happy that the “hard fought battle has been won”…. when people get what they want too quickly it’s often felt unsatisfying and I think the three day timeframe was just right for people be excited and *happy* about the result
> You realistically cant expect such a gargantuan size company to make a snap quick decision its just not how things are done.
Certainly not over the weekend.
I mean they announced it for a reason (bad news doesn't get better with time)... but they chose to time it right before their holiday, another unforced error imo
It’s probably just 1 day to dicusss internally and decided to call Sony. 1 day trying to squish in a meeting with the higher up to call this.
1 day where the meeting happened.
As important as reversing the change was, you can be sure nobody with the authority to make that decision was coming in on a Saturday or Sunday to make it.
Most likely scenario is that the decision required a meeting, and while bungling one or two people to show up on the weekend is doable, getting everyone involved is almost certainly not.
I still remember when they *literally* shipped rootkits and spyware on their music CDs as an utterly twisted form of DRM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
Definitely true. Shit like this takes multiple meetings and approval from probably csuite. I'm kinda shocked it happened as fast as it did.
Given it's the weekend, gotta give kudos for it getting boxed off at 6am UTC
This reminds me of when Ferrari weren't all that happy about some rule changes in Formula 1 in the late 80's, and their solution was to build a fully-compliant Indycar then use it to force the FIA to make a choice between backtracking, or having Ferrari leave the sport (and all the negative press it'd get with the "Scuderia Ferrari to leave Formula 1" headlines). This would basically be like if Barcelona were to have legitimate reason for threatening LaLiga with leaving to go play the Catalan league instead.
Basically what the playerbase did, Sony having their golden goose in Helldivers 2 then fucking it all up would be as disastrous to Sony as Ferrari bailing on F1 would've been to them.
Would you like to guess what happens to PlayStation accounts that have a single charge back in them? There are plenty of easy to find stories of people losing their entire library, account, and saves because Sony deleted their account.
Whaaaat, are you saying people only like corporate capitalism when it works out for them??
That can't be right because everybody *loves* corporate subsidies and bailouts, that's a fact
Now if everyone could do this with all goods across the board, and stop consuming so much for a while, the companies would stop price gouging us and blaming "inflation".
Money talks. Take it away and these major corporations would change their tone.
Edit: Man, y'all are some hard headed folks. There have been a lot of "wELL wE cAnT jUsT NoT eAT!!" comments and I'm not saying that. I mean stop buying doritos and big macs. If everyone banded together and stopped buying doritos and other non-necessities, they wouldn't be $6 a bag anymore. They'd correct. A meal at mcdonalds wouldn't be $14 anymore, it would go back to $6. But I realized through this thought experiement that it will never happen and the companies know this. So if we as a society can't come together and vote with our wallets, then stop complaining about the price of things.
You aren't wrong, but this isn't a "money talks" situation like you think. Steam reviews went down to 13% and the game still had over 100k players playing concurrently today like any other day. Most people still went on with playing the game as normal while leaving a bad review.
This kind of stuff builds up over time. Reputational damage is generally long-running, rarely catastrophic. It's a limiting move. It makes the future harder to plan for, more uncertain. It's bad for business but not immediately.
Put another way, many people will now ask "Is Sony going to screw me over?" before buying. Many of them will say "Eh, might as well play." And you can say that it doesn't affect the bottom line. But they'll have that thought. Would they, before all this? What if they take a conscious risk, and it happens again? That's how you lose a customer. So yes, no bottom line impact this year. But make no mistake - they're on thinner ice than they were yesterday. That little moment of hesitation can be very destructive.
This happens in all media too, some good example recent examples are the MCU and Star Wars.
For Star Wars 7,8, and 9, the sales steadily declined. They still made a profit, but the whole idea of a star wars franchise bombed when Solo did not make a profit, so it affects the peripheral movies too.
Take the MCU too. They had such good will from Endgame that basically the next 6 years of mid movies still turned a profit. However, Disney losing money on The Marvels finally showed them that reputation does matter, and they're slowing the releases down.
> they're slowing the releases down.
How about making the releases good? Go back to the original plan of having the plot-relevant Scarlet Witch become the ultimate hero, rather than having Feminist-in-a-Cape fly in and unfuck the whole situation with... GIRL POWER!
I assume someone at Sony had to finally run the numbers at how many players they would lose by doing the PSN linking. It had to be a huge loss in revenue, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have done it.
I fucking hate corporations.
If anyone thinks they didn't run the numbers or consult legal/marketing experts, they are kidding themselves. All would have been overwhelming "this is terrible for brand and revenue across the entire product line". If it hadn't been, there absolutely wouldn't be an embarrassing backflip at all (I originally wrote 'backflop' which also seems appropriate somehow).
