So good news; the journey of Helldivers 2 has been a beacon of positivity in a very bleak landscape of online gaming, and the entire community got Sony to back down in record time.
Their success is proof that if you care for your game and your players first of all, and not micro transactions or "spreading the message", you can truly create something special.
To see the community come together for the Major Orders (HD2 rewards everyone if e.g. key planets are taken, creating a sense of urgency rarely seen) has been great.
To me, this created the force that came to play this weekend as everyone united in support of those who had no possible way of creating a PSN account - by putting pressure on Sony in any way possible.
The Devs recommended updating the reviews and submitting refund requests as a valid way of voicing discontent - so we did. Also, Pilestedt/ Arrowhead took full and complete ownership over missteps around the requirements. This transparency was refreshing to see!
It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the reviews to be updated in the days ahead. The victory will only make the community stronger!
>if you care for your game and your players first of all, and not micro transactions or "spreading the message", you can truly create something special.
For the game that has micro transactions. Already knew it from the Steam Marketplace, but rule of cool is in full effect, even in a medium historically thought of as geeky.
>It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the reviews to be updated in the days ahead.
Bad news, many won't. Nasty side effect of review bombs is that people "forget" to update just as quickly as they start the drama.
Good news, Steams review system means they heal naturally. But it'll probably take months to get back to "outstanding" rating again, or whatever Steam calls it.
Compared to most other live service games around, the MTX in Helldivers 2 is both unobtrusive and minimal
A vast majority of the content is earned in game, with no way to purchase it with MTX. Also you earn the premium currency in the game by playing, so there no content locked out permanently behind MTX purchases
It's a move in the right direction compared to most games with MTX, they do deserve some credit here even if they aren't perfect
This comment cycle is so predictable. :-) Yup, you don't have to pay for a single thing if you play the game enough, you find super credits on the map as you go about - or unlock from Warbonds with medals - it's one of the things I love about it.
I've (happily) paid for one Warbonds set, earned another. And close to unlocking my third.
A couple of points:
There's a few individual (mainly cosmetic) items on daily rotation available for instant unlock, but you still have to earn medals in the game to unlock e.g weapons in the Warbond sets.
And there's no time limit on the Warbonds, you can unlock them at any point in time.
Reviews are already coming back, I'm tracking the Steam graph and we're back to "mixed" now. The Daily graph for 6th May was very encouraging!
MTX in HD2 is extremely well handled. Everything is reasonably unlockable by playing the game, since you get enough currency through regular gameplay to customize your character how you like.
I think the review bombing is stupid for many reasons.
Is the same game you were posting memes about yesterday, suddenly bad? No longer having fun?
Who do you think you are going to hurt between the less-than-30-person studio or the multinational behemoth?
Are you going to refund the game today then buy it again tomorrow when the change is reverted? You might be hurting the developer even more.
IMO Steam reviews should completely disappear as it's no longer an useful gaugfe of a game quality. Hell, I see people leave negative reviews to co-op games such as "I hAvE No fRiEnDs tO PlAy iT WiTh lOl." Are you stupid?
Besides, buy the game, test it and if you don't like refund it.
> Who do you think you are going to hurt between the less-than-30-person studio or the multinational behemoth?
Evidence indicates it hurt Sony far more than the developers.
> Are you going to refund the game today then buy it again tomorrow when the change is reverted? You might be hurting the developer even more.
Unlikely as Sony, the distributor/publisher is the party from whom refunds will be taken, the developer only gets paid after Sony takes their cuts.
> IMO Steam reviews should completely disappear as it's no longer an useful gaugfe of a game quality.
They might! This is a valid point and might be the opinion of Valve, too, if Sony or the publisher ask. They've done it before.
> Hell, I see people leave negative reviews to co-op games such as "I hAvE No fRiEnDs tO PlAy iT WiTh lOl." Are you stupid?
Yes, lots of people are very stupid, but that's not relevant here.
> Besides, buy the game, test it and if you don't like refund it.
