A few days ago, PC gamers got mad when Arrowhead and Sony said they’d need a PSN account for Helldivers 2 on Steam. But now, Sony changed its mind. PC gamers won’t have to use a PSN account for the game anymore. Yep, the company has reversed its plans of using a PSN account on PC for this particular title.
Helldivers fans — we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward.
We’re still…
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) May 6, 2024
Just to be super clear, this change only applies to Helldivers 2. Ghost of Tsushima will still need a PSN account for its Online Multiplayer and PlayStation overlay. However, you’ll be able to play the single-player campaign without needing a PSN account. So, you’ve already been warned about this title.
In short, just because Sony has backpedaled on this does not really mean anything. Yes, PC gamers have won the Helldivers 2 battle. However, future games may require a PSN account. Sony claimed that it is still learning what is best for PC players and that our feedback has been invaluable. However, this sounds like a PR statement and nothing more.
Let’s also not forget that the PSN support page still states that some PC games may require a PSN account. Back in 2022, Sony was claiming that all its PlayStation games would be playable on PC without the need for a PSN account. This shows you Sony’s real motive.
The main issue with Helldivers 2 was that the PlayStation Network isn’t available in many countries. So, Sony was basically selling a game that lots of PC gamers couldn’t play. Sure, you could make a “fake” account, but someone got banned for doing that in Helldivers 2. And then, the game became unavailable in over 100 countries. So, this wasn’t just about whining about something PC gamers did not like. This was a huge issue.
Let’s also not forget that Helldivers 2 was fully playable on PC without the need for a PSN account. So, forcing something like that on PC gamers three months after the game’s release was really stupid. I mean, there are a lot of PC gamers that don’t want to use any other store than Steam. So, what made Sony believe that they’d be OK with creating a new account for their network?
For what it’s worth, Helldivers 2 currently sits on Mostly Negative/Mixed Reviews on Steam. My guess is that things will normalize now after Sony’s announcement. So, we should expect to see more positive reviews.
Finally, as I said, I don’t expect anything major to change for future titles. At least not for single-player games. But for competitive multiplayer games, Sony has to make sure PSN is available everywhere. Otherwise, the cycle will repeat itself.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
so much power to trolls is scary. what happens if tomorrow they ask for all games to have white male protagonists. or for all women characters to wear a burka. review bombing must be addressed. It is disgusting to let it continue.
Bootlicking so hard you igrore that Sony was committing an illegal act and stole people’s money. Yep. That’s a fanboy alright
Well they better get to work and make that happen
CUSTOMERS are always right, because they control your revenue
That is what worries me.
a lot of countries could not even played the game because in there psn account doesnt work.
Not true. Playstation is being sold to many countries that no official psn support exists.
That’s an unrelated fact.
You’re an idiot if you think this change is because of “review bombing“. Sony couldn’t give a **** about a post-launch review score on Steam.
But companies are scared a heck of chargebacks. They get penalties, fines, reputation damage and legal fees.
Each $50 chargeback can easily cost a company $200 in damages, and reputation damage with banks. And there are millions of people who were ready to chargeback not just the game, but all microtransactions too.
Mass chargebacks is why companies tend to cave. That is likely what happened here.
You’re an idiot if you think this change is because of “review bombing“. Sony couldn’t give a **** about a post-launch review score on Steam.
But companies are scared a heck of chargebacks. They get penalties, fines, reputation damage and legal fees.
Each $50 chargeback can easily cost a company $200 in damages, and reputation damage with banks. And there are millions of people who were ready to chargeback not just the game, but all microtransactions too.
Mass chargebacks is why companies tend to cave. That is likely what happened here.
You forgot the “/s” at the end.
Bootlicking so hard you igrore that Sony was committing an illegal act and stole people’s money. Yep. That’s a fanboy alright
Illegal? How exactly?
Doesn’t take high brainpower to think about how taking people’s money from places that don’t have PSN accounts and then banning/locking out said places when people start pointing out why they even sold the game in said places to start with is gonna trip red flags. Sony only backed down because they were on the verge of facing extremely high chances of people forming lawsuits, not mention valve allowing refunds regardless of hours played, while uncommon to start with, is a sign that even Valve could see the issue at hand
Why didn’t Sony and AH region lock HD2 from day 1? Steam allows publishers/devs to region lock. so either extreme incompetence or malicious greed, pick one. either way. It looked bad on Sony’s end to allow places that don’t even have the ability to make PSN accounts without changing regions to buy and play the game
based toxicity.
I’m not sure DSOgaming is the right place for you. Maybe try r/PlayStation or N4G.
The trolls are not like the wokies, they wouldn’t ask for that lol. Wokies are the ones demanding race swaps.
You’re an idiot if you think this change is because of “review bombing“. Sony couldn’t give a **** about a post-launch review score on Steam.
But companies are scared a heck of chargebacks. They get penalties, fines, reputation damage and legal fees.
Each $50 chargeback can easily cost a company $200 in damages, and reputation damage with banks. And there are millions of people who were ready to chargeback not just the game, but all microtransactions too.