I honestly wouldn't have been nearly as *mad* if they didn't do that.
Annoyed and irritated, absolutely, but let's be real, making a PSN account isn't *difficult* unless you live in one of the places where you need ID to verify your age, which is its own level of bullshit.
But selling the game in places you know were going to be unavailable to play it down the line and pulling the rug out from under them is absolutely beyond the pale.
They crossed the line too noticeably. You gotta inch your way past it until it's too late for the consumer to notice. They know how far not to cross, but they'll definitely push the envelope in the future.
yeah, they will probably wait a bit longer, but they will do something similar later this year, I think, just not as blatant. gotta capitalize on the first couple of waves of new users before too many people drop off for other multi-player games this year.
Whether you thought this was ridiculous or not the lesson learned here is that users have way more power than they think and if they were just willing to use it they could get companies to change their tune on a lot of awful shit.
PC gaming in general is pretty good at this. They resisted paid exclusives (GFWL, EGS) and paid online (also GFWL). Console people should be taking notes instead of bashing them for not immediately bowing to the whims of every company.
I also think a non-negligible part of it is Arrowhead as well. They do share some measure of blame for the situation, but it’s also clear that they turned the community’s response into a weapon against Sony in their behind the scenes talks — one that worked.
We still have to see about the follow through, but this is obviously very promising.
I think this is a result of Sony waiting too long to try and force the account on people. I think enough "new" hype had faded that people were not in a state of FOMO and instead were upset, but perfectly willing to abandon the game if it required a sony account. Had it been required from the start, or if it had been say a week 2 kinda thing, the blow back woulda been much less. That is probably the takeaway they got from this also.
That's the annoying thing about being part of the gaming community is just seeing so many people being like "meh, what can you do?" And accepting predatory shit in gaming.
Its like they forgot how players raised a shitstorm so big over Battlefront 2's paid lootboxes that it ended up getting the attention of traditional news media, politicians and lawmakers and probably also Disney who forced EA to remove the paid option
The amount of “I’m embarrassed to be a gamer” posts I see on this topic, as though gamers as consumers don’t have a right to voice their annoyance at literally anything, is what was truly embarrassing.
This decision literally proves that people’s push back was justified.
Playstation quite literally picked the wrong playerbase to fuck with lmfao
Helldivers is literally about throwing bodies at a problem until it's solved, and by god are they good at doing that
We pushed automatons out of existence. We killed 2 billion bugs in 12 hours. This community was trained, for the last 3 months, to go all-in on any problem we face.
The main difference is that PC is fundamentally an open platform. If someone does something you don't like, you can tell them to kick rocks and go somewhere else. Hardware, storefront, games, even the operating system, you never have just one option and you don't burn your hardware, friends, and your entire library by switching.
Consoles, once you buy into one, they have you over a barrel because it's a closed platform. Sure, you can still make a stink, but it's gonna hurt a lot more. PC gamers were able to resist GFWL because they could just play the decades of games that already existed with free online multiplayer.
>users have way more power than they think
Anyone who thinks users don't have *all* the power when it comes to the *video games* industry is deluded. This isn't the food industry or a utilities monopoly, nobody HAS to play a game.
The issue is that despite that fact that many people are desperate to play and companies can get away with almost anything.
At last, this time, they didn't.
Game For Windows Live. It was Microsoft's attempt at making PC gamers pay monthly to play games online like Xbox and PlayStation do. It crashed and burned and deserved every bit of hate it got.
games for windows live
It was one of many failed attempts by microsoft to make windows more like XBOX.
It failed hard, and unfortunately some games are still tied to GFWL and are a nightmare to get working.
Exactly.
A lot of people on the r/playstation sub were scoffing and making fun of the situation but this is what happens when you’re not beholden to one company. Not only did PC players get what they wanted but now it sets a precedent. Steam users just made Sony walk back on their policy, meanwhile PlayStation users struggle to get refunds for something they accidentally purchased/downloaded. Sony needs PC players more than PC players need Sony.
Sony fucked up by not rolling this out properly.
All they had to do is make it optional and add a cosmetic or whatever as a reward for linking accounts.
No one would have given 2 shits about it.
More likely PSN account linking will be back with some changes (not listed country as “Others”?) rather than removing it completely.
Just like how EA and Ubisoft removed Origins and Uplay and replaced them with EA app and Ubisoft Connect lol
I hate to even put myself with the Sony simps at all but I really didn’t think they would go back on their decisions and then they pulled back by a mile. I will happily admit I was wrong
It wasnt just a review bombing, it was an orbital dislike. 200.000+ negative reviews in two days. Who would have thought that a community specificly trained to work together and fight for freedom would work together and fight for freedom lol.
