After a weekend of fire, which saw the Helldivers of Steam stand united in the breach of an unprecedented front, the militias of Super Earth inaugurated the week with a victory that was nothing short of overwhelming: Sony has retracted its position on the issue “PSN account required“, and the subsequent ceasefire put an end to the blanket review bombing on the Arrowhead Game Studios title (here is the review of Helldivers 2).
Beyond the case itself, sensational to say the least, the events of the last few days deserve to be analyzed also in relation to the – decidedly clumsy – concertation of a Sony certainly not in great shape.
Helldiver Revolt
It all started on May 3rd, just before the weekend, when an update published on the Helldivers 2 community hub started to a real revolt among the ranks of users. In the post, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, it was explained that connecting to a PSN account would become a necessary requirement to access the title’s servers, all starting from May 6th for new users and from the 30th for existing Helldivers. in service.
“Account linking plays a vital role in protecting our players and maintaining the safety and security of PlayStation and PlayStation Studios games – we read in the Sony press release – This is our primary strategy for protecting players from griefing and abuse, and allows us to ban players who engage in these types of behaviors. It also gives players who have been banned the right to appeal“.
Net of the reasons explained by the publisher, it is easy to assume that among Sony’s interests there was also that of conveying within its ecosystem the large group of PC users of Helldivers 2, which certainly would have had a major impact on PlayStation Network numbers. We are talking about a practice which, although questionable, is widely spread in the videogame industry, and which has only rarely given rise to dissent of this magnitude.
In the specific case, it is also urgent to clarify that the requirement under discussion it had already been aired at the time of the launch of Helldivers 2, only to be suspended in conjunction with the network problems recorded in the days following publication. On these notes, however, it would be wrong to dismiss the issue as a simple whim of PC users, an empty resistance to the need to fill out a form and press a couple of buttons. To begin with, both Sony and Arrowed did not manage the communication on the connection between accounts in a careful and timely manner, and this started from the day of the publication of Helldivers 2, when in the developer’s first post it was explained that, given the server-side problems, players could temporarily skip the procedure. At the same time, the FAQ page on the PlayStation portal defined this specific operation as completely “optional”, thus suggesting that the procedure would remain optional even subsequently. In short, over the months neither Arrowhead nor its publisher have treated the matter with the right transparency, and it is therefore understandable that users saw in the announcement an arbitrary and forced imposition, made even less attractive by the shadow from the past PlayStation Network failures in terms of cybersecurity.
To aggravate the gaps in communication, we then find a problem that soon became the cornerstone of community furor, namely the disparity between the list of territories in which the game is sold – officially and via Steam – and that of the countries in which it is formally You can register a PSN account.
In short, to align with the new norm, users from different territories would have violated the PlayStation Network terms of servicethus risking a ban and the loss of access rights to a game which, moreover, presented a EULA (end user license agreement) without mentioning PSN.
An avoidable conflict
When the issue of the excluded countries became the cornerstone of public protests, Sony made a further inexplicable move to say the least, going so far as to suspend the sale of the product in the territories in question, again without issuing any official statement: a sensational misstep to say the least, which suddenly fundamentally delegitimized acquisitions already made.
Given the trend, even Valve has started to distance themselves from Sony’s choicesallowing users to obtain a refund regardless of exceeding the maximum number of hours to access the cancellation of the purchase, and therefore adding to the damage to the image a potentially significant financial loss.
In the midst of this phenomenal debacle, punctuated by a storm of negative reviews on Steam (over 200 thousand in 72 hours), the CEO of Arrowhead attempted to stem the disaster by expressing his displeasure at what had happened and via social media the intention to mediate with Sony to find a solution to the crime, triggering a domino effect that in the space of three days put the future of one of the biggest gaming surprises of 2024 at serious risk. In short, over the course of a weekend, Helldivers 2 saw a sudden collapse in the numbers of its installed basecaused by a series of clumsy stances which, day by day, have worsened the status of a title counted among the best “game as a service” on the market.
Fortunately, just over 72 hours after the start of the cataclysm, Sony has now backtracked by canceling, at least for the moment, the directive of May 3rd: apparently in the near future nothing will change for PC users of Helldivers 2, and this about-face is bringing the average product ratings back up. What remains, after these three days of fire, are doubts about the solidity of the direction chosen by Sony, both as regards the foresight of its management and – and above all – as regards the ability to communicate effectively with the public. In fact, there is no doubt that the Tokyo giant has been in recent years has repeatedly made rather important misstepsbetween incomplete announcements then clarified with notes in the margin, sudden changes in its policies on cross-generationality and “next-gen” upgrades, a wavering support for important products (at least in economic terms) like PlayStation VR 2, and widespread changes of direction in relation to the plans established at the end of Jim Ryan’s mandate. Returning to the case of Helldivers 2, it is really worrying that the label had not sensed the problems within his “unification” strategyand also the late arrival of the necessary “damage control” measures suggest a certain confusion among the ranks of the management.
More generally, Sony needs to find the right harmony with its installed base strengthen the foundations of the claim “For the Players” starting from communication, which is not just marketing. All things considered, in short, we hope that the victory achieved by the Helldivers can represent a strong signal for the division led by Hiroki Totoki and for the entire industry. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