How does one test a game when the publisher makes changes months after initial release? How is what you're suggesting here different from what you criticized a few lines above?
So, if I want to share my displeasure with a product I shouldn't show this displeasure with reviews? WTH? How companies will get feedback from their customers without reviews?! How customers would share their experiences with one another? How prospective customers would be informed before buying a product?
Boohoo. I’m happy any time people show some spine and principles, instead of sucking up to companies and brands. We should do it more, not less. Review bombing is a great start.
As a Steam customer, I appreciate it when others review bomb games that do that kind of thing. It is a huge red flag that I want to know about when buying them.
As someone who wants to play games, it's frustrating navigating through every drama just to know if a game is actually for me. These are the same people who want to "keep politics out of games"?
Voicing your disagreement with a company (whatever the reason) is necessary to get things to change.
Perhaps doing so will stop future decisions that hurt consumers and by consequence the developers, publishers etc.
I don't think it's too much to say they brought this on themselves by their actions and the backlash will cause them to think twice about doing the same in future.
The developer was actively encouraging their players to ask for refunds and leave negative reviews
Their community managers started off on the wrong foot with how they reacted, but issued strong apologies and quickly changed track. The CEO himself was tweeting about his own culpability in the mess and encouraging unhappy people to make their voices heard in reviews
Arrowhead's CEO was on Twitter explicitly telling people to refund and leave negative reviews, as that customer feedback gives them more leverage to negotiate with when discussing reverting the unpopular change. But nice "what about the children".
The developer a casualty, but not in the way you're trying to portray. They were a casualty of Sony's descision to cut the game off from over half of the countries in the world. In addition, the Helldiver's team and CEO told everyone to let Sony know what we thought with our words and our pockets, so we did -- and it worked. I'd suggest looking into these things more before spouting nonsense.
To us, you come off as irrational trying to defend Sony while using the developers as your (unwilling) ammo.
Consumer activity and protest does work from time to time. One lesson to learn about these sort of statements here is not to make them during weekend. In the end backing down here at least for a while is a sensible action.
I just wish that people actually would do something about the (far worse imo) requirement to give the game kernel access for anti cheat. But nobody gives a shit about that, so they're never going to change it. It's not really acceptable in my opinion for any game to have these rootkits, but it's especially bad for a co-op game where you're going to be playing most of the time with people you know.
Especially when the anti-cheat has a tendency to cause BSoDs. For a while the anti-cheat that came with Fortnite caused my machine to BSoD over and over. I googled and a ton of people were having the same problem. There didn't seem to be a good solution just the standard "Try reinstalling everything" advice. At one point the situation caused my windows installation to corrupt and I had to completely reinstall. It's ridiculous.
It did but it wasn't a choice. The system just wouldn't boot. Repairs didn't work, trying to replace files didn't work. The only thing that would was a wipe and reinstall of the system drive.
I can't believe this hasn't been a bigger issue. Other than a handful of comments on steam about this when the game was first released, most people have either ignored this or don't care.
There’s a lot of posts about the anticheat and the issues it causes players on the steam forum, dozens if not hundreds a day still. But you’re right; enough people don’t care so the developers do nothing.
Interesting side effect of this has been that it has driven a substantial amount of people to play the game under a Linux distro using Valve’s proton wrapper for Windows emulation (same as is used on Steam Deck) because the anticheat version for Linux doesn’t have the rootkit element.
Conversely most of the cheaters that this system is designed to stop seem to also use Linux, making the entire endeavour pointless from the developer’s side, yet they remain adamant in keeping a system that harms many and doesn’t even prevent cheating anyway…
Welcome to gaming drama. Just like everything else, it's all about timing and vitality. That's why so much legal stuff that actually makes gaming worse gets through. Law isn't sexy, it's not instant.
But yea, "victory for gaming" that they don't need to log into an account... As they log into an account to boot the game up. But TWO accounts, absolutely not. Unless it's Call of Duty. Or Diablo. Or Assassin's Creed (which isn't even an online game?).