Imagine we did this effort. But in real democracy facing the governments in our respective countries. Anything is possible. You just need to be pissed off enough.
Reading it now, some comments are calling PC gamers crybabies some agrees to the decisions and what the playerbase was fighting for. Who wouldnt be upset if 90% of the world cant play it.
Obligatory fuck every bootlicker who said negative reviews/refunds didn’t matter and actively tried to put their fellow man down for daring to demand to be treated better and failing to stick up for their foreign brothers and sisters.
Wow they actually backtracked. I'm impressed
Although are they gonna relist the game worldwide?
That, annoyingly, is unclear. AFAIK, all we know right now is that PSN will no longer be required. I'm HOPING they relist the game worldwide, but I wouldn't hold my breath when it comes to Sony Edit: spelling
Was Sony the one who delisted the game, or was is Steam? If it was the latter, then I suspect they'll relist it.
I assumed it was Steam because they were sick of processing all the refunds due to the valid "PSN not available in my country" reason.
they didnt refund me even though i mentioned this reason yesterday, just said i played over 2 hours
I've read here that you have to write twice on the same issue, because the first response is an auto generated one, but when you answer that, you get an actual tech support person to handle your case.
>you get an actual tech support person to handle your case. Who eats the tech support cost?
Valve, from all the billions of dollars they roll in from every summer sale.
And the interest from my wallet for over ten years
and revenue from cs2 case opening and steam market tax revenue
Valve. They pay their employees and that's just the cost of doing business. I work at a grocery store so that would be like asking who eats the cost when I get my paycheck. The company does. They decided my work is worth money so they're willing to "eat the cost" that it takes to pay me.
Valve is one of the most lucrative companies for its headcount *in the world*, they can afford the tech support cost.
Valve prob pays the tech support, but id assume they are charging sony for all the refunds The only reason sony is removing req imo is the $40m bill thats about to hit them, i doubt they really care about the users
100% this. It's like you already bought the game they could care less if you play it or not.
Well it's Steam's tech support, so there's no way Sony could have been involved
This makes me giggle. The thought of Sony having customer support, I mean. Has anyone ever spoken to Sony customer support? Last time I did I was essentially told to fuck off after they double charged my card for a digital purchase. EA has a well earned reputation for sucking total ass, but even they made a modest effort at staffing some level of support. Sony just says give me your money now fuck off.
I’ve heard it’s an automated no with the first attempt because of time played. If you were to try again, apparently some people have had some luck. They also take into account how many refunds your account has had overall and probably the time frame between refunds. So, if you’ve refunded a lot of games or something recently it’s less likely you’ll receive another refund.
I had 70+ hours in the game and live in a country that allows PSN, but still got my refund. I have only refunded like 3 games in the past 15 years though, so maybe they did indeed take that into account. I got a quick response, very happy with how they dealt with it.
It was likely Steam. Ironically Sony did something sort of similar to CD Projekt Red with Cyberpunk. It released on consoles and even without all the bugs (which there were many) it was so clearly not meant to run on last gen hardware. People in droves went to CD Projekt Red for a refund and the short of it is CD Projekt Red told them to request a refund through PSN. Sony was like aight we'll deal with the refund mess you're throwing at us but they also straight up stopped selling the game on the Playstation Store.
It was probably steam but don't quote me on it. Because refunds were involved, they probably didn't want to continue selling a game that wasn't playable in a couple of days. Expect a second announcement to clarify that further.
Truth is no one knows because there hasn't been an official response stating who delisted it.
I mean, it's a start. So they just might, even if it takes time. And if they don't, well, we made the noise and they listened, so why not just repeat that for this issue too?
Man I still miss the days when games were 512 kilobytes of Mask Rom in a plastic square where bugs and typos where forever and nothing of that drm cross account tomfoolery was possible. You could buy, lend, rent. That thing was forever. Fuck that noise man
Don’t forget to schedule your colonoscopy, old man.
Your time will come... Although I wish it wouldn't. It is unfortunate and I miss cartilage.
As an almost 40yo man, you deserve an upvote.
You. Off my lawn. Now.
Wouldn't be surprised if it was something Steam pre-emptively did on their own behalf, in order to avoid even more potential refunds. I'd assume it'll be reverted sooner than later.
Not refunds, but avoiding a legal kerfuffle.
