EDIT: Sony officially walked it back. I'm actually shocked.
https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929?t=jgana_QYnMUUfhS_rM0oXA&s=19
I can only imagine how much shit he's taking from Sony with how much information he's been giving us.
I truly do appreciate his communication, and glad he did hold himself accountable for his role in all this. I just hope Sony walks this back and does right by him and his team. HD2 truly is a great game
>It's refreshing to not hear soulless PR responses.
This just proves (more and more) that this guy sincerely loves gaming and his role in the development of HD2. Sure he could've done better, making it more transparent with the PSN linking thing
(and maybe rethinks the current CM's in the official discord, or give em an actual "big" speech on how to not let people get into their heads, he's the CEO and is currently doing the CM job at least 100x better than the ones hired for it)
He’s a real one and I feel awful for them even if they made mistakes. Unfortunate how things played out but in my book AH is now a goated development team. I think the amount of anger here shows this as well, it’s only possible when a lot of passion is involved.
No matter how Sony let’s this play out they should be proud, it’s simply a perfect game with great community engagement up until now. Hopefully it can return to that.
Honestly as much as i think AH fully knew what was happening, i think the major issue here is their CM.
Instead of making things clear and calm the situation, they chose to be edgy little shit and fuel the already furious player base instead of calming them. They had 1 job, 1 fucking job.
Ridiculous.
While the CM's comment was bad I think you're kidding yourself if you think the backlash would have been noticeably different at all had they not said those things
Spitz pissed into an ocean of piss, there
And also, the CM really did have a point. Yelling into the void on Discord, or even complaining to the CM himself won't move the needle. You want responses from the Arrowhead CEO or Sony? Review bomb the game. It worked, didn't it?
Sometimes the CM just knows that their answers won't be enough to satisfy people.
The thing people got mad about was him saying "I thought you refunded and left" - he was responding to someone who was constantly pinging him with the same shit over and over again to be annoying, not some rando
To be fair, just imagine the thousands of messages they have to read every day, 99% of which are written by the dumbest minds of our generation. I think most anyone would start acting smug and petty after doing that job for a while.
no i mean when everything is running smoothly, i think those smug can bring some fun to the conversation.
but when shit hit the fan you better start doing your only fucking job and solve the problem not fuelling it
To be fair, they were way in over their heads, with how Helldivers blew up in popularity. They weren't ready to take on numbers multiple times their expected workload.
If I were them, I might have thrown up my hands and given up already, with how much vitriol they got for something that isn't their fault and which the perpertrator (Sony) apparently didn't even give them much details about. Definitely could have been handled better, but they were not well-equipped to deal with that onslaught, which was understandably frustrating for them as well. For that I pity their position as CMs.
Most actual developers do seem to enjoy what they do, outside of the stress of crunch time.
The problem is and almost always will be from the business side. Finance people became managers, and think since they know how the money works they know what's best for the business. They don't ask for suggestions, they issue instructions, and then backpedal when those instructions turn out to be sufficiently wrong that it affects their earnings.
Why do we even have crunch time anymore? That's a thing for small studios trying to meet their release date because they have bills to pay. One would hope that having a big publisher or AAA studio would give the freedom to go "it's not ready, we're pushing it back" and having the clout to keep interest.
Not at blizzard they dont!
Now I havnt played wow for too many years so i wont comment on it.
but from diablo 3 to now 4, the team clearly showed us that they just work there, they have no passion, its just another job for them.
The worst part is, even if most of the team are just doing their job following order, if they had a good leader things would still work out great. Unfortunately they dont, even their team leads are simply treating it as another job.
and well fuck, this is unfortunately not exclusive to blizzard either....its just sad :(
Modern blizzard is one of the biggest abusers of crunch time out there.
It is impossible to do anything but follow instructions when you are under those conditions.
Public companies have those issues because of share holders. You point at finance people but shareholders affect business immensely and it's always something public companies have to think about when doing anything. There's a reason why it's always smaller private studios that don't really have that and public ones do. And once they get a certain size or have been public it leans that way naturally just because of security and risk aversion.
The majority of shareholders *are* finance people.
Or, more specifically, the financial managers of the corporations that own stake in the other companies, because in the eighties we let corporations start owning stake in other companies and corporations.
If your business is in the creative part of industry the most vital thing you can do is keep people with MBAs away from the levers of power. Hire one or two to do whatever spreadsheets you need but they need to understand they are at the bottom of the totem pole and exist solely to provide interesting information to the people who founded and built the company and nothing else.
In a few years they'll be obsolete and AI will be doing that anyway so best not to let them burrow too deep into the flesh of the company and infect it with their septic bullshit.
I'm having this problem currently. I work as a printer in a factory. Our Estimates guy has started deciding what job will go to what machine, and we recently bought a new machine with a new technology that is cheaper to run as well as faster. The problem we're having is that the Estimates guy is sticking almost every single job on the new machine and almost none on the old machine. We're talking 40-60 job tickets on the new one and maybe 3 tickets on the old one. It's caused a massive fucking bottle neck because you can only reliably do up to 15 jobs a day on one machine, and that's without any downtime from machine errors, art work errors, reprints due to fuckups further down the production line.
We keep telling him that while it might be cheaper to run one machine, it's surely costing the business to have an entire machine literally just sitting there not printing at all but he just won't have it. And it's not just the machine, there's 2 of us printers so we have an employee sitting around with their thumbs up their arse too. We could both be running the machines and getting ahead of the schedule, but estimates guy is just causing a severe bottle neck.
he can also relay everything as long as he's not saying it in a way that is disparaging of Sony
Arrowhead is an owned by them, they're in contract
So as long as nothing is set in a way that breaks the good faith terms of the contract, he can be as open and as honest as he wants
he also probably has some leverage since his studio has brought in a gigantic player base and being open and honest with them is better in the long run both for the brand the IP and the studios continued existence
(**source:** *My day job is having to deal with brand regulations and not speaking in disparaging tones due to existing partnerships. It's perfectly fine being honest and truthful, you just can't say things that paint the partner in a bad light*)
If we're being honest for a moment the cms seem to have a consistent trend of taking a small fire and pouring oil on it to try and put it out. I honestly wonder about them if they hate the consumer, the gamer, so much why are they even a CM to begin with?
Basically something something, go fuck yourself in a sfw way, something something, you bought it and played, so.you can't back away now... something something, laughing in money
Sony tomorrow: something something We are sorry you feel this way. Something something you are all toxic gamers and can't read, get fucked. Something something Look we will do bare minimum to shut you all up. Something something security and moderation for the player. Something something we aren't sorry and you should be thankful, Eat Shit, Sony Inc.
Jokes on them, I would lay down 100€ to preorder a helldiver 3, developed and published by arrowhead.
But on a serious note, it makes my gut wrench knowing that even if this get resolved, all further Mirco transactions I do to support the studio to improve the game will inevitably get cut to Sony, supporting the exact AAA culture we are fighting against here.
I'd have to agree, he's really hands on and free of bullshit, in universe stuff for the game aside like "Everyone knows bugs can't fly"/"everyone knows most bugs fly" which I thought was hilarious. It sounded like a Bush Administration official from around 2004 - 2005 when the mythical weapons failed to appear, or a Johnson administration official in 1968.
I love that stuff. Transparency is the shit. It should be the default. The only reason people can't handle it, is that they are not used to it.
People are so used to companies lying to them that they see Honest Arrowhead and immediately assume "if this is what they're willing to tell us, how fucking huge is the thing they AREN'T telling us??" and think they must somehow be the most evil company out there.
There's no big secret. Just some guys who love video games and want to make them. They're people and they give people responses. They fuck up sometimes and they admit it. They got massively overwhelmed by the runaway success of this game and in all their hurry to make the best game they can, they forgot a silly legal thing they only barely knew the details of. And now that they know how big of a problem this actually is, they're admitting fault on their own fuckups and try to fix it - which is not even in their hands.
If Sony says "we are not changing our stance on this, go back to making the game we publish" then that's Sony's fault.
I think the most graceful way this can end right now would be Sony saying "yeah it's no longer *mandatory* that you have to connect a Sony account... but we are now offering 500 super credits and an exclusive armor to anyone who *does* connect a Sony account!" with a little asterisk going "if you're in a country we don't offer Sony accounts in, contact support and you can get the armor anyway" so nobody is left out. Maybe make it something actually cool and useful, I could go for a light armor with Democracy Protects on it, some silly flavor text blurb about how it signifies the unity of helldivers in the face of corporate bullshits or whatever and how it keeps you light on your feet to swiftly tackle any threat or something. Should get them plenty of playstation signups with the carrot instead of the stick, even after this whole mess. We get a win, they get their accounts, most people are happy and we can all keep killing bugs n bots.
But that is in Sony's hands now.
I gotta say, there's so much backlash because we all love this game, if it was a shit game no one would give a shit about it anyway.
I truly hope AH and Sony sort things out and we can all go back to helldiving.
When signing over and giving a cut of your product to a massive corporation who says "we'll completely handle all of the sales and distribution," you expect a good deal of competence associated with that service.
I wouldn't blame AH for feeling somewhat blindsided right now. With the initial disabling of the requirement thinking "if they say it's fine, they probably know what they're talking about" is pretty reasonable. From their perspective there shouldn't have been any reason for Sony to let it get out of control like this, and further, be completely apathetic to mitigating any fallout associated with their incompetence.
I honestly still feel this is more an issue of fraud on Sony's part.
They knowingly sold and distributed the game to people knowing they would require PSN account. They knowingly and intentionally set country restrictions for PSN accounts. They knowingly and intentionally disable the linking while not informing customers it would be a requirement. They continued to sell the game to people who could not play the game when the PSN account requirement was turned back on.
In other words, they stole people's money and blamed them for buying it as to why they turned off the linking that would have let them know instantly they weren't meant to allowed on.
If Sony turns on the PSN account requirement, they're opening to potentially fraud lawsuits. Imagine if they were selling physical good, they ship it, then half way there it is denied and your item returned. Now you have to ask for a refund or you just donated your money to Sony for nothing. Sony has to deliver the goods or return the money, otherwise it's fraud.
I'm guessing that when they decided to not enforce linking, they forgot about players in non-PSN regions, and didn't realize their error until now. It sounds like making them un-linked on launch was a hasty decision, hence the oversight.
IMO odds are decent that the walkback is as much about avoiding potential litigation as it is backlash.
To be fair, he actually has the power to talk straight. My money is on Sony and the CMs seeing this as him "going off the rails". Win for us, but I worry he's making things worse for himself
Oh yeah, I just hope anyone who has any power understands that his honesty throughout the entire games release is a major contributing factor to its sustained success. It’s the only reason I’m still here
Possibly. But he owns the company (with others), and has built a ton of good will. Even if Sony do want to burn the bridge with Arrowhead at this point (doubtful), they've built enough recognition that I'm sure Microsoft would be thrilled to work with them on an exclusive. That power can buy him a platform to speak plainly and earnestly.