I can't even feel sorry. They bring it all on themselves.
An account that you can only have in 73 countries, while the game was originally sold in ~190. The PSN ToS is pretty awful, but what got a lot of attention was Sony just retroactively making the game unplayable for over half the globe. Yes, you can lie and give them a fake address, but in the ToS they can demand ID to prove your identity and location.
When I moved from one country to another, PSN wouldn't allow me to pay for things with the card issued by my new bank - I ended up having to open a new Sony account
I'm not sure if things are the same now - that happened in the era of transition from PS3 to 4
Don't know if you are still playing on windows the OS itself is now basically a spyware, so if people don't care about that a potential rootkit is not much.
More importantly imo is that the game is working well in the flatpak distribution of Steam.
Oh trust me, I ditched Windows a long time ago. I keep a Win10 install around for occasional games which refuse to work under Proton, but it's very rare I use it. A few years back when they got caught "testing" ads in Windows Explorer, I switched.
Anti-cheat is physically an uphill battle, because, in the end, it's all just numbers. Anti-cheat is basically trying to say "you can send these numbers but you can't send those numbers". But I can send "those" numbers. I can send any numbers I want. You can make it difficult to send the right numbers, but I've got your numbers that describe how to send the numbers right in front of me, which is a rather large help.
That's not to say it's hopeless. Sibling comments point out various options that can be run purely server-side. But there's no perfect solution. Even cloud gaming can't prevent cheating because I can take the resulting video stream and run computer vision algorithms on it and still send wrong-numbers back up as my input stream. This may not let me see through walls but is still plenty to implement an aimbot, for instance. Push it into a DRM'd device and I can grab the HDMI stream and hack apart my controller to directly apply voltages to the controller. DRM the HDMI stream and I can point a camera at my TV. Detect my aimbot through machine learning and I can put together a machine learning network with a few hundred of my buddies to precisely characterize the thresholds the server is using and stay below them while still having a cheat system that plays better than I do. And so forth.
(And do not underestimate the extent that people will go to to cheat. I don't really consider "get together with a hundred of my buddies and use machine learning to characterize your machine learning ban algorithm" to be something that could not happen. The amount of effort people will put into cheating is not bounded by your credulity. Weirder things have already happened.)
The deck is fundamentally stacked against preventing cheating. You can certainly take a bite out of it but precisely hitting the exact right contour to exactly nail the cheaters and never hit anyone by mistake is effectively impossible.
It always seemed strange that anticheat wasn’t based on statistics. If you send too many number Ns, then you get banned. Then tuning the false positive rate is an exercise for an ML model.
It won’t work perfectly, or perhaps even well, but maybe it’d work well enough to avoid rooting your customers’ PCs.
The ones I'm familiar with (e.g. Riot's) do use statistics, along with just about anything else you can think of. Code that does nothing but act as a honeypot for cheaters? Of course that's a thing. I'm actually surprised that people focus so much on the kernel part given the scale of the data collection, though the collected data is pretty innocuous.
I don't know if you can solve everything in an alternative way, but after watching the drama in Tarkov last year, I think the game companies are leaving a lot of low hanging fruit. For example people who can see through walls will track someone coming from behind the wall, before they can be seen. The server has the record of it. In the specific case of Tarkov, people got more information about other players by pointing at their wallhacked silhouettes. Again, the server knows. So did external people have to make videos about "the wiggle" to cause any change?
There's so much that could be done through basic behaviour analysis and injecting false data. Yet, instead of that, games just come loaded with anti-cheats that barely work.
I still don't understand why Microsoft just hasn't made a generic kernel anti-cheat driver yet with restricted scope and permissions, and then allowed commercial entities like Vanguard to integrate with that driver.
Theoretically, such a driver could allow anti-cheat systems like Vanguard the same permissions as before, but provide information to the user on exactly what it is doing and accessing. Even that would be an improvement. (And in the future, if the driver had a stable API surface, it would make Linux porting easier.)