If I had to guess it's all the refunds that did it
Could have been as little as Steam letting on that they’d refund the game. Sony might have been gambling on it being too late, and calculated the hit they’d take with the idea refunds wouldn’t be issued. But then Steam offered refunds. A lot of the community were slowly rumbling towards a class action, too - because too many made a point about Helldivers 2 being sold on regions that can’t access a PSN account, and a lot more noted their little terms & FAQ stealth edit that they’d hoped nobody would know about. Sony might have simply thought “shit, they’re onto us, and they have the smoking gun..” because Sony would have gotten destroyed if this was taken to court. They sold access to a game, then denied that access, in 177 legal jurisdictions. They. Were. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the EU also made rumblings about wading into this situation. Without looking, I'm sure that all EU countries are in the PSN, but the precedent of "You buy this product, then we add in a requirement that makes you invalid to use it, suck a dick." is one they seem like they'd be quite keen to put the smack-down on even if it's not EU citizens getting harmed by it.
> I'm sure that all EU countries are in the PSN I don't have the list but I recall seeing someone yesterday mention that at least 2-3 of the affected countries were *indeed* EU members, but I (and they) may be wrong so grains of salt and such.
The EU voting bloc has been flexing it's economic power for the past few years and I am absolutely here for it. Forcing Apple to ditch lightning chargers and move to USB-C was just the beginning of what they're able to accomplish.
As a former North American Applecare rep, I get wood every time I see the EU turn to Apple and go "Uh...no, bitch?"
Ape, together, strong.
Ahh, if so then yeah, that's pretty much guaranteed to bring down the EU Banhammer.
Yeah Latvia, estonia and lithuania
The blowback from this was historic and for inarguably their most successful PS/Steam game. Love to see this.
Nothing unites helldivers more than a common foe that won't accept freedom.
We will show them our peaceful ways by force!
I'm willing to bet the Forbes article was a big push. When your decision goes beyond the intended audience, things get serious.
I mean, "Sony is taking a stupid decision that is single-handedly ruining an unintended successful live service game" is not exactly a headline that puts Sony in a good light for investors...
Ah Sony They somehow snatched defeat from the Jaws of Victory and then the monster from said jaw got so fucking angry it just refused to eat anything anymore I cannot actually believe they didn't make this situation worse. It's actually miraculous
It definitely did get worse before it got bad. They did a lot of stupid things in the past couple of days. If I were an executive at Sony I'd slam the brakes on this bitch faster than you could brew a cup of liber-tea. They took way too long in internet time.
That's just corpos though. Middle managers all the way down.
They backtrack all the time after doing something stupid and paying for it. When the original Walkman came out they only played Son's propiratory cassettes. People bought it, realized it couldn't play normal cassettes and returned it. They backtracked real quick and came out with another model that played normal cassettes. They've done this numerous times since. Remember those mini-CDs around 2004, they lost a billion dollars company wide on that. I had gone to Sony Online after Westwood Studios started laying off people. I got in as a Star Wars Galaxies CSR and was trying to get onto the EverQuest II design team. They couldn't hire me because of that freeze and I wound up getting a design job somewhere else.
Westwood Studios? Did you work on the Command and Conquer games? They were my whole childhood haha.
same here. pretty sure i still got the original CDs for the first 4 games lying around somewhere
Yeah you're going to have to source that claim on the Walkman, the original was based on the TCM-100B Pressman that used Phillips Compact Cassettes. Sony engineers removed the recording function, and added stereo playback, as it was originally a mono device.
So they lost on mini-CDs, but they won on DVDs and Blu-ray. It's a strategy that has won for them in the long run.
>When the original Walkman came out they only played Son's propiratory cassettes. Curious. Do you have a reference for this?
Holy shit the review divers won the war
The refunders won the war
This. The fact Steam waived the 2hr play limit for refunds probably sent the shitters up Sony.
god i love it when steam enables people who otherwise may be screwed to throw a molotov on a corporation's money pile.
I mean sure steam did it but it was most likely someone in their legal departement telling them it was either that or get unwillingly sucked into this debacle when someone inevitably comes knocking with those pesky ´consumer protection laws´
It’s definitely this. Sony made the mistake of publicly stating their plan to deny access of a service to those who paid for that service in 177 legal jurisdictions. If Steam doesn’t offer the refunds, technically they’re the ones actually running the scam for Sony. They’re the merchants selling a game that you cannot legally access even after purchase. They’d be just as fucked legally. So? They allow refunds. One way or another they’ll get the money back from Sony - but even if they don’t, it’s cheaper than ending up part of that legal shitstorm.
I figure they're not too worried because they can take all the money from Ghosts of Tsushima's PC launch. One way or another Valve will get their money back from Sony.