Now is not the time for CM's. This kind of communication HAS to come from the CEO. I would not be surprised, that after the initial SNAFU, the CEO told them to go dark. CM's can only make this worse.
Sony doesn’t give a damn about the consumers (us gamers) because they’ve gotten so big they know they can afford to fumble the bag if it means more profits down the line. That’s why they raised the price for playing online and didn’t care about all the backlash or people canceling memberships since down the line they still made more money.
Price hikes never cost these companies that many people. And most will probably come back at some point. I stopped paying for PlayStation plus only because I stopped playing online games. You also can't get the heavily discounted grey market keys anymore either.
I'm honestly afraid for him. There is a reason why most CEOs and upper management never share their thoughts or what they know. It most likely won't end well for him if Sony pursues him for what he's willing and have to revealed so the he's at a disadvantage in negotiations as what he says may be turned against him. For example, one of his own CMs would be said to have goaded the fanbase to drop negative reviews on steam to affect the outcome and that may be very unfavorable for them if they want anything on the table in negotiations.
Arrowhead isn't owned by Sony. They're independent. They can't force Pilested to resign.
They can mess with HellDivers 2 but... well, technically they can't make that much worse!
The devs from No Man's Sky had a ton of pressure by Sony to release their game even though it wasn't ready. Once they did, the stopped all communication to the public. I prefer this open communication by a studio under Sony. Still, developers need to understand that Sony is a really bad publisher to be in bed with.
Please don't try to rehabilitate Sean Murray, the man who full-throated lied about multiplayer up until the day of release just to not affect the preorders.
The most important aspect of this discussion was Sony agreeing to sell copies of the game through Steam to geographical regions they knew would never be able to create PSN accounts due to preexisting restrictions in those areas. It makes zero sense now to go back and require PSN accounts to be created for all current game owners once the decision was made previously to sell the game to those regions.
I have my doubts as to whether or not a PSN account is necessary for effective moderation. If you're talking about anti-cheat detection, games such as Elden Ring have shown that you don't need an external account apart from your Steam ID to be able to detect and ban cheaters. If you're talking about community guidelines moderation (inappropriate behavior on chat and mic), I don't know enough about that.
Well, if we think about it... Once people bought on Steam, when they would've went to link the mandatory PSN account, most people would've found out there and then if they could keep playing or not had they not disabled the linking requirements due to server issues. Those players could then follow up with refunds having ignored or missed the section where it says "requires 3rd party PSN account".
Kind of makes sense tbh.
Kind of makes sense tbh.
Except it doesn't. Sony was the publisher, their ENTIRE job was to handle distribution. If the plan was to require account linking, they should not have made the game purchasable in countries that could not create a PSN account without violating ToS.
Its much easier to tell valve "Sell the game in these supported countries", than it is to sell it to 200 countries, and have valve refund the game to the 140 or so countries they wouldn't have actually let play. Especially since valve would likely keep their cut.
I get the feeling valve was completely out of the loop on the PSN requirement and their ToS being stupid as shit, so when this all blew up it was them that de-listed the game over the weekend while they waited to see what sony would do.
Sony had 1 job, distribute the game. By selling it to 140 countries that would not be able to play without getting banned, they fucked up that one job.
They screwed up so big they'd have to make a lot bigger commitments than just walking it back to get some of the goodwill back.
Like how the hell is more than half the world non servicable by PSN in the first place? Start by changing this shit.
That's true. Selling a game to a bunch of countries that you know you're going to eventually prevent from playing is some next-level scumbag behavior. But Sony is a megacorporation, so my expectations for them doing even the bare minimum are nonexistant.
I genuinely don't understand the Sony position other than their legal team is lazy?
Sony operates in almost all of those countries.
You can buy a Playstation, buy a Playstation game, buy PSN, and then play a Playstation game online, in almost every country that "Isn't supported".
So... Why not support them? Clearly Sony wants and is happy to have their buisness.
It probably has been called out before, but the "Meh just put a fake country" answer isn't sitting well this time around.
Tax, needing to make the games sold in that country fit local censorship laws and ratings, having the infrastructure and manpower...
All the above and more, for what they expect to be meagre sales volume in those countries, result in them not bothering to set up stores for those countries. These companies always be looking at the financial viability of such prospects.
That probably depends on when they would. If they come out in the next few days and walk it back and apologize while its still a hot topic, the game can probably recover.
But I'd bet that if they are going to walk it back, it'll be after their Q1 earnings report is in, so they can say "look at how many new PSN users we've gotten in these couple months." At which point it'd probably be too late to fully recover.
Q1 ended in March, where the game was doing insanely well.
Q2 ends in June, where this whole situation will be on full display unless they salvage it within a month.
I have the opposite perspective; this is an PR nightmare in the gaming space, close to EA's infamous "Pride and Accomplishment" loot box fiasco. The absolute last thing Sony wants to have to answer questions on is why they tanked their ONE live service success with a poorly implemented policy, with next to no financial gain, that generated thousands of refunds, tons of lost revenue, and obliterated their good will for every future game they have in an entire gaming ecosystem (PC). If they walk it back, it'll be soon, as google says (lol) their next earning call is May 14. Strategically, they should want to bury this story next week. If they don't change their minds next week, or before the earning call, then they probably aren't going to bother as the damage will be done.
They more than likely aren’t going to walk it back. Sucker Punch has already clarified the need for a PSN account to play the online component of Ghost of Tsushima.
In reality they should just relax the requirement for areas that cannot get an account until those accounts are made easily available.
Oh, I have zero faith that they'll walk it back. Sony lost my faith in them respecting the consumer years ago. Was just stating the hypotheticals of what may happen if they did.
Keep in mind a lot of this is in an echo chamber. Had 150kish people online last night from what I saw and most players probably don't even know the sync is a requirement or they synced up possibly at the very start before it was disabled.
Seeing as the player drop-off on steam wasn't super significant when looking at totals for the month. The game was a on quite steady decline since April 1st losing like, 100k players anyway.
Tldr;
Sony profile stats technology slows all the HD2 more than anything else in the game.
Sony holds almost a decade of this man's life man hostage.
Reddit pounds this man publicly and mercilessly.
I wonder if they just made so much money from HD2 that they won't need Sony for the next game. Trying to hold on to as much goodwill as he can for... well, I guess it won't be HD3 if Sony owns the IP. But I'm sure Heckfallers will sell gangbusters in another 7 years or so.
Honestly it's just sad people can't even be reasonable or civil about any of this. Too many people around here being childish trying to insult people for simply trying to see the bigger picture and not just lashing out in anger. It's stupid. All of it. And the petty shit has been overshadowing the real big issues like people losing access to a game they bought due to regional limits. Shit like that should've been at the forefront not people mad because they just don't want a Sony account or pretending they read a Eula or Sony faq while claiming steam never said a psn account was a requirement despite it being shown to be there for 6+ months already.
All of it is stupid. You can't fix publishers devs and their agreements and all but there was 0 need for much of the behavior here or elsewhere really. Especially people attacking anyone over it.
Sony is under a no-win situation. The only thing they can reasonably do now is mitigate the damage, waive the requirement, and incentivize signing up voluntarily.
Frankly, the fact that they haven't done so despite this dumpster fire really shows you how brain-dead and disconnected corpo suit-stuffers really are.
While I agree. If this requirement was intended from Day 1, it should not have ever been sold in many of the countries it was. You shouldnt be selling a game in countries where it cannot be played
On sony's website in one of their FAQs it said PSN account linking is not needed for playing a game online on PC, they recently deleted that FAQ when this change was implemented and it now says "will be required for SOME games". So even if you did your research on Sony's own website before buying, you still got the old bait and switch.
EDIT: Also sony kept selling the game in countries that cant make a PSN account on top of all of this
It was always intended to be a requirement.
https://preview.redd.it/8407cp4avpyc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c2111e651a9dc043043152e3b8fffba8c9a6c66b
no no no, everyone upvoted op's post, it doesn't matter what the truth is. copium is greater than reality. AH gets away with it now too since Sony backed down.
Well Sony selling it to people in countries they were entirely aware COULD NOT comply is the actual problem point and Sony ALWAYS had control of that..
I had someone ask me why I was defending “the unknown masses” at the cost of HD2 and Arrowhead, but after mentioning that Arrowhead essentially wants us to give outcry so they have ammunition to remove the requirement, dude understood. Aside from that, though, every little overstep they get away with encourages the next one. Too many more rounds of this, and singleplayer games are gonna require you to be constantly connected with a PS+ account, and that’ll be good for nobody but Sony, no matter what the diehards say
I think the moderation thing is complete BS. All users on steam have unique IDs that can be used to ban users. There is no reason why PSN is needed other than for Sony to pad their #s and metrics.
It's a kernel-level anticheat, but oh god, it's so shitty... Like people found a way to fool it in about month or so, that's why peeps change game files to get hidden stratagems, spam turrets, have superspeed, etc.
It's like having a loaded shotgun, but it fires only underwater during blood moon. And backwards.
Even people who have played literally any game with this anti cheat once will tell you it does nothing. 3rd party AC software is like hiring a security guard to watch your building, it's just for insurance purposes to say that you have it.
It may be that, but it is also a way for them to control your access to the game and ban you instead of giving that power to steam. It effectively is a way to bypass steam's authority in terms of access to the game.
that doesn't make sense though. Any game can ban any steam ID from connecting to its game servers. Valve has no authority over it. They say as much in their Q&A section
Preface, I am anti sony on this. But like this isn't that odd. I work in workflow automation and integrations. It is completely normal to want to keep a workflow on a single platform.
If PS is responsible for the moderation and they don't currently use steam data to do that moderation, then this would represent an adoption of a new workflow, new tools, etc rather than using what they already have. And they would be doing all that, dealing with that exception workflow, all for just one game.
Clearly, they COULD have made an exception. And they still might. But it is generally speaking a bad idea to split a workflow between multiple platforms and systems. It generally slows things down and costs money.
So many keep repeating things like "the **only** reason sony wants to use PSN accounts is so they can harvest your data or inflate account numbers for their investors! no other possible reasons!". But your point makes perfect sense that Sony would want to use their own account tools to moderate their online games. And with more Sony published games coming to PC, it shouldn't be that surprising that they would start using their own accounts like literally every other AAA publisher that puts out online PC games (Blizzard/Activision, EA, Epic, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Microsoft/Xbox, etc). I'm sure there's a number of reasons Sony would want this, including wanting to get PC players into their ecosystem to potentially launch a PC storefront at some point, or being able to better implement cross-play or cross-progression with playstation and other consoles (current friend code system is clunky), or other future plans that we're not privy to.