For years I have wanted hardware level anti-cheat in CPU's, memory, and GPU's that came in optional "anti-cheat" editions that would get their own servers in games.
Yes, there are still possible ways of getting around this, but it becomes much harder than "Download this cheat, install, and you're aimbotting"
Yes. It's called moderation, and it's what we were doing for decades.
The problem is that multiplayer game servers aren't run by players anymore; which means they aren't moderated by players anymore. Game studios have monopolized the responsibility of moderation, and tried (utterly failed) to replace it with a rootkit.
It's really funny. They took a system that was essentially free to them (player run servers and moderation) and replaced them with expensive, in house run servers, such that if your game is more popular than you expected, everyone has a miserable time because your infra dies.
But they """had""" to, because they want to sell cosmetics and "microtransactions", nevermind that a digital costume that costs as much as a candybar or soda shouldn't be called a "micro" transaction.
You can't sell anything if you give away the authoritative server software. Valve tried to get around this by having third party servers contact an official server with a "who actually owns what" style api but nobody gives a fuck.
Ah man, it's almost like a costume that took your character artist a week to put together when they would have otherwise been sitting on their hands shouldn't cost $5
100% this. VAC remains one of the more effective anti-cheats out there while retaining relatively few privileges on the client machines.
A gaming youtuber, 3kliksphilip, made a 10-minute rundown of the state of VAC and where it may be going from here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DHMAwAeRMA. I'm unaffiliated with the channel.
The video front-loads some information that many readers here will already be familiar with (along the lines of "what's a kernel and who decided to put so many rings on it") but overall it's a nice light watch.
VAC is laughable. The state of cheating in CounterStrike has always been one of the worst games in the industry. VAC doesn't even stop blatant spin botters.
This is especially bad because in CounterStrike, a "game" is a one hour commitment with the same group of people, and most people near the higher levels of rankings report getting a match with a cheater in about 1/10 matches or more. It's so bad, there are MULTIPLE third party companies whose entire product is "we install a rootkit style anticheat software so you can actually play counterstrike" like Faceit.
Counterstrike official servers are unplayable because of cheating.
I mean, christ, Warowl literally had a video last week about how it's impossible to play the new counterstrike because of cheating! Philip should definitely be aware of that situation.
Holding it up as some sort of pillar of achievement is absurd.
I know. :( I care, obviously, but there are Dozens of Us (TM) so nothing will ever change. Most people simply do not see it as an issue to begin with, and even those who care somewhat think it's an acceptable tradeoff.
That's old school marketing. Sony knew this wasn't going to be popular, you release bad news on Friday and good news on Monday. The problem is that 1. this is a game, we get more engaged with it on weekends; 2. the internet exists; 3. the entire premise of the game is to band together against unlikely odds, the sentiment of camaraderie is there.
> People did not buy the game with that requirement
That requirement/disclaimer was present on the Steam store page the entire time the game was actually available for purchase.
The main issue was that it was not actively enforced due to server issues at the time - which the studio CEO acknowledged:
> I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough.
We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.
> The main issue was that it was not actively enforced due to server issues at the time - which the studio CEO acknowledged:
I'd say the bigger issue is that Sony listed the game for sale in many countries in which the requirement to have a PSN account could not be met because Sony doesn't offer PSN there.
If PSN were available in all of those countries then having the requirement listed (which of course nobody reads, because we're programmed to ignore that sort of thing) would be a reasonable out and I'd be fine with telling people to suck it up and make a free PSN account, but the unrestricted selling in regions in which that requirement can't be met was a huge fuckup that's entirely on Sony (and likely why Steam rightfully started giving people no hassle refunds).
The biggest issue is that the game was being sold in countries where people couldn't make an account in that country (and where making an account in a different region would be against the ToS and there's no customer support for these people). You can't sell a multiplayer only game in 177 countries that people aren't allowed to make a required account in, then not expect people not to be extremely upset.