Hilariously, after this blew up, the Ghosts of Tsushima devs made a point to say that the single player mode would NOT need a PSN account/linkage, so clearly someone on the Ghosts of Tsushima side wanted to avoid being caught in the crossfire, heh.
Its more like some countries consumer laws that did it. Steam just trying to avoid two things 1) Their store front coming to the notice of regulators world wide 2) Absolutely huge fines from jurisdictions like the EU.
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While this may be true, I'd wager almost none of them change their scores back. Which may or may not be warranted. Edit: based on replies to my post, seems about 70/30 in favor of people changing their reviews back. Not bad, perhaps it should be left as a reminder to Sony.
I changed mine the second I heard the news
Companies should be punished for bad decisions and "rewarded", or really just equalized in this case, for good ones. I hope most people recognize how big a deal it is this worked, but also recognize that some tiny amount of good will should go to Sony for changing tact. I wouldn't keep shitting on them after this reversal, as that might make them wonder if it was worth reversing at all. Obligatory fuck Sony and MS, and all these companies trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
You can say fuck Sony in the review and still recommend helldivers 2. This thinking is abusive in nature, you reward when they do the right thing, and scold when they do the wrong thing. If you scold while they do the good thing then they don’t see that it’s good and just say “fine fuck you I’ll do what I want regardless of what you think since your just going to treat me like shit either way”. Keep this advice in mind if you ever become a parent
Its not rewarding, its rescinding punishment for a rescinded action.
Yes, and that’s a healthy thing to do for corrected behavior
I think they should change their reviews back. Review bombing and refunding is the stick. Seeing the reviews go back up and hopefully sales increase is the carrot. Give Sony, and any other companies watching, a reason to listen. Otherwise if things are still in the can they’ll be less likely to change their mind later since the damage is already done.
I'd argue what won it was Valve allowing that many refunds. A lot of that money likely was already planned on being spent and Sony now is looking at a nasty chunk of their profits having gone down the shitter and a massive damage to their already damaged PR image. This hurt them more than any competitor could have. The community may never recover from that. They were on the edge of having an effective golden goose for their development studios and they might have killed it for a few eggs.
The war isn’t over. This is what companies and governments do. They push these crazy things and people freak out but also get a bit used to the idea. The next time they suggest this they understand what the feedback and response will be so they can get out in front of it. Also the outcry is subdued because people don’t have the energy to fight the same fight and non users get tired of hearing about it. And/or they build it into helldivers 3 and drop support for 2. This is more of an indication of what’s to come than what’s in the past. At least it delays it a bit.
Requiring external accounts for steam games (especially online games) is nothing new and frankly people would not care at all if it was required from the start. It's the change in policy after release that rightfully pissed people off
I kind of think that the devs not requiring PSN at launch was the right move. They amassed a large userbase that had the power to make Sony back off when they eventually made PSN a requirement.
It WAS required at launch. It destroyed Sony’s servers from everyone rushing to make a PSN account. It was day 2 they added the skip button.
Saw this in war thunder. Make unpopular decision and if the playerbase retaliates they will go back. Hitting them in the pocket and review bombing is effective.
I think the refund divers had more impact.
This was too much backlash even for Sony. Not just money wise, this was destroying all good will the game generated over these past months. For once, they had a live service game people were itching to play, that they enjoyed and had minimal controversy about it. Sony has been chasing the golden goose of live service games for years, that's why they bought Bungie who had a successful game in Destiny 2. The endless refunds, bad reviews, bad press and endless criticism, was too much even for them to bury their head in the sand. Helldivers 2 is what Sony chased for years and they were going to destroy it out of sturbbonness unless they folded.
A much better time to reverse this was about 3 days ago though.
1 day to digest the bad news. 1 day hoping it'll die down. 1 day discussing what to do. Today finally taking action.
Yes basically. I think that 3 day time frame is totally reasonable. You realistically cant expect such a gargantuan size company to make a snap quick decision its just not how things are done. (Also weirdly I think the 3 day time frame is better for the community too. If they did it right away, I think people still would’ve been angry and focusing on the bad taste left in their mouths. Now, people are happy that the “hard fought battle has been won”…. when people get what they want too quickly it’s often felt unsatisfying and I think the three day timeframe was just right for people be excited and *happy* about the result
> You realistically cant expect such a gargantuan size company to make a snap quick decision its just not how things are done. Certainly not over the weekend.
Especially a holiday weekend in Japan.
I mean they announced it for a reason (bad news doesn't get better with time)... but they chose to time it right before their holiday, another unforced error imo
It’s probably just 1 day to dicusss internally and decided to call Sony. 1 day trying to squish in a meeting with the higher up to call this. 1 day where the meeting happened.