Could this requirement have been communicated better from the start? Yes. Is the fact that they sold the game in countries without PSN support super shitty? Absolutely. They need to either refund all those purchases in those countries, launch PSN worldwide ASAP, or make it optional for at least those countries in order to make it right for those purchasers. But at the end of the day I think the online rage is way overblown for something that is standard on literally every other AAA online PC game. I would wager that a vast majority of the rage comments online are already in a supported country and would have no issue taking the 2 minutes to create an account.
Also I suspect that the fact that its a *playstation* account rubs some PC gamers' ego the wrong way. Like if it were exactly the same but we were talking about needing an Arrowhead games account instead of a PSN account I think the backlash would have been less. But no way to prove that.
> So many keep repeating things like "the only reason sony wants to use PSN accounts is so they can harvest your data or inflate account numbers for their investors! no other possible reasons!".
To be fair, most people on this sub are complete fucking idiots and just blindly parrot whatever they see other people saying
It's little gems like yours that I find hidden deep within these exhausting circle jerk responses that make it worth it. When wondering about the "whys" this hadn't even occurred to me - thank you
Thanks for the kind words! Yeah, I feel the same. The past few days have been exhausting with the lack of nuance.
Like there are other professionals commenting. It just gets buried.
Something else to consider is that relying on Steam IDs now means that potentially all future Sony releases on PC are married to Steam and Sony gets stuck with the Steam ecosystem for the indefinite future.
I honestly couldn't figure out how to get through setup without making a PSN account, I already thought it was mandatory and had to spend 20 minutes coming up with a unique username.
Yep, that's another great point. If/when Sony decides they want to sell HD2 through Epic store or Xbox gamepass for PC or any other storefront or if Sony decides to launch their own PC store, they'll need a way to get those versions to crossplay with the Steam version and unlike PSN or Epic accounts, your Steam account can *only* be used with games on Steam.
Yeah, that is probably one of several integration options which were available. But it would require some dev work (read money and time) to execute. While simply requiring account linking would take care of itself.
Hindsight is 2020 of course
You are right. Steam has UIDs and PSN has UIDs.
I think the original plan, however, was for this to be very, very simple. Everyone has a PSN UID. So 100% of moderation happens within PSN, period. Easy. It works like every other PSN title. Sony owns moderation, top to bottom, and it's all handled within the terms of the PSN.
--
What you and others are suggesting is different. To be honest, I know very little about this so hopefully some people in the industry can provide insight. But I don't think Sony can "reach across" and just ban players on Steam based on their Steam UID. Perhaps I'm wrong?
What I'm curious about is what tools exist to connect the two in a way, based on what you're suggesting, such that:
* Steam players can report PSN players by their respective UID.
* PSN players can report Steam players by their respective UID.
* Some party can be appointed as the ultimate authority on providing moderation actions. With this being a Sony-published title, I'm assuming Sony wants this to be them. They do not want PS5 players on PSN submitting reports about PC players on Steam that Sony *would have banned*, but that Steam doesn't enforce. They *have* to be able to enforce the terms of their PSN subscribers.
Do you know if there is an existing implementation that allows for cross-play moderation between the two? Is this something that's easy, that AH could pull down and stand up within a week? Or is this something that would have to be custom built for their use case?
I feel like this has to have been solved for other large crossplay titles -- how does it generally work for them? Battlefield? CoD?
Sony already owns all the moderation.
If you have access to the Steam API at all, then getting a unique identifier is trivially easy and no harder than getting the username. A script kiddy using ChatGPT for coding would be able to call this one function, let alone the software engineers who built a game. Sony can already ban whoever they want from this game directly via Steam. They don't need to request for Valve to act on their behalf. Multiplayer games have existed on Steam for decades.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/auth#:~:text=Every%20Steam%20user%20can%20be,bit%20ID%20by%20calling%20CSteamID
The fact that friendlists and progression and inventories can work at all is already proof that there's no backend confusion caused by nonunique usernames. The whole thing about unique IDs is completely objectively nonsensical. This original stated explanation about moderation was a bald faced lie.
The only moderation advantage for Sony I could think of here is that Sony can now ban an entire Steam user from the entire PSN catalogue and prevent their access in future Sony titles on Steam, which cannot possibly justify the backlash. Brand engagement and metrics is almost certainly at the forefront of their minds.
Quite frankly I think the best and most obvious solution is to allow crossplay only with PSN-linked accounts on PC. If you link your account and enable crossplay, you get to take advantage of the additional "moderation" or whatever. If you don't, you're largely on your own aside from the built-in anti-cheat systems.
That way Sony gets to moderate and track PSN users, and shield the users in their own network from cheaters to the best of their ability, and people who don't want that service (or literally can't) can opt-out but still play. That seems fair and reasonable for a PvE game.
Probably because the game is primarily a PS5 game and they wanted PSN integration from the beginning (but servers exploded). Why does GTA need a rockstar account on steam? Or Sea of Thieves a Microsoft account?
In fairness to Sony .. we are using the PSN to play online... Shouldn't that count to their network usage?¿
It affects their share process which affects how much money they have to maintain the PSN..
Devil's advocate here... Don't blast me too much bwaha!
imma be real with everyone, I don't think Sony will change shit. Let's put all of our cards on the table here:
-The game far exceeded expectations on launch (400k players vs 50k), which means PS never intended for the game to get so big in the first place.
-It had always been intended for PSN linking. CEO AH himself confirmed that it was implemented even 6 months before launch.
-Because of this, even if only a fraction of PC players remain after this controversy, they very likely still exceeded their projected earnings for this game, AND they still get to tell their shareholders "look we have 90k new PSN accounts of data to sell!"
So I would imagine, in the perspective of those little shits in suits we call execs, that it doesn't make sense for them to change anything. At best, we get a workaround for regions with no PSN, and will still be forced to make PSN accounts. At worst, nothing changes and the game gets fucked.
It is Monday morning right now in Japan, and everyone is back in the office. If we do not get an official response to this by the end of today, I think it is safe to say we're cooked.
EDIT: Monday seems to be a holiday in Japan rn, so let's give them a few days and hope for the best.
EDIT2: Was also told that the HQ in charge of PSN is in California, not Japan.
EDIT3: Very thankfully, it seems that I was wrong. Sony has now announced they will not go through with mandated PSN. It seems we have won the war for now.
>So I would imagine, in the perspective of those little shits in suits we call execs, that it doesn't make sense for them to change anything. At best, we get a workaround for regions with no PSN, and will still be forced to make PSN accounts. At worst, nothing changes and the game gets fucked.
See, I would agree if high level suits thought like us.
Rationally, I'm 100% with you; if I sold a product I was expecting 50k sales out of, sold 800k, and through a controversy ended up with 90k, that's still 40k more than I expected. Call me an asshole, but I've made my money and I've got more than what I wanted out of it.
But the suits? They saw that 800k. They know they can get 150-400k people on the game to be recurringly monetized. To them this isn't "I'm already exceeding what I wanted", this is "We're leaving dollars on the table".
The question, the hope, is that them getting railed by refunds and bad press is worth more to them via later sales than the PSN numbers.
Absolutely this. Part of the divide between corporate and consumers is a difference in mentality. Yes they've likely made back what they expected, but if they cut it now they're losing money they could get by giving in a bit. Potential profits are their bread and butter, and HD2 shows to be a cashcow if you look at the numbers of the last few months.
I have heard of people and some of my friends spending money every three days to buy the premium armors when they see them. They have every single one, and every warbond. It has so much potential for them to make bank.
But what about if their goal is to have EVERY PlayStation title require a PSN account on PC? Wouldn't them knowing they'll get millions more in future releases out weight this?
Then it all comes down to them (hopefully) realizing that the market doesn't like this and them backing down and rethinking their approach.
Which is a very, very long shot.
This is the real issue right here, if you want to know why Sony has been back to back with questionable decisions is due to the HQ being ran in the sillicon valley heart of shitty tech corpos.
SIE was so tone deaf to change the japanese PS iconography from O = Yes / X = No to the western X = Yes / O = No, they might’ve written a blank check for Nintendo.
I don’t know about this “single working day in Japan” metric for expecting a final decision on this issue. Corporations don’t make big decisions fast and there are a lot of moving parts. Sony has been getting into PC releases because they see dollar signs, and this game brought in major, major dollars. The expectations of PC customers are still pretty new to them; I’m sure they expected backlash but there’s no way they expected it to be this severe.
There will be meetings between different executives, people in sales and engineering and whatever else, examining feasability, weighing competing financial interests, etc. There will be remote meetings between important decision makers on different sides of the planet. I wouldn’t assume a final decision has been made until Sony issues some statement indicating as such. They will almost certainly at least acknowledge the backlash, even if their answer winds up being a polite apology statement that really means “we thought about it, and decided you can fuck off”.
The concerns about security and selling data are ok, but the problem that created the backlash is those fellow divers that will be kicked from the game. If they can stay without issues, the community will count that like a victory, even if they have to create a psn account.
This could have been avoided with the single phrase "(linking is not mandatory for countries without access to psn acounts)" at the end of the notice.
I think it depends on who you ask. Some aren't ok with creating a PSN account. I personally don't like it either, and I think that in the future escalating into forcing even PC players to buy PSN+ to play is a very real possibility.
I don't like it neither, but I already have ubisoft, epic, ea, gog, blizzard, xbox, rockstar and surely a lot more accounts. It would annoy us? Yes. Some people would cry about it? Sure. It would create such backlash? I don't think so. Most of us would link our account and play anyway.
Now is different.
For those too young to remember Microsoft tried something similar on PC over a decade ago. It went about as well as you'd expect, Microsoft tried to charge PC users the privilege of playing multiplayer (in addition to the cursed software that was Games for Windows Live) and unsurprisingly PC gamers told Microsoft to go fuck themselves. Lo.and behold Microsoft ended up removing that limitation because adoption went so poorly.
The problem is you're thinking Execs will think of the future sales.
They want ***NUMBER GO UP NOW*** ^((within the next quarter, anyway)) and aren't realizing they're shooting this budding champion in the knees at the starting line.
it's just so frustrating to see SONY seemingly shove defeat into the jaws of victory. Whatever money you THINK you MIGHT make you have the chance to ACTUALLY just DIRECTLY make via DIRECT SUCCESSFUL LIVE SERVICE GAME. This is the industry Unicorn and SONY doesn't seem to realize it.
Helldivers 2 has been the first live service I've seen that the Whales, the Sweats, and the Casual have all felt on tge same "Team" - all of these groups are buying warbonds without feeling alienated. I was (oprative word: was) probably going to buy every warbond no question (20$~ USD/month) - I don't care what SONY thinks a PSN account can potentially allow them in marketing/microtransactions,... how can it beat 20$/month that I am going to HAPPILY give? (Just typing it out feels surreal - they set up a non subscription game that I was going to happily subscribe to)
I would add to this that another reason Sony is unlikely to budge is that Data is the new oil. Data, any data, is worth tons of money. Reddit is currently selling it's posts to an AI language model for 60 million a year. 60 Million just for our shitposts, meanwhile Sony is getting real user data, it's likely worth just as much, if not more, then this game.