When companies see mass chargebacks, they panic and cave. That is likely what happened here.
There was no base at all for chargebacks, everyone was denied except from affected countries after steam’s decision to block the sales to no psn supported regions. We can assume that these cases were very limited, since we mostly discuss for non gaming countries.
A chargeback is done by the bank that issued the card you paid with. The reason chargebacks were originally conceived is due to stolen credit cards.
All the cards are stacked against the seller when a chargeback happens. The bank will almost always issue the chargeback and get your money back. And the financial institutions will also usually fine the seller and force the seller to pay for all transaction fees.
If a seller wants to dispute a chargeback, it will cost them legal fees.
If this happens with microtransactions, which are thousands of small transactions, each requiring legal dispute, the seller is completely screwed. Mass chargebacks can wreck a company involved in microtransactions.
This is the only response any steam users are receiving “We are unable to refund this purchase to your Steam Wallet at this time. Your playtime of an included product exceeds 2 hours.”
This is emphatically wrong, or misinformation at the least. Yes, that was an automated response for nearly every game where you’ve played more than 2 hours but you could easily get past that. All they had to do was re-request a refund with information about the change in licensing requirement/PSN requirement, etc,. and they were issued a refund despite being or not being in a country that supported PSN. The reddit threads are numerous about this.
You not very bright, no one is charging back Steam, unless they want their account banned.
PC master race players are not Playstation fanboys, that’s why they must calculate every step they do in this platform.
It’s official. Sony is a dogs**t company.
ikr? makes me proud I got rid of my PS4 Pro a while ago and only play on PC now. At least we can choose which publishers to support on here and aren’t tied to a single storefront.
How many years too late people come to this conclusion?
Don’t ever forget what this garbage company has tried, continues to try, and will try to do in the future.
This was a data grab, and psn number pump, and you have to be a bonafide re**rd to not see that. I’m pretty sure everyone here can figure out the only reason they backtracked this cancerous trash, was that it was becoming a PR disaster for them.
F*** Sony.
Indeed.
Remember to really rub this in the face of every bootlicker who went against the review bomb.
Sony can go eat a bag of dicks. Helldivers 2 rating should not be changed as a reminder. Just port your games, we don’t want those stupid trophies or PSN integration,/cross play.. Release Bloodborne demons souls and GT7 on PC. Those games will have large enough communitiesxwith PC players alone.
Turns out that “complaining” does, indeed, work. As it has a million times before. Imagine that. Complaining, and not, faceless voting with your wallet.
Only a complete sh*t storm that doesn’t involve money like this or SW Battlefront II’s character unlocking progression. How many years have we been whining about microtransactions?
Strong, vocal protests are the best tool we have. I was being tongue in cheek about the horrible article john wrote recently how gamers shouldnt complain online because it does nothing. One of the worst articles i have ever read in my entire life regarding gaming. It boggles the mind how someone can even process thoughts like that.
Protests have worked all the way back to microsoft wanting to make us pay for windows live. You just need to overstep hard enough that the whole comunity riots. Microtransactions dont bother anyone 99% of the time, so we dislike them by default, but nobody is gonna expend energy like it happened now for random, nameless microtransactions. But once they overstep the line with those too in a way that affects anyone, they’re gonna be let know about them as well
Wasn’t Dragon’s Dogma 2 overstepping the line according to the Internet? Nothing happened as far as I know.
There wasn’t really much that could happen in that case. They were some silly MT’s that you could find and get very easy and quickly in game, that people had a small uproar about. It died out because there wasnt much to it that tangibly affected people.
I feel like you’re fishing for something over here where protesting vocally like this is not cool or something ? The fact that it doesn’t work 100% of the time for every little thing, doesnt change the instances, very, very numerous, where it did work. It’s a good thing what happened here with Sony
Doesn’t involve money? What about the refunds? And all the negative reviews contribute negatively to future sales.
Pretty sure refunds involve the wallet of someone, but i didn’t know if it was Steam or Sony.
on paper, you would think “voting with your wallet” works, but in reality, unless masses of people from all around the glove rally together with an express purpose, it won’t matter that you or me or your friend vote with our wallets. 100 other people spread across the world will take our place and buy a game. We would be faceless, anonymous persons that nobody knows we exist. Complaining, protesting loudly is actually the very best tool that we have and it absolutely workd and has worked dozens of times over the years. You can be sure Sony shat their pants this weekend and every publisher in the business was looking at the situation
How about both, protesting AND divesting for garbage companies?
Sony should stay out of PC gaming.
The only connection Sony has with PC Gaming is PC ports. And those are not done by Sony but by Nixxes.
And Nixxes should become independent again. They are way too talented to be under the tumb of some Sony executives in Japan who don’t understand the first thing about gaming.
All Sony Japan does it take money out of gaming by buying up Western talent. They should get out of gaming altogether. Sony Japan are talentless hacks.
You mean Sony West? PlayStation has been under Californian thumb for a decade
No, I mean Sony Japan. Sony Japan ends up with the money, even though Nixxes, Guerillia Games, Nauthty Dog, Insomniac etc. are all Western studios.