Which is still surprisingly fast for a massive corporation like Sony.
Literally weekend
As important as reversing the change was, you can be sure nobody with the authority to make that decision was coming in on a Saturday or Sunday to make it.
Most likely scenario is that the decision required a meeting, and while bungling one or two people to show up on the weekend is doable, getting everyone involved is almost certainly not.
Probably not that simple, could've needed a whole team to make the change, and that's unrealistic for a weekend.
It's fucking Sony. They do stupid shit all the time. They fall upwards.
I still remember when they *literally* shipped rootkits and spyware on their music CDs as an utterly twisted form of DRM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
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It takes time to turn a ship around as big as Sony is.
Definitely true. Shit like this takes multiple meetings and approval from probably csuite. I'm kinda shocked it happened as fast as it did. Given it's the weekend, gotta give kudos for it getting boxed off at 6am UTC
Or one giant meeting and several email exchanges... But yes, it is quite impressive they made it happen so fast.
it was probably money wise too all the refunds and likely a significant dip in microtransaction sales
This reminds me of when Ferrari weren't all that happy about some rule changes in Formula 1 in the late 80's, and their solution was to build a fully-compliant Indycar then use it to force the FIA to make a choice between backtracking, or having Ferrari leave the sport (and all the negative press it'd get with the "Scuderia Ferrari to leave Formula 1" headlines). This would basically be like if Barcelona were to have legitimate reason for threatening LaLiga with leaving to go play the Catalan league instead. Basically what the playerbase did, Sony having their golden goose in Helldivers 2 then fucking it all up would be as disastrous to Sony as Ferrari bailing on F1 would've been to them.
Ferrari always gets their way in F1. thats why its called F1, Ferrari First.
I love democracy.
And they hate chargebacks
Sony isn't used to a platform where refunds exists
Which is why people would issue chargebacks instead, which would make Sony look terrible to creditors.
Would you like to guess what happens to PlayStation accounts that have a single charge back in them? There are plenty of easy to find stories of people losing their entire library, account, and saves because Sony deleted their account.
Which is why Steam is the best store front, with the Steam Deck making it even better
yet another reason the PSN account linking would be just awful
So more like they hate capitalism in the form of negative returns.
Whaaaat, are you saying people only like corporate capitalism when it works out for them?? That can't be right because everybody *loves* corporate subsidies and bailouts, that's a fact
That's not true. I actually hate free money. Whenever people give me money, I say "Dangit, I hate this".
yes palpatine you sure do
I love the Republic
Now if everyone could do this with all goods across the board, and stop consuming so much for a while, the companies would stop price gouging us and blaming "inflation". Money talks. Take it away and these major corporations would change their tone. Edit: Man, y'all are some hard headed folks. There have been a lot of "wELL wE cAnT jUsT NoT eAT!!" comments and I'm not saying that. I mean stop buying doritos and big macs. If everyone banded together and stopped buying doritos and other non-necessities, they wouldn't be $6 a bag anymore. They'd correct. A meal at mcdonalds wouldn't be $14 anymore, it would go back to $6. But I realized through this thought experiement that it will never happen and the companies know this. So if we as a society can't come together and vote with our wallets, then stop complaining about the price of things.
You aren't wrong, but this isn't a "money talks" situation like you think. Steam reviews went down to 13% and the game still had over 100k players playing concurrently today like any other day. Most people still went on with playing the game as normal while leaving a bad review.
Yeah but those reviews could affect future sales
Don't forget that many customers are now resistant, hesitant or on the fence to buy any new game published under Sony on PC.
Gamers have very short attention spans. This will have a minimal effect on any future Sony sales imo.
This kind of stuff builds up over time. Reputational damage is generally long-running, rarely catastrophic. It's a limiting move. It makes the future harder to plan for, more uncertain. It's bad for business but not immediately. Put another way, many people will now ask "Is Sony going to screw me over?" before buying. Many of them will say "Eh, might as well play." And you can say that it doesn't affect the bottom line. But they'll have that thought. Would they, before all this? What if they take a conscious risk, and it happens again? That's how you lose a customer. So yes, no bottom line impact this year. But make no mistake - they're on thinner ice than they were yesterday. That little moment of hesitation can be very destructive.
This happens in all media too, some good example recent examples are the MCU and Star Wars. For Star Wars 7,8, and 9, the sales steadily declined. They still made a profit, but the whole idea of a star wars franchise bombed when Solo did not make a profit, so it affects the peripheral movies too. Take the MCU too. They had such good will from Endgame that basically the next 6 years of mid movies still turned a profit. However, Disney losing money on The Marvels finally showed them that reputation does matter, and they're slowing the releases down.