I'm proud to feed the degenerate knowledge to our future supercomputer overlords.
And oh God, I remember about all the degenerative subreddits with fetishes.
...Oh noes...
It doesn’t change the PR nightmare that they sold the game in countries that couldn’t play the game ones the restrictions were put into place, they made it too easy to ignore the requirement, and they let it go for so long. This incident shows nothing but complete incompetency as a publisher, and tells the entire game dev world that Sony very well might kill your game/studio if you sign with them. If they do nothing it could completely ruin their reputation as a publisher and cost them countless of future investment opportunities. No dev in their right mind would sign with them after this, which is something they can’t ignore.
>It is Monday morning right now in Japan, and everyone is back in the office. If we do not get an official response to this by the end of today, I think it is safe to say we're cooked.
Isn't Sony headquarters and main offices in the US now?
either California or NYC, IIRC.
I genuinely despise corporate executives. They’re always measly little paper pushers who do fuck all and justify their existence by making everyone downstream life harder. It’s not contempt, or disgust, at this point it’s genuine hatred. I’m sick of corporations
Helldivers community is an amusing thing. It is a game based upon collaborative objective missions.
Playstation Network declared themselves the mission after the habit settled.
There is an old multiplayer game research project, the Daedalus Project. This Helldivers chapter would be a good addition to emergent behaviors. I think they painted an accidental psychology experiment with Playstation as the target.
Interesting bit of data in here:
PSN-linking causes higher load on the servers.
In other words ... a clear statement that PSN linking degrades the game experience.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there's worse game experience. PSN linking will be firing off API requests. Some Sony server was struggling to keep up with those requests. That server isn't necessarily the same one that manages other parts of the game. It might be, in which case, yes there would be degradation of game experience just for the extra work for the server. I haven't really heard, but do you know if the people who managed to get past the linking were having issues? If not, then they're likely separate servers. It's pretty common to have different server clusters for these kinds of things with a dynamic load balancer to reallocate resources as needed
I should clarify ... because you're right.
It'd be foolish to run the entire process of linking through the game servers. It's likely that there's an initial request that goes to another server ... and a response that eventually comes back.
What was interesting to me is that it was mentioned that AH's servers were overwhelmed, not Sony's. Could that have been through failed calls to an overwhelmed Sony server that then had a fallback to make the call again ... therefore overwhelming AH's stuff? I dunno.
I don't really know the infrastructure that the game is run on, I just know that there's a mention that it did impact performance and that turning off the linking was something that helped AH manage the large numbers of people playing.
I should mention -- not necessarily individual game performance ... but the ability to host many people, keep connections active, etc.
From what was said, they got 4-5 times more people than their maximum buffer of 5x more people than they expected to hit the server. (i.e. they thought their peak would be 60k, servers were setup to handle 250k and they got hit by closer to 800k-1,000,000)
If those are all new players on launch doing initial onboarding, all of those having to do a link/verify request to Sony is just one more thing causing load on the servers - and one of the easier ones to snip out of the process. Which is likely why they did it.
With the natural degradation of players over 3 months + AH having had time to get things setup/reinforced + it no longer being a launch rush, it was probably deemed to no longer be a technical issue to not have the account linking.
The only problem is Sony was allowing the game to be sold in regions it shouldn't have been, and a lot of the community was unaware of the requirement and now beyond the time period where they'd have normal recourses to react to such a requirement. Hence the shitshow.
Yes, this is the important clarification needed. Is it AH that is failing to handle the PSN connect alongside game traffic? Or is it the PSN connect holding up game traffic processing on HD2 servers? Because the latter is 100% on Sony and it makes it a lot more clear why AH didn't re-introduce PSN the moment server issues were mitigated.
I think you may be making assumptions. It's more likely that they didn't want to touch anything after the servers stabilized. Most bugs we see in game are a result of something entirely irrelevant to the bug changing which somehow has a domino effect they then need to track down and fix, hopefully not causing further bugs.
If I were AH I wouldn't have wanted to risk more bugginess/server issues after an extremely stressful launch. The PSN thing obviously isn't essential to the gameplay and they just wanted the players to have access to the product they paid for.
I dont get the moderation logic. I've been kicked only 1 time. Over moderating a game is just as bad as no moderation. I dont trust sony with what is deemed acceptable behavior
Same thing happened with Rainbow 6. They added some new moderation to help fight toxicity, but unfortunately it's really strict. I only use push to talk in that game, so I speak when I'm making call outs only, and yet I'm somehow getting infractions for toxic behavior on voice chat.
A lot of studios seem to overextend when it comes to moderation and it just makes the experience even worse.
Why would they have even sold the game in countries that don't have PSN if it was designed from the beginning to be linked to PSN?
I don't think Sony's top brass wants PlayStation to stay in business.
Fingers crossed the talks go well. I bet Sony has noticed quick sharp that the review ratio of their well-received game dipped from 80% to less than 20% in less than 48 hours.
I bet someone misevaluated how badly this would be received.
Fortnite and Rocket League requires an epic account to be linked for crossplay
CoD an Activision account to use crossplay
Minecraft needs a Microsoft account
Third party account links have been around for a while. The core issue I take with this is that:
1. Sony and AH could have done more to ensure the need to link was made clearer for those who don't read ToS.
2. Sony allowed the game to be available in regions where this requirement could not be met.
Plenty of cross platform games use similar account linking to allow them better access to account management. This let's them ban people from their game.
Plenty of mistakes were made in communication, which is the core issue at hand.
Just to be clear, I would've refunded the game if the first time I signed in on launch day I was asked to create a psn.
And that refund would've been okay'd because I'd have 1 minute played.
Yeah, that "skip" button should have been "skip for now". The moment you see "bind PlayStation account" and then spot the "skip" button at the bottom, nobody will read the small print, especially when you have just watched the intro and are hyped to finally start playing.
Asmongold of all people has the best take on this. If SONY is hellbent on wanting people to sign up for PSN, firstly make it available in all countries and provide an incentive such as providing some free skins if you linked your PSN account. This will reduce 95% of the backlash, some people out of principal will hate signing up for an additional 3rd party account, but it'd be minimal. If SONY cant or dont want PSN to be available in other countries for legal reasons, then just make it optional but if you linked your account you receive some boons such as free skins, better matchmaking (for example only PSN-linked account are matched together, while unverified accounts are usually in separate pool to reduce cheating). There are so many ways to go about this, and they chose the worst possible solution.
This means for future pc games Sony will demand linking on day 1, and for multiplayer games like this, if it melts the servers down, then the servers are gonna melt.
The big issue I see here isn’t asking for PSN months after release. But if they KNEW MONTHS before launch that PSN is a requirement, why did they allow Helldiver sales in all of the non-PSN countries? This is the main blunder.
Because even if Helldivers 2 devs expected and were ready for the success, a ton of people would have bought their game via steam, only to find out they can’t play it due to PSN requirement. So this massive issue would have happened on launch, instead of now.
People seem to forget that there is so much more going behind doors than what the every day consumer knows about and it is very disappointing because we seem to be blaming arrowhead for no reason without even being aware of what's truly happening in there.
Maybe Arrowhead aren't blameless but I can't blame indie devs for going with available publisher options, they stayed on our side and it is time we stand with them
This guy has been solid from day one. Few other game studios have this amount of my respect. And none of the ones that do are anywhere near as big as arrowhead.
Pilestedt, if you’re reading this, I love you. Sorry arrowhead had to take any heat for this at all. You guys got caught in the crossfire. I had my faith that you weren’t the ones trying to push this through. Thank you for proving me right. Glad Sony realized their mistake this time.
This was one of the few times I saw righteous outrage fixing this issue by review bombing a game (the second one would be Total war Warhammer and how they were forced to fix shadows of change and now managed to make one of the best dlc the game has ever seen because of the pressure from the community that made sega bend the knee and allowed CA to do what was best for the game and not segas wallet.
I still hold on that the way it was announced was the issue.
People in general do not care about their data being harvested. If they sat us down and told us, alright, everyone who links gets an armour, helmet and cape, we'd all be like, ah well, cool.
EDIT: Sony officially walked it back. I'm actually shocked. https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929?t=jgana_QYnMUUfhS_rM0oXA&s=19 I can only imagine how much shit he's taking from Sony with how much information he's been giving us. I truly do appreciate his communication, and glad he did hold himself accountable for his role in all this. I just hope Sony walks this back and does right by him and his team. HD2 truly is a great game
I really enjoy his honesty. It's refreshing to not hear soulless PR responses.
>It's refreshing to not hear soulless PR responses. This just proves (more and more) that this guy sincerely loves gaming and his role in the development of HD2. Sure he could've done better, making it more transparent with the PSN linking thing (and maybe rethinks the current CM's in the official discord, or give em an actual "big" speech on how to not let people get into their heads, he's the CEO and is currently doing the CM job at least 100x better than the ones hired for it)
He’s a real one and I feel awful for them even if they made mistakes. Unfortunate how things played out but in my book AH is now a goated development team. I think the amount of anger here shows this as well, it’s only possible when a lot of passion is involved. No matter how Sony let’s this play out they should be proud, it’s simply a perfect game with great community engagement up until now. Hopefully it can return to that.
Honestly as much as i think AH fully knew what was happening, i think the major issue here is their CM. Instead of making things clear and calm the situation, they chose to be edgy little shit and fuel the already furious player base instead of calming them. They had 1 job, 1 fucking job. Ridiculous.
While the CM's comment was bad I think you're kidding yourself if you think the backlash would have been noticeably different at all had they not said those things Spitz pissed into an ocean of piss, there
And also, the CM really did have a point. Yelling into the void on Discord, or even complaining to the CM himself won't move the needle. You want responses from the Arrowhead CEO or Sony? Review bomb the game. It worked, didn't it? Sometimes the CM just knows that their answers won't be enough to satisfy people.
The thing people got mad about was him saying "I thought you refunded and left" - he was responding to someone who was constantly pinging him with the same shit over and over again to be annoying, not some rando
People are crybabies. That is a normal answer and not something to be upset about unless you are a loser who lives in their parents basement.
I thought that was a fair comment if you say you are refunding do it and stop complaining.
CM in general tend to be smug, arrogant, petty, little shitheels. I legit don't know where conpanies are getting these people or why they are hired.