Sony Japan doesn’t know the first thing about gaming, but ends up with all the money. The only thing Sony Japan did was buy up Western talent, but Sony Japan are talentless hacks.
All these developers and studios should just kick Sony Japan to the curb.
Actually headquarters are in NYC …… but most of the entertainment (Sony Pictures Entertainment) and gaming ( Sony Interactive Entertainment) based business operates out of California
Thank you
No, I mean Sony Japan. Sony Japan ends up with the money, even though Nixxes, Guerillia Games, Nauthty Dog, Insomniac etc. are all Western studios.
Sony Japan doesn’t know the first thing about gaming, but ends up with all the money. The only thing Sony Japan did was buy up Western talent, but Sony Japan are talentless hacks.
All these developers and studios should just kick Sony Japan to the curb.
Sony Japan is the good one and all those studios suck. They just killed all the people that actually cared about gaming in this company from Japan to focus on interactive movies.
Sony Japan used to have good games, but they gutted it.
Sony’s gaming and entertainment division is 100% US based and run and has been for over a decade which is why it’s called “Sony Corporation of America”.
Sony Japan is pretty much 100% hardware products (There is a Japan only music subdivision but it’s tiny compared to the US based Sony Music Group) . The United States-based Sony Corporation of America is operated independently from Sony Group Corporation Japan
I would agree with you if you weren’t an xbox n*groid.
I wish steam would just force a new policy that require your game to not have any launchers or unnecessary accounts.
It would be a big selling point for a lot of games.
This!
“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God”
-Thomas Jefferson
See this is indeed unexpected. I was waiting for them to double down and add the requirement to all other of their games on PC or some similar BS.
(where is your profile picture from?)
I love the Gamers Nexus tweet in response to this:
https://twitter.com/GamersNexus/status/1787384852074958872
I guess when Steam announced they would let anyone refund the game that wanted to is what caused Sony to change their stance.
Apes together strong.
“We win fellas, we win!!!!!” What did we win? Nothing
Should have kept the requirement just to let them know who’s the boss. These nerds will demand more now.
LMAO only low IQ n*gger f4ggots play on consoles.
What did you do about Epic’s launcher? Always online Blizzard DRMs? or Denuvo?
You did nothing, now sit the fck down nerd.
Only low IQ n*ggers use controllers.
Good keep that garbage to your PotatoStation.
I’m glad they have backpedaled on this, but the game was pretty mid regardless…so I have uninstalled it and will likely not be playing it much more. This whole fiasco has really killed my enthusiasm for future Sony games coming to Steam. Outside of getting Rift Apart and Ghost on a deep sale someday and enjoying those, I don’t see myself getting too hyped for any of their future ports knowing they could pull this again at any time.
Ha, and people said this won’t work. I guess too much drama and negative press CAN change things for the better. If only i didn’t have to install EA app/Ubisoft apps to play my Steam games as well… where are these protests?
Gamers won….they beat corporate greed…by demanding access to….a game full of microtransactions.
wait what..
Isn’t the game just $40 including access to the servers?
What do you expect from the devs? To rob a bank?
I wanted to remind myself if Hollow Knight was a good game last month.
50 hours in right now. It is a good game :D. Helldivers can go suck it for all I care.
Bad, bad, bad.
Sony shouldn’t have bent to the crybabies pressure.
Pc gamers deserve absolutely NOTHING.
Let them have their F2P, MEMO, and other garbo games.
I hope every new Sony game on PC comes with PSN sign in requirement.
They need to release their own store to spit on Steam trash too.
The amusing aspect of the situation is that Ghost of Tsushima will necessitate a PSN account for its online mode.
This seems to be going unnoticed, and Sony appears to be the victor once more.
Although PSN won’t be utilized for Helldivers 2, it seems that all future titles on PC will require PSN for online interactions.
The gaming community is so naïve.
People can always not buy the upcoming game, i know it is easy for me since i already written off Sony for more than a decade.
That is not the take to be had from my comment, everyone was making a storm cause Helldivers 2 was going to require a PSN account.
Now, there is a celebration as if it were a victory, but in reality, it is Sony who has won the war anyway, as gamers are being naïve.
Had they not been, they would have continued their complaints to prevent PSN requirements in future titles.
Ultimately, everyone will purchase Ghost of Tsushima, generating millions for Sony and no one will care about the PSN requirement, as is common in this industry. This is why publishers can often do as they please.
Similarly, Bethesda ultimately prevailed with the implementation of paid mods.
My decision not to support or purchase the game won’t make a difference; it would take a community effort, which seems impossible, as the majority of gamers are easily misled.
I suppose you are right, given that people already bought this game and still gave Sony too much leeway that lead them to this situation in the first place, but we shoudn’t get too much far into the game, this episode was embarassing for Sony and thier sychopants and it should be view in this light. Whatever bad thing happens next would have happened regardless of this event, or worse since they are always testing boundaries.
Hit them where it hurts the most, Steam refund policy works so well.