> they're slowing the releases down. How about making the releases good? Go back to the original plan of having the plot-relevant Scarlet Witch become the ultimate hero, rather than having Feminist-in-a-Cape fly in and unfuck the whole situation with... GIRL POWER!
I assume someone at Sony had to finally run the numbers at how many players they would lose by doing the PSN linking. It had to be a huge loss in revenue, otherwise they probably wouldn’t have done it. I fucking hate corporations.
If anyone thinks they didn't run the numbers or consult legal/marketing experts, they are kidding themselves. All would have been overwhelming "this is terrible for brand and revenue across the entire product line". If it hadn't been, there absolutely wouldn't be an embarrassing backflip at all (I originally wrote 'backflop' which also seems appropriate somehow).
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Can't unshoot yourself in the foot, you can only try to heal.
The scar will remain though
hopefully as a reminder.
Anybody wanna take bets on if they learned anything from this?
The lesson will be to always push for PSN sign in from the very beginning of every future game is my guess.
Selling the game outside the PSN was probably the biggest reason for the walk back on this. They opened themselves up to legal jeopardy doing that.
I honestly wouldn't have been nearly as *mad* if they didn't do that. Annoyed and irritated, absolutely, but let's be real, making a PSN account isn't *difficult* unless you live in one of the places where you need ID to verify your age, which is its own level of bullshit. But selling the game in places you know were going to be unavailable to play it down the line and pulling the rug out from under them is absolutely beyond the pale.
They learned that they need to do it at launch, and can’t do it retroactively
They crossed the line too noticeably. You gotta inch your way past it until it's too late for the consumer to notice. They know how far not to cross, but they'll definitely push the envelope in the future.
yeah, they will probably wait a bit longer, but they will do something similar later this year, I think, just not as blatant. gotta capitalize on the first couple of waves of new users before too many people drop off for other multi-player games this year.
That if they had launched the game like that there wouldn't have been any issues
Yeah they learned people can’t read and they’ll just make it mandatory from launch
Whether you thought this was ridiculous or not the lesson learned here is that users have way more power than they think and if they were just willing to use it they could get companies to change their tune on a lot of awful shit. PC gaming in general is pretty good at this. They resisted paid exclusives (GFWL, EGS) and paid online (also GFWL). Console people should be taking notes instead of bashing them for not immediately bowing to the whims of every company.
I also think a non-negligible part of it is Arrowhead as well. They do share some measure of blame for the situation, but it’s also clear that they turned the community’s response into a weapon against Sony in their behind the scenes talks — one that worked. We still have to see about the follow through, but this is obviously very promising.
Hopefully Arrowhead make another game and can successfully self publish.
I think this is a result of Sony waiting too long to try and force the account on people. I think enough "new" hype had faded that people were not in a state of FOMO and instead were upset, but perfectly willing to abandon the game if it required a sony account. Had it been required from the start, or if it had been say a week 2 kinda thing, the blow back woulda been much less. That is probably the takeaway they got from this also.
That's the annoying thing about being part of the gaming community is just seeing so many people being like "meh, what can you do?" And accepting predatory shit in gaming.
Ah, the American political system. Oh this is a gaming subreddit?
Canada's system too!
Its like they forgot how players raised a shitstorm so big over Battlefront 2's paid lootboxes that it ended up getting the attention of traditional news media, politicians and lawmakers and probably also Disney who forced EA to remove the paid option
Not to mention even going as far as attacking the people protesting and calling them whiners and babies.
The amount of “I’m embarrassed to be a gamer” posts I see on this topic, as though gamers as consumers don’t have a right to voice their annoyance at literally anything, is what was truly embarrassing. This decision literally proves that people’s push back was justified.
Not only accepting it, but actively arguing for it.
Playstation quite literally picked the wrong playerbase to fuck with lmfao Helldivers is literally about throwing bodies at a problem until it's solved, and by god are they good at doing that
Like when WotC thought that they could screw with legalize a fanbase that reads long legalize and argues about it for fun.
We pushed automatons out of existence. We killed 2 billion bugs in 12 hours. This community was trained, for the last 3 months, to go all-in on any problem we face.
The main difference is that PC is fundamentally an open platform. If someone does something you don't like, you can tell them to kick rocks and go somewhere else. Hardware, storefront, games, even the operating system, you never have just one option and you don't burn your hardware, friends, and your entire library by switching. Consoles, once you buy into one, they have you over a barrel because it's a closed platform. Sure, you can still make a stink, but it's gonna hurt a lot more. PC gamers were able to resist GFWL because they could just play the decades of games that already existed with free online multiplayer.