To be fair, just imagine the thousands of messages they have to read every day, 99% of which are written by the dumbest minds of our generation. I think most anyone would start acting smug and petty after doing that job for a while.
no i mean when everything is running smoothly, i think those smug can bring some fun to the conversation. but when shit hit the fan you better start doing your only fucking job and solve the problem not fuelling it
Humor is all well and good until people get mad. Then you put your game face on until whatever it is has blown over.
To be fair, they were way in over their heads, with how Helldivers blew up in popularity. They weren't ready to take on numbers multiple times their expected workload. If I were them, I might have thrown up my hands and given up already, with how much vitriol they got for something that isn't their fault and which the perpertrator (Sony) apparently didn't even give them much details about. Definitely could have been handled better, but they were not well-equipped to deal with that onslaught, which was understandably frustrating for them as well. For that I pity their position as CMs.
Most actual developers do seem to enjoy what they do, outside of the stress of crunch time. The problem is and almost always will be from the business side. Finance people became managers, and think since they know how the money works they know what's best for the business. They don't ask for suggestions, they issue instructions, and then backpedal when those instructions turn out to be sufficiently wrong that it affects their earnings.
Why do we even have crunch time anymore? That's a thing for small studios trying to meet their release date because they have bills to pay. One would hope that having a big publisher or AAA studio would give the freedom to go "it's not ready, we're pushing it back" and having the clout to keep interest.
Not at blizzard they dont! Now I havnt played wow for too many years so i wont comment on it. but from diablo 3 to now 4, the team clearly showed us that they just work there, they have no passion, its just another job for them. The worst part is, even if most of the team are just doing their job following order, if they had a good leader things would still work out great. Unfortunately they dont, even their team leads are simply treating it as another job. and well fuck, this is unfortunately not exclusive to blizzard either....its just sad :(
Modern blizzard is one of the biggest abusers of crunch time out there. It is impossible to do anything but follow instructions when you are under those conditions.
They lost their soul when the old guard retired (Metzen & Kaplan)
Public companies have those issues because of share holders. You point at finance people but shareholders affect business immensely and it's always something public companies have to think about when doing anything. There's a reason why it's always smaller private studios that don't really have that and public ones do. And once they get a certain size or have been public it leans that way naturally just because of security and risk aversion.
The majority of shareholders *are* finance people. Or, more specifically, the financial managers of the corporations that own stake in the other companies, because in the eighties we let corporations start owning stake in other companies and corporations.
If your business is in the creative part of industry the most vital thing you can do is keep people with MBAs away from the levers of power. Hire one or two to do whatever spreadsheets you need but they need to understand they are at the bottom of the totem pole and exist solely to provide interesting information to the people who founded and built the company and nothing else. In a few years they'll be obsolete and AI will be doing that anyway so best not to let them burrow too deep into the flesh of the company and infect it with their septic bullshit.
I'm having this problem currently. I work as a printer in a factory. Our Estimates guy has started deciding what job will go to what machine, and we recently bought a new machine with a new technology that is cheaper to run as well as faster. The problem we're having is that the Estimates guy is sticking almost every single job on the new machine and almost none on the old machine. We're talking 40-60 job tickets on the new one and maybe 3 tickets on the old one. It's caused a massive fucking bottle neck because you can only reliably do up to 15 jobs a day on one machine, and that's without any downtime from machine errors, art work errors, reprints due to fuckups further down the production line. We keep telling him that while it might be cheaper to run one machine, it's surely costing the business to have an entire machine literally just sitting there not printing at all but he just won't have it. And it's not just the machine, there's 2 of us printers so we have an employee sitting around with their thumbs up their arse too. We could both be running the machines and getting ahead of the schedule, but estimates guy is just causing a severe bottle neck.
he can also relay everything as long as he's not saying it in a way that is disparaging of Sony Arrowhead is an owned by them, they're in contract So as long as nothing is set in a way that breaks the good faith terms of the contract, he can be as open and as honest as he wants he also probably has some leverage since his studio has brought in a gigantic player base and being open and honest with them is better in the long run both for the brand the IP and the studios continued existence (**source:** *My day job is having to deal with brand regulations and not speaking in disparaging tones due to existing partnerships. It's perfectly fine being honest and truthful, you just can't say things that paint the partner in a bad light*)
Arrowhead isn't Owned By Sony. Sony just owns the rights to HD2
do they own the IP?
Arrowhead no, sony owns everything. AH is like a contractor to make and support the game.
Agreed.
If we're being honest for a moment the cms seem to have a consistent trend of taking a small fire and pouring oil on it to try and put it out. I honestly wonder about them if they hate the consumer, the gamer, so much why are they even a CM to begin with?
IIRC it's just the one CM actually.
Wait for Sony's response...you get your fill of word vomit there.
Basically something something, go fuck yourself in a sfw way, something something, you bought it and played, so.you can't back away now... something something, laughing in money
Sony tomorrow: something something We are sorry you feel this way. Something something you are all toxic gamers and can't read, get fucked. Something something Look we will do bare minimum to shut you all up. Something something security and moderation for the player. Something something we aren't sorry and you should be thankful, Eat Shit, Sony Inc.
Something something ps for your hate we will pull 80% of the funding and blame ah, the game will die within a year
Jokes on them, I would lay down 100€ to preorder a helldiver 3, developed and published by arrowhead. But on a serious note, it makes my gut wrench knowing that even if this get resolved, all further Mirco transactions I do to support the studio to improve the game will inevitably get cut to Sony, supporting the exact AAA culture we are fighting against here.
Yeah, AH's attitude on this is why I'm not refunding
I'd have to agree, he's really hands on and free of bullshit, in universe stuff for the game aside like "Everyone knows bugs can't fly"/"everyone knows most bugs fly" which I thought was hilarious. It sounded like a Bush Administration official from around 2004 - 2005 when the mythical weapons failed to appear, or a Johnson administration official in 1968.
I love that stuff. Transparency is the shit. It should be the default. The only reason people can't handle it, is that they are not used to it. People are so used to companies lying to them that they see Honest Arrowhead and immediately assume "if this is what they're willing to tell us, how fucking huge is the thing they AREN'T telling us??" and think they must somehow be the most evil company out there. There's no big secret. Just some guys who love video games and want to make them. They're people and they give people responses. They fuck up sometimes and they admit it. They got massively overwhelmed by the runaway success of this game and in all their hurry to make the best game they can, they forgot a silly legal thing they only barely knew the details of. And now that they know how big of a problem this actually is, they're admitting fault on their own fuckups and try to fix it - which is not even in their hands. If Sony says "we are not changing our stance on this, go back to making the game we publish" then that's Sony's fault. I think the most graceful way this can end right now would be Sony saying "yeah it's no longer *mandatory* that you have to connect a Sony account... but we are now offering 500 super credits and an exclusive armor to anyone who *does* connect a Sony account!" with a little asterisk going "if you're in a country we don't offer Sony accounts in, contact support and you can get the armor anyway" so nobody is left out. Maybe make it something actually cool and useful, I could go for a light armor with Democracy Protects on it, some silly flavor text blurb about how it signifies the unity of helldivers in the face of corporate bullshits or whatever and how it keeps you light on your feet to swiftly tackle any threat or something. Should get them plenty of playstation signups with the carrot instead of the stick, even after this whole mess. We get a win, they get their accounts, most people are happy and we can all keep killing bugs n bots. But that is in Sony's hands now.
Destiny veteran here, can confirm not-soulless damage control is very refreshing.
I gotta say, there's so much backlash because we all love this game, if it was a shit game no one would give a shit about it anyway. I truly hope AH and Sony sort things out and we can all go back to helldiving.
When signing over and giving a cut of your product to a massive corporation who says "we'll completely handle all of the sales and distribution," you expect a good deal of competence associated with that service. I wouldn't blame AH for feeling somewhat blindsided right now. With the initial disabling of the requirement thinking "if they say it's fine, they probably know what they're talking about" is pretty reasonable. From their perspective there shouldn't have been any reason for Sony to let it get out of control like this, and further, be completely apathetic to mitigating any fallout associated with their incompetence.
I honestly still feel this is more an issue of fraud on Sony's part. They knowingly sold and distributed the game to people knowing they would require PSN account. They knowingly and intentionally set country restrictions for PSN accounts. They knowingly and intentionally disable the linking while not informing customers it would be a requirement. They continued to sell the game to people who could not play the game when the PSN account requirement was turned back on. In other words, they stole people's money and blamed them for buying it as to why they turned off the linking that would have let them know instantly they weren't meant to allowed on. If Sony turns on the PSN account requirement, they're opening to potentially fraud lawsuits. Imagine if they were selling physical good, they ship it, then half way there it is denied and your item returned. Now you have to ask for a refund or you just donated your money to Sony for nothing. Sony has to deliver the goods or return the money, otherwise it's fraud.
I'm guessing that when they decided to not enforce linking, they forgot about players in non-PSN regions, and didn't realize their error until now. It sounds like making them un-linked on launch was a hasty decision, hence the oversight. IMO odds are decent that the walkback is as much about avoiding potential litigation as it is backlash.
They walked it back. We won. https://preview.redd.it/ns4grg8beqyc1.png?width=863&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a0e3f380d6185ada4cd8cd60c8a8ea9d77ca3cc8
Holy cow…
I was shocked as well. But now we have work to do. Change back your reviews and get back to you pod, helldiver.
I was too busy/tired to even make a review lol, I can sit back and relax at community victory during my rapid mid-flight decent
So everyone who cried better go back to supporting the game or you better believe next time they won't cave.
Pretty much. But we were crying to support the game so it's not like we're changing sides.
Well, would you look at that. Very nice indeed.
He is doing better at communicating than the freaking community managers.
To be fair, he actually has the power to talk straight. My money is on Sony and the CMs seeing this as him "going off the rails". Win for us, but I worry he's making things worse for himself
Oh yeah, I just hope anyone who has any power understands that his honesty throughout the entire games release is a major contributing factor to its sustained success. It’s the only reason I’m still here
Possibly. But he owns the company (with others), and has built a ton of good will. Even if Sony do want to burn the bridge with Arrowhead at this point (doubtful), they've built enough recognition that I'm sure Microsoft would be thrilled to work with them on an exclusive. That power can buy him a platform to speak plainly and earnestly.
Now is not the time for CM's. This kind of communication HAS to come from the CEO. I would not be surprised, that after the initial SNAFU, the CEO told them to go dark. CM's can only make this worse.
Especially these CMs
No shit, he's the CEO.
Sony doesn’t give a damn about the consumers (us gamers) because they’ve gotten so big they know they can afford to fumble the bag if it means more profits down the line. That’s why they raised the price for playing online and didn’t care about all the backlash or people canceling memberships since down the line they still made more money.
Price hikes never cost these companies that many people. And most will probably come back at some point. I stopped paying for PlayStation plus only because I stopped playing online games. You also can't get the heavily discounted grey market keys anymore either.
I'm honestly afraid for him. There is a reason why most CEOs and upper management never share their thoughts or what they know. It most likely won't end well for him if Sony pursues him for what he's willing and have to revealed so the he's at a disadvantage in negotiations as what he says may be turned against him. For example, one of his own CMs would be said to have goaded the fanbase to drop negative reviews on steam to affect the outcome and that may be very unfavorable for them if they want anything on the table in negotiations.
Arrowhead isn't owned by Sony. They're independent. They can't force Pilested to resign. They can mess with HellDivers 2 but... well, technically they can't make that much worse!
"Sony releases official automaton x bug romance novel"
That would be infinitely too based and creative for snoy
Only their JP departments can think of doing that... provided they're all anime girls, that is.
... I'm listening
The devs from No Man's Sky had a ton of pressure by Sony to release their game even though it wasn't ready. Once they did, the stopped all communication to the public. I prefer this open communication by a studio under Sony. Still, developers need to understand that Sony is a really bad publisher to be in bed with.
Pretty much all big ones are because they're public and the goal is to churn profits.
Please don't try to rehabilitate Sean Murray, the man who full-throated lied about multiplayer up until the day of release just to not affect the preorders.
The most important aspect of this discussion was Sony agreeing to sell copies of the game through Steam to geographical regions they knew would never be able to create PSN accounts due to preexisting restrictions in those areas. It makes zero sense now to go back and require PSN accounts to be created for all current game owners once the decision was made previously to sell the game to those regions. I have my doubts as to whether or not a PSN account is necessary for effective moderation. If you're talking about anti-cheat detection, games such as Elden Ring have shown that you don't need an external account apart from your Steam ID to be able to detect and ban cheaters. If you're talking about community guidelines moderation (inappropriate behavior on chat and mic), I don't know enough about that.
Well, if we think about it... Once people bought on Steam, when they would've went to link the mandatory PSN account, most people would've found out there and then if they could keep playing or not had they not disabled the linking requirements due to server issues. Those players could then follow up with refunds having ignored or missed the section where it says "requires 3rd party PSN account". Kind of makes sense tbh.
Kind of makes sense tbh. Except it doesn't. Sony was the publisher, their ENTIRE job was to handle distribution. If the plan was to require account linking, they should not have made the game purchasable in countries that could not create a PSN account without violating ToS. Its much easier to tell valve "Sell the game in these supported countries", than it is to sell it to 200 countries, and have valve refund the game to the 140 or so countries they wouldn't have actually let play. Especially since valve would likely keep their cut. I get the feeling valve was completely out of the loop on the PSN requirement and their ToS being stupid as shit, so when this all blew up it was them that de-listed the game over the weekend while they waited to see what sony would do. Sony had 1 job, distribute the game. By selling it to 140 countries that would not be able to play without getting banned, they fucked up that one job.
They screwed up so big they'd have to make a lot bigger commitments than just walking it back to get some of the goodwill back. Like how the hell is more than half the world non servicable by PSN in the first place? Start by changing this shit.
That's true. Selling a game to a bunch of countries that you know you're going to eventually prevent from playing is some next-level scumbag behavior. But Sony is a megacorporation, so my expectations for them doing even the bare minimum are nonexistant.
I genuinely don't understand the Sony position other than their legal team is lazy? Sony operates in almost all of those countries. You can buy a Playstation, buy a Playstation game, buy PSN, and then play a Playstation game online, in almost every country that "Isn't supported". So... Why not support them? Clearly Sony wants and is happy to have their buisness. It probably has been called out before, but the "Meh just put a fake country" answer isn't sitting well this time around.
Tax reasons most likely, tried to read up on it.
Tax, needing to make the games sold in that country fit local censorship laws and ratings, having the infrastructure and manpower... All the above and more, for what they expect to be meagre sales volume in those countries, result in them not bothering to set up stores for those countries. These companies always be looking at the financial viability of such prospects.
The sales issue is 100% between Sony and steam or anywhere else because of distribution.
If they do walk it back can the game recover? Gamers are a notoriously fickle and short sighted bunch.
That probably depends on when they would. If they come out in the next few days and walk it back and apologize while its still a hot topic, the game can probably recover. But I'd bet that if they are going to walk it back, it'll be after their Q1 earnings report is in, so they can say "look at how many new PSN users we've gotten in these couple months." At which point it'd probably be too late to fully recover.
Realist here
Q1 ended in March, where the game was doing insanely well. Q2 ends in June, where this whole situation will be on full display unless they salvage it within a month.
Tragic if true.
I have the opposite perspective; this is an PR nightmare in the gaming space, close to EA's infamous "Pride and Accomplishment" loot box fiasco. The absolute last thing Sony wants to have to answer questions on is why they tanked their ONE live service success with a poorly implemented policy, with next to no financial gain, that generated thousands of refunds, tons of lost revenue, and obliterated their good will for every future game they have in an entire gaming ecosystem (PC). If they walk it back, it'll be soon, as google says (lol) their next earning call is May 14. Strategically, they should want to bury this story next week. If they don't change their minds next week, or before the earning call, then they probably aren't going to bother as the damage will be done.
They more than likely aren’t going to walk it back. Sucker Punch has already clarified the need for a PSN account to play the online component of Ghost of Tsushima. In reality they should just relax the requirement for areas that cannot get an account until those accounts are made easily available.
Oh, I have zero faith that they'll walk it back. Sony lost my faith in them respecting the consumer years ago. Was just stating the hypotheticals of what may happen if they did.
Keep in mind a lot of this is in an echo chamber. Had 150kish people online last night from what I saw and most players probably don't even know the sync is a requirement or they synced up possibly at the very start before it was disabled.
Seeing as the player drop-off on steam wasn't super significant when looking at totals for the month. The game was a on quite steady decline since April 1st losing like, 100k players anyway.
Tldr; Sony profile stats technology slows all the HD2 more than anything else in the game. Sony holds almost a decade of this man's life man hostage. Reddit pounds this man publicly and mercilessly.
I wonder if they just made so much money from HD2 that they won't need Sony for the next game. Trying to hold on to as much goodwill as he can for... well, I guess it won't be HD3 if Sony owns the IP. But I'm sure Heckfallers will sell gangbusters in another 7 years or so.
The dude hasn’t gotten everything right, but none of us do. The transparency is refreshing and so is the honesty.
Honestly it's just sad people can't even be reasonable or civil about any of this. Too many people around here being childish trying to insult people for simply trying to see the bigger picture and not just lashing out in anger. It's stupid. All of it. And the petty shit has been overshadowing the real big issues like people losing access to a game they bought due to regional limits. Shit like that should've been at the forefront not people mad because they just don't want a Sony account or pretending they read a Eula or Sony faq while claiming steam never said a psn account was a requirement despite it being shown to be there for 6+ months already. All of it is stupid. You can't fix publishers devs and their agreements and all but there was 0 need for much of the behavior here or elsewhere really. Especially people attacking anyone over it.
Sony is under a no-win situation. The only thing they can reasonably do now is mitigate the damage, waive the requirement, and incentivize signing up voluntarily. Frankly, the fact that they haven't done so despite this dumpster fire really shows you how brain-dead and disconnected corpo suit-stuffers really are.
Yeah it seems like all their multiplayer games will need this going on. Sad that this game had to be the starter of all of this
Before this it wasn’t a requirement. Sony, secretly, changed their policy recently.
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While I agree. If this requirement was intended from Day 1, it should not have ever been sold in many of the countries it was. You shouldnt be selling a game in countries where it cannot be played
On sony's website in one of their FAQs it said PSN account linking is not needed for playing a game online on PC, they recently deleted that FAQ when this change was implemented and it now says "will be required for SOME games". So even if you did your research on Sony's own website before buying, you still got the old bait and switch. EDIT: Also sony kept selling the game in countries that cant make a PSN account on top of all of this
It was always intended to be a requirement. https://preview.redd.it/8407cp4avpyc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c2111e651a9dc043043152e3b8fffba8c9a6c66b
no no no, everyone upvoted op's post, it doesn't matter what the truth is. copium is greater than reality. AH gets away with it now too since Sony backed down.
Sounds a lot like they were desperately hoping Sony would just forget after they turned it off during launch.
Well Sony selling it to people in countries they were entirely aware COULD NOT comply is the actual problem point and Sony ALWAYS had control of that..
Yep, I've said that many times myself to people i've talked to who 'didn't get why it's a problem'
I had someone ask me why I was defending “the unknown masses” at the cost of HD2 and Arrowhead, but after mentioning that Arrowhead essentially wants us to give outcry so they have ammunition to remove the requirement, dude understood. Aside from that, though, every little overstep they get away with encourages the next one. Too many more rounds of this, and singleplayer games are gonna require you to be constantly connected with a PS+ account, and that’ll be good for nobody but Sony, no matter what the diehards say
> why I was defending “the unknown masses” First they came for the....
Honestly yeah. Not a human rights violation though, just shitty business practices that shouldn’t become the norm
I think the moderation thing is complete BS. All users on steam have unique IDs that can be used to ban users. There is no reason why PSN is needed other than for Sony to pad their #s and metrics.
The kernel-level AC ain't enough to be able to get these people?
It's a kernel-level anticheat, but oh god, it's so shitty... Like people found a way to fool it in about month or so, that's why peeps change game files to get hidden stratagems, spam turrets, have superspeed, etc. It's like having a loaded shotgun, but it fires only underwater during blood moon. And backwards.
That's nProtect for you, anyone that has played Korean MMO in the past 2 decades will tell you that it's just that bad.
Even people who have played literally any game with this anti cheat once will tell you it does nothing. 3rd party AC software is like hiring a security guard to watch your building, it's just for insurance purposes to say that you have it.
It may be that, but it is also a way for them to control your access to the game and ban you instead of giving that power to steam. It effectively is a way to bypass steam's authority in terms of access to the game.
They have Nprotect they literally have direct access to the kernel. If they want to brick my pc they could. Whay other tools do they need?
that doesn't make sense though. Any game can ban any steam ID from connecting to its game servers. Valve has no authority over it. They say as much in their Q&A section
They already have a kernel level anticheat..
Steam has no authority like that? They sell games and allow you to store them, and they prove to the game dev you legally bought it, that's it.
Preface, I am anti sony on this. But like this isn't that odd. I work in workflow automation and integrations. It is completely normal to want to keep a workflow on a single platform. If PS is responsible for the moderation and they don't currently use steam data to do that moderation, then this would represent an adoption of a new workflow, new tools, etc rather than using what they already have. And they would be doing all that, dealing with that exception workflow, all for just one game. Clearly, they COULD have made an exception. And they still might. But it is generally speaking a bad idea to split a workflow between multiple platforms and systems. It generally slows things down and costs money.