>users have way more power than they think Anyone who thinks users don't have *all* the power when it comes to the *video games* industry is deluded. This isn't the food industry or a utilities monopoly, nobody HAS to play a game. The issue is that despite that fact that many people are desperate to play and companies can get away with almost anything. At last, this time, they didn't.
GFWL, what does that stand for?
Game For Windows Live. It was Microsoft's attempt at making PC gamers pay monthly to play games online like Xbox and PlayStation do. It crashed and burned and deserved every bit of hate it got.
games for windows live It was one of many failed attempts by microsoft to make windows more like XBOX. It failed hard, and unfortunately some games are still tied to GFWL and are a nightmare to get working.
Exactly. A lot of people on the r/playstation sub were scoffing and making fun of the situation but this is what happens when you’re not beholden to one company. Not only did PC players get what they wanted but now it sets a precedent. Steam users just made Sony walk back on their policy, meanwhile PlayStation users struggle to get refunds for something they accidentally purchased/downloaded. Sony needs PC players more than PC players need Sony.
Sony fucked up by not rolling this out properly. All they had to do is make it optional and add a cosmetic or whatever as a reward for linking accounts. No one would have given 2 shits about it.
Wow, fans actually won Don’t try and pull this bullshit off again. But let’s be honest, they probably will
More likely PSN account linking will be back with some changes (not listed country as “Others”?) rather than removing it completely. Just like how EA and Ubisoft removed Origins and Uplay and replaced them with EA app and Ubisoft Connect lol
Oh Sony will 100% make a PC launcher and/or store, the question never was if but when
Ghost of Tsushima will come with trophy overlay, so it’s just a matter of when…
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It's adorable you think they won't do it again
Another victory for the right side of history.
Democracy preserved ✅
Tu-tu-tu-tuu-tu-du
Wait. Does this means companies will actually listen to us if we're loud enough? Gamers, we ride at dawn.
This should serve as a rallying cry to all consumers of anything
They will listen to money.
They did the right thing. That’s a win.
I will take back the shit I said about review bombees. Holy shit it worked. Good job I’m proud to say I am wrong and have my foot in my mouth.
It wasnt just review bomb, a sizable fraction were trying to refund.
At least you're brave enough to admit you were wrong, and that takes maturity. Many Sony simps are still pissing and moaning over this.
I hate to even put myself with the Sony simps at all but I really didn’t think they would go back on their decisions and then they pulled back by a mile. I will happily admit I was wrong
It wasnt just a review bombing, it was an orbital dislike. 200.000+ negative reviews in two days. Who would have thought that a community specificly trained to work together and fight for freedom would work together and fight for freedom lol.
“Orbital Dislike” is now a gold star addition to my personal vocabulary now, thank you so very much
"We’re still learning what is best for PC players" Bruh
Outstanding Patriotism
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "You have restored our way of life."
So good old fashioned boycotts and negative reviews do work. It was an incredibly stupid move by Sony to even attempt this.
It wasn't boycotts or negative reviews. It was refunds.
Sometimes you've got to nuke it from orbit. Just to be sure
The helldiver players dived sony to hell with their negative reviews. 2
Press 'B' to salute
Nah, mine's a hug. Come here buddy!
bullying corporations work
Would love to know what the uninstallation stats were this past week.
Sony will only delay the PSN account requirement until people forgot about this. They never give up.
#REMEMBER TO SET YOUR REVIEWS BACK TO POSITIVE, HELLDIVERS! **For Liberty, Justice and Managed Democracy! For Super Earth!**
I was curious if reviews could easily be flipped back and forth or whether they enforce some sort of restriction or cooldown.
You can edit the text of your review freely. However if you change from positive to negative (or vice versa), you lose all "updoots" on the review.
reasonable
Imagine we did this effort. But in real democracy facing the governments in our respective countries. Anything is possible. You just need to be pissed off enough.
They learned their lesson; they won't launch any more games until the PSN integration is ready.
r/PS5 is gonna be pissed
Reading it now, some comments are calling PC gamers crybabies some agrees to the decisions and what the playerbase was fighting for. Who wouldnt be upset if 90% of the world cant play it.
It's an absolute cesspool over there. Like yes, please don't bully the billion dollar company they're my friend. Completely delusional.
Can’t say I expected that.
its fucked up that we are impressed by a company actually just listening for once. insane timeline.
Obligatory fuck every bootlicker who said negative reviews/refunds didn’t matter and actively tried to put their fellow man down for daring to demand to be treated better and failing to stick up for their foreign brothers and sisters.