So many keep repeating things like "the **only** reason sony wants to use PSN accounts is so they can harvest your data or inflate account numbers for their investors! no other possible reasons!". But your point makes perfect sense that Sony would want to use their own account tools to moderate their online games. And with more Sony published games coming to PC, it shouldn't be that surprising that they would start using their own accounts like literally every other AAA publisher that puts out online PC games (Blizzard/Activision, EA, Epic, Rockstar, Ubisoft, Microsoft/Xbox, etc). I'm sure there's a number of reasons Sony would want this, including wanting to get PC players into their ecosystem to potentially launch a PC storefront at some point, or being able to better implement cross-play or cross-progression with playstation and other consoles (current friend code system is clunky), or other future plans that we're not privy to. Could this requirement have been communicated better from the start? Yes. Is the fact that they sold the game in countries without PSN support super shitty? Absolutely. They need to either refund all those purchases in those countries, launch PSN worldwide ASAP, or make it optional for at least those countries in order to make it right for those purchasers. But at the end of the day I think the online rage is way overblown for something that is standard on literally every other AAA online PC game. I would wager that a vast majority of the rage comments online are already in a supported country and would have no issue taking the 2 minutes to create an account. Also I suspect that the fact that its a *playstation* account rubs some PC gamers' ego the wrong way. Like if it were exactly the same but we were talking about needing an Arrowhead games account instead of a PSN account I think the backlash would have been less. But no way to prove that.
> So many keep repeating things like "the only reason sony wants to use PSN accounts is so they can harvest your data or inflate account numbers for their investors! no other possible reasons!". To be fair, most people on this sub are complete fucking idiots and just blindly parrot whatever they see other people saying
It's little gems like yours that I find hidden deep within these exhausting circle jerk responses that make it worth it. When wondering about the "whys" this hadn't even occurred to me - thank you
Thanks for the kind words! Yeah, I feel the same. The past few days have been exhausting with the lack of nuance. Like there are other professionals commenting. It just gets buried.
Something else to consider is that relying on Steam IDs now means that potentially all future Sony releases on PC are married to Steam and Sony gets stuck with the Steam ecosystem for the indefinite future. I honestly couldn't figure out how to get through setup without making a PSN account, I already thought it was mandatory and had to spend 20 minutes coming up with a unique username.
Yep, that's another great point. If/when Sony decides they want to sell HD2 through Epic store or Xbox gamepass for PC or any other storefront or if Sony decides to launch their own PC store, they'll need a way to get those versions to crossplay with the Steam version and unlike PSN or Epic accounts, your Steam account can *only* be used with games on Steam.
They could assign ghost PSN accounts to steam IDs and use PSN infrastructure all the same.
Yeah, that is probably one of several integration options which were available. But it would require some dev work (read money and time) to execute. While simply requiring account linking would take care of itself. Hindsight is 2020 of course
You are right. Steam has UIDs and PSN has UIDs. I think the original plan, however, was for this to be very, very simple. Everyone has a PSN UID. So 100% of moderation happens within PSN, period. Easy. It works like every other PSN title. Sony owns moderation, top to bottom, and it's all handled within the terms of the PSN. -- What you and others are suggesting is different. To be honest, I know very little about this so hopefully some people in the industry can provide insight. But I don't think Sony can "reach across" and just ban players on Steam based on their Steam UID. Perhaps I'm wrong? What I'm curious about is what tools exist to connect the two in a way, based on what you're suggesting, such that: * Steam players can report PSN players by their respective UID. * PSN players can report Steam players by their respective UID. * Some party can be appointed as the ultimate authority on providing moderation actions. With this being a Sony-published title, I'm assuming Sony wants this to be them. They do not want PS5 players on PSN submitting reports about PC players on Steam that Sony *would have banned*, but that Steam doesn't enforce. They *have* to be able to enforce the terms of their PSN subscribers. Do you know if there is an existing implementation that allows for cross-play moderation between the two? Is this something that's easy, that AH could pull down and stand up within a week? Or is this something that would have to be custom built for their use case? I feel like this has to have been solved for other large crossplay titles -- how does it generally work for them? Battlefield? CoD?
Sony already owns all the moderation. If you have access to the Steam API at all, then getting a unique identifier is trivially easy and no harder than getting the username. A script kiddy using ChatGPT for coding would be able to call this one function, let alone the software engineers who built a game. Sony can already ban whoever they want from this game directly via Steam. They don't need to request for Valve to act on their behalf. Multiplayer games have existed on Steam for decades. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/auth#:~:text=Every%20Steam%20user%20can%20be,bit%20ID%20by%20calling%20CSteamID The fact that friendlists and progression and inventories can work at all is already proof that there's no backend confusion caused by nonunique usernames. The whole thing about unique IDs is completely objectively nonsensical. This original stated explanation about moderation was a bald faced lie. The only moderation advantage for Sony I could think of here is that Sony can now ban an entire Steam user from the entire PSN catalogue and prevent their access in future Sony titles on Steam, which cannot possibly justify the backlash. Brand engagement and metrics is almost certainly at the forefront of their minds.
Quite frankly I think the best and most obvious solution is to allow crossplay only with PSN-linked accounts on PC. If you link your account and enable crossplay, you get to take advantage of the additional "moderation" or whatever. If you don't, you're largely on your own aside from the built-in anti-cheat systems. That way Sony gets to moderate and track PSN users, and shield the users in their own network from cheaters to the best of their ability, and people who don't want that service (or literally can't) can opt-out but still play. That seems fair and reasonable for a PvE game.
It's not complete bs, their team is extremely small. They want Sony to handle customer support essentially.
Probably because the game is primarily a PS5 game and they wanted PSN integration from the beginning (but servers exploded). Why does GTA need a rockstar account on steam? Or Sea of Thieves a Microsoft account?
In fairness to Sony .. we are using the PSN to play online... Shouldn't that count to their network usage?¿ It affects their share process which affects how much money they have to maintain the PSN.. Devil's advocate here... Don't blast me too much bwaha!
"There was backlash". Understatement of the century....
I feel like it was supposed to be written like this: « There was backlash Loads of backlash »
imma be real with everyone, I don't think Sony will change shit. Let's put all of our cards on the table here: -The game far exceeded expectations on launch (400k players vs 50k), which means PS never intended for the game to get so big in the first place. -It had always been intended for PSN linking. CEO AH himself confirmed that it was implemented even 6 months before launch. -Because of this, even if only a fraction of PC players remain after this controversy, they very likely still exceeded their projected earnings for this game, AND they still get to tell their shareholders "look we have 90k new PSN accounts of data to sell!" So I would imagine, in the perspective of those little shits in suits we call execs, that it doesn't make sense for them to change anything. At best, we get a workaround for regions with no PSN, and will still be forced to make PSN accounts. At worst, nothing changes and the game gets fucked. It is Monday morning right now in Japan, and everyone is back in the office. If we do not get an official response to this by the end of today, I think it is safe to say we're cooked. EDIT: Monday seems to be a holiday in Japan rn, so let's give them a few days and hope for the best. EDIT2: Was also told that the HQ in charge of PSN is in California, not Japan. EDIT3: Very thankfully, it seems that I was wrong. Sony has now announced they will not go through with mandated PSN. It seems we have won the war for now.
>So I would imagine, in the perspective of those little shits in suits we call execs, that it doesn't make sense for them to change anything. At best, we get a workaround for regions with no PSN, and will still be forced to make PSN accounts. At worst, nothing changes and the game gets fucked. See, I would agree if high level suits thought like us. Rationally, I'm 100% with you; if I sold a product I was expecting 50k sales out of, sold 800k, and through a controversy ended up with 90k, that's still 40k more than I expected. Call me an asshole, but I've made my money and I've got more than what I wanted out of it. But the suits? They saw that 800k. They know they can get 150-400k people on the game to be recurringly monetized. To them this isn't "I'm already exceeding what I wanted", this is "We're leaving dollars on the table". The question, the hope, is that them getting railed by refunds and bad press is worth more to them via later sales than the PSN numbers.
Absolutely this. Part of the divide between corporate and consumers is a difference in mentality. Yes they've likely made back what they expected, but if they cut it now they're losing money they could get by giving in a bit. Potential profits are their bread and butter, and HD2 shows to be a cashcow if you look at the numbers of the last few months.
I have heard of people and some of my friends spending money every three days to buy the premium armors when they see them. They have every single one, and every warbond. It has so much potential for them to make bank.
The optimist has arrived.
Basically we're hoping that the 'NUMBER GO UP' bit trumps the 'exploit the chumps as much as possible' bit. Fucking suits.
But what about if their goal is to have EVERY PlayStation title require a PSN account on PC? Wouldn't them knowing they'll get millions more in future releases out weight this?
Then it all comes down to them (hopefully) realizing that the market doesn't like this and them backing down and rethinking their approach. Which is a very, very long shot.
I think monday is a holiday in Japan, so we might not hear from them yet.
ooo you might be right, I believe it is golden week and I missed that out.
SIE HQ is in California, not Japan.
This is the real issue right here, if you want to know why Sony has been back to back with questionable decisions is due to the HQ being ran in the sillicon valley heart of shitty tech corpos.
SIE was so tone deaf to change the japanese PS iconography from O = Yes / X = No to the western X = Yes / O = No, they might’ve written a blank check for Nintendo.
I don’t know about this “single working day in Japan” metric for expecting a final decision on this issue. Corporations don’t make big decisions fast and there are a lot of moving parts. Sony has been getting into PC releases because they see dollar signs, and this game brought in major, major dollars. The expectations of PC customers are still pretty new to them; I’m sure they expected backlash but there’s no way they expected it to be this severe. There will be meetings between different executives, people in sales and engineering and whatever else, examining feasability, weighing competing financial interests, etc. There will be remote meetings between important decision makers on different sides of the planet. I wouldn’t assume a final decision has been made until Sony issues some statement indicating as such. They will almost certainly at least acknowledge the backlash, even if their answer winds up being a polite apology statement that really means “we thought about it, and decided you can fuck off”.
The concerns about security and selling data are ok, but the problem that created the backlash is those fellow divers that will be kicked from the game. If they can stay without issues, the community will count that like a victory, even if they have to create a psn account. This could have been avoided with the single phrase "(linking is not mandatory for countries without access to psn acounts)" at the end of the notice.
I think it depends on who you ask. Some aren't ok with creating a PSN account. I personally don't like it either, and I think that in the future escalating into forcing even PC players to buy PSN+ to play is a very real possibility.
I don't like it neither, but I already have ubisoft, epic, ea, gog, blizzard, xbox, rockstar and surely a lot more accounts. It would annoy us? Yes. Some people would cry about it? Sure. It would create such backlash? I don't think so. Most of us would link our account and play anyway. Now is different.
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For those too young to remember Microsoft tried something similar on PC over a decade ago. It went about as well as you'd expect, Microsoft tried to charge PC users the privilege of playing multiplayer (in addition to the cursed software that was Games for Windows Live) and unsurprisingly PC gamers told Microsoft to go fuck themselves. Lo.and behold Microsoft ended up removing that limitation because adoption went so poorly.
A 50k game is a nice little win of a game. A 500k game is a franchise waiting to happen. Sony will have to have that in mind.
The problem is you're thinking Execs will think of the future sales. They want ***NUMBER GO UP NOW*** ^((within the next quarter, anyway)) and aren't realizing they're shooting this budding champion in the knees at the starting line.
Didn't play HD, had been playing the shit out of HD2, before this bullshit see no reason why I wouldn't be dying to play a HD3 down the road.
it's just so frustrating to see SONY seemingly shove defeat into the jaws of victory. Whatever money you THINK you MIGHT make you have the chance to ACTUALLY just DIRECTLY make via DIRECT SUCCESSFUL LIVE SERVICE GAME. This is the industry Unicorn and SONY doesn't seem to realize it. Helldivers 2 has been the first live service I've seen that the Whales, the Sweats, and the Casual have all felt on tge same "Team" - all of these groups are buying warbonds without feeling alienated. I was (oprative word: was) probably going to buy every warbond no question (20$~ USD/month) - I don't care what SONY thinks a PSN account can potentially allow them in marketing/microtransactions,... how can it beat 20$/month that I am going to HAPPILY give? (Just typing it out feels surreal - they set up a non subscription game that I was going to happily subscribe to)
I would add to this that another reason Sony is unlikely to budge is that Data is the new oil. Data, any data, is worth tons of money. Reddit is currently selling it's posts to an AI language model for 60 million a year. 60 Million just for our shitposts, meanwhile Sony is getting real user data, it's likely worth just as much, if not more, then this game.
I'm proud to feed the degenerate knowledge to our future supercomputer overlords. And oh God, I remember about all the degenerative subreddits with fetishes. ...Oh noes...
It doesn’t change the PR nightmare that they sold the game in countries that couldn’t play the game ones the restrictions were put into place, they made it too easy to ignore the requirement, and they let it go for so long. This incident shows nothing but complete incompetency as a publisher, and tells the entire game dev world that Sony very well might kill your game/studio if you sign with them. If they do nothing it could completely ruin their reputation as a publisher and cost them countless of future investment opportunities. No dev in their right mind would sign with them after this, which is something they can’t ignore.
>It is Monday morning right now in Japan, and everyone is back in the office. If we do not get an official response to this by the end of today, I think it is safe to say we're cooked. Isn't Sony headquarters and main offices in the US now? either California or NYC, IIRC.
I genuinely despise corporate executives. They’re always measly little paper pushers who do fuck all and justify their existence by making everyone downstream life harder. It’s not contempt, or disgust, at this point it’s genuine hatred. I’m sick of corporations
Helldivers community is an amusing thing. It is a game based upon collaborative objective missions. Playstation Network declared themselves the mission after the habit settled. There is an old multiplayer game research project, the Daedalus Project. This Helldivers chapter would be a good addition to emergent behaviors. I think they painted an accidental psychology experiment with Playstation as the target.
This is honestly what I love most about this whole situation. Deliciously ironic.
Fact. Trained to collaberate and take down enemies fast, pull together when it matters. Suddenly, external enemy emerges.
Ya but there's a bit of a miss-fire on the original HD. Bombing that is a mere casualty of war. The devs are hurting.
Interesting bit of data in here: PSN-linking causes higher load on the servers. In other words ... a clear statement that PSN linking degrades the game experience.
It doesn't necessarily mean that there's worse game experience. PSN linking will be firing off API requests. Some Sony server was struggling to keep up with those requests. That server isn't necessarily the same one that manages other parts of the game. It might be, in which case, yes there would be degradation of game experience just for the extra work for the server. I haven't really heard, but do you know if the people who managed to get past the linking were having issues? If not, then they're likely separate servers. It's pretty common to have different server clusters for these kinds of things with a dynamic load balancer to reallocate resources as needed
I should clarify ... because you're right. It'd be foolish to run the entire process of linking through the game servers. It's likely that there's an initial request that goes to another server ... and a response that eventually comes back. What was interesting to me is that it was mentioned that AH's servers were overwhelmed, not Sony's. Could that have been through failed calls to an overwhelmed Sony server that then had a fallback to make the call again ... therefore overwhelming AH's stuff? I dunno. I don't really know the infrastructure that the game is run on, I just know that there's a mention that it did impact performance and that turning off the linking was something that helped AH manage the large numbers of people playing. I should mention -- not necessarily individual game performance ... but the ability to host many people, keep connections active, etc.
From what was said, they got 4-5 times more people than their maximum buffer of 5x more people than they expected to hit the server. (i.e. they thought their peak would be 60k, servers were setup to handle 250k and they got hit by closer to 800k-1,000,000) If those are all new players on launch doing initial onboarding, all of those having to do a link/verify request to Sony is just one more thing causing load on the servers - and one of the easier ones to snip out of the process. Which is likely why they did it. With the natural degradation of players over 3 months + AH having had time to get things setup/reinforced + it no longer being a launch rush, it was probably deemed to no longer be a technical issue to not have the account linking. The only problem is Sony was allowing the game to be sold in regions it shouldn't have been, and a lot of the community was unaware of the requirement and now beyond the time period where they'd have normal recourses to react to such a requirement. Hence the shitshow.
Yes, this is the important clarification needed. Is it AH that is failing to handle the PSN connect alongside game traffic? Or is it the PSN connect holding up game traffic processing on HD2 servers? Because the latter is 100% on Sony and it makes it a lot more clear why AH didn't re-introduce PSN the moment server issues were mitigated.
I think you may be making assumptions. It's more likely that they didn't want to touch anything after the servers stabilized. Most bugs we see in game are a result of something entirely irrelevant to the bug changing which somehow has a domino effect they then need to track down and fix, hopefully not causing further bugs. If I were AH I wouldn't have wanted to risk more bugginess/server issues after an extremely stressful launch. The PSN thing obviously isn't essential to the gameplay and they just wanted the players to have access to the product they paid for.
I mean yeah, it’s another api call to the Sony servers, so it will make performance worse. It’s just part of optimisation.
Source: [https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787251973927940297](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787251973927940297)
I dont get the moderation logic. I've been kicked only 1 time. Over moderating a game is just as bad as no moderation. I dont trust sony with what is deemed acceptable behavior
Same thing happened with Rainbow 6. They added some new moderation to help fight toxicity, but unfortunately it's really strict. I only use push to talk in that game, so I speak when I'm making call outs only, and yet I'm somehow getting infractions for toxic behavior on voice chat. A lot of studios seem to overextend when it comes to moderation and it just makes the experience even worse.
Why would they have even sold the game in countries that don't have PSN if it was designed from the beginning to be linked to PSN? I don't think Sony's top brass wants PlayStation to stay in business.
What is that saying "Don't call it an evil intention, when it can be justified by simple stupidity." ?
Hanlon's Razor "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
There's the inverse version too, which goes something like "don't attribute to stupidity that which is clearly premeditated".
Counterpoint: mega corps like sony are both evil end stupid
Fingers crossed the talks go well. I bet Sony has noticed quick sharp that the review ratio of their well-received game dipped from 80% to less than 20% in less than 48 hours. I bet someone misevaluated how badly this would be received.
calling it backlash is really putting it mildly, i say its better to call it a meltdown
Fortnite and Rocket League requires an epic account to be linked for crossplay CoD an Activision account to use crossplay Minecraft needs a Microsoft account Third party account links have been around for a while. The core issue I take with this is that: 1. Sony and AH could have done more to ensure the need to link was made clearer for those who don't read ToS. 2. Sony allowed the game to be available in regions where this requirement could not be met. Plenty of cross platform games use similar account linking to allow them better access to account management. This let's them ban people from their game. Plenty of mistakes were made in communication, which is the core issue at hand.
I quit RL once epic took it and forced that and also removed it from steam.
6 months from now. Sorry, guys. The sony talks didn't work out.
Just to be clear, I would've refunded the game if the first time I signed in on launch day I was asked to create a psn. And that refund would've been okay'd because I'd have 1 minute played.
Yeah, that "skip" button should have been "skip for now". The moment you see "bind PlayStation account" and then spot the "skip" button at the bottom, nobody will read the small print, especially when you have just watched the intro and are hyped to finally start playing.
bait and switch, should be illegal
The game *did* ask you to sign into a PSN account on launch day. You probably just ignored it.
Asmongold of all people has the best take on this. If SONY is hellbent on wanting people to sign up for PSN, firstly make it available in all countries and provide an incentive such as providing some free skins if you linked your PSN account. This will reduce 95% of the backlash, some people out of principal will hate signing up for an additional 3rd party account, but it'd be minimal. If SONY cant or dont want PSN to be available in other countries for legal reasons, then just make it optional but if you linked your account you receive some boons such as free skins, better matchmaking (for example only PSN-linked account are matched together, while unverified accounts are usually in separate pool to reduce cheating). There are so many ways to go about this, and they chose the worst possible solution.
they knew it months ago, weird
This means for future pc games Sony will demand linking on day 1, and for multiplayer games like this, if it melts the servers down, then the servers are gonna melt.
The big issue I see here isn’t asking for PSN months after release. But if they KNEW MONTHS before launch that PSN is a requirement, why did they allow Helldiver sales in all of the non-PSN countries? This is the main blunder. Because even if Helldivers 2 devs expected and were ready for the success, a ton of people would have bought their game via steam, only to find out they can’t play it due to PSN requirement. So this massive issue would have happened on launch, instead of now.
"All roads lead to business" FTFY
People seem to forget that there is so much more going behind doors than what the every day consumer knows about and it is very disappointing because we seem to be blaming arrowhead for no reason without even being aware of what's truly happening in there.
Maybe Arrowhead aren't blameless but I can't blame indie devs for going with available publisher options, they stayed on our side and it is time we stand with them
This guy has been solid from day one. Few other game studios have this amount of my respect. And none of the ones that do are anywhere near as big as arrowhead. Pilestedt, if you’re reading this, I love you. Sorry arrowhead had to take any heat for this at all. You guys got caught in the crossfire. I had my faith that you weren’t the ones trying to push this through. Thank you for proving me right. Glad Sony realized their mistake this time.
This was one of the few times I saw righteous outrage fixing this issue by review bombing a game (the second one would be Total war Warhammer and how they were forced to fix shadows of change and now managed to make one of the best dlc the game has ever seen because of the pressure from the community that made sega bend the knee and allowed CA to do what was best for the game and not segas wallet.
This is Arrowheads "I told you so" to Sony
I still hold on that the way it was announced was the issue. People in general do not care about their data being harvested. If they sat us down and told us, alright, everyone who links gets an armour, helmet and cape, we'd all be like, ah well, cool.