In fact, it's insanity that Sony can sell consoles in all these countries without allowing them to make accounts when they literally require it for significant functionality. How is that okay?
Idk about Steam but even if that's true, some people bought physical copies of the game not expecting that bullshit. Many were not in countries where PSN even operates. It's bad business for sure. If it needs PSN then that needs to be the first thing you see in the description, like "Now available exclusively on PSN..."
Idk, that's what I heard. I looked around and the standard $60 edition comes with PS and PC versions. I can't say if one of those is digital only, but even if it is some people were not happy campers about the PSN requirement not being advertised. I assume the PS versions of some games can be played offline with no account, but idk. I don't have a Playstation or a PSN account.
All non-free PlayStation games require both a PlayStation Network account and an active PlayStation Plus subscription for online play. Free games don't require a subscription but still require an account as far as I know. And seeing as Helldivers 2 is online only, you need both an account and a subscription to play it at all on a PlayStation.
weekend / Friday changes are really the pandora's box. It's really enticing to publish on Friday because usually it's a slower business day, and you have time to really monitor the publishing / do the talk to make decision, but it comes with a big risk that you won't feel the impact until Monday.
You're both right and wrong. You'd be surprised how much impact 100k people can have in national changes. The whole stop killing games initiative is a lot less and it's at least getting a little bit of buzz.
But the thing is you gotta do more than downvote on steam to do that. That's where you lose people. I'm sure many web devs here can attest to how much traffic is impacted by an extra click. Ironically, logging into a new website to fill out a form may be enough to kill so much momentum.
Nice, guess I can buy Helldivers 2 and see why everyone loves it so much now.
I held back specifically because (despite me already having a PSN account) this seemed like Sony was just willing to torch an incredibly successful game (and double down on that torching) in order to insure it juiced up its PSN signup numbers for its earnings reports, and it made me feel bad to support that.
But as shitty as Sony can be, at least they were willing to walk back this decision after such a huge backlash.
Just buy Earth Defense Force 5. It’s the same game with better satire and way better variety in load-outs and enemies. Also no DRM or microtransactions. Or wait for EDF6 in some weeks time.
A reminder, this is a straight up rootkit level "anti-cheat" in a game WITHOUT ANY PLAYER VS PLAYER INTERACTION
Oh no, one of my teammates has a cheat that lets them call down infinite strategems, how horrible for me. /s
They put it there so you can't give yourself free supercredits. They need a rootkit level "anti-cheat" so they can protect their stupid monetization scheme.
Griefing and trolling is just as valid a concern as cheating.
If I can join a random game and make three other people' lives spectacularly shit at the same time, that's a boon to me.
But HD2 isn't like PvP games like Counter Strike or DoTA or CoD. It's an RPG, like D&D. Just as the DM doesn't want the players cheating at dice rolls, the point of any anticheat in this situation is to make it just that much harder that the low-level cheating stays at a minimum and the bigger cheats are easier to spot.
> Nice, guess I can buy Helldivers 2 and see why everyone loves it so much now.
Great. Give them your money. That'll show 'em!
At least wait until you can say you forgot how terrible the company behaved. We can't be rid of these terrible companies because people keep handing them money. Same goes for TicketMaster. "Ugh, I hate TicketMaster! They are awful and abuse their customers" some guy says as he buys Taylor Swift tickets. Every time you give money to these companies, you're giving them bullets to fire at you.
Pretty much all companies (and people) make mistakes. I'd rather reward those that are willing to acknowledge and walk back mistakes than those that don't, especially to show them where they can see that they did the right thing and encourage them to do the right thing next time.
As long as those mistakes didn't result in horrible, life-ending consequences, at least (and I'm sorry, but forcing a PSN sign up is not one of those reasons, it's relatively minor, I just didn't really feel like supporting it since I had plenty of other games to play anyway).
Actually the biggest thing that kept me from buying it (and why I didn't buy it right away) is it seems like it doesn't have a very good single-player mode, and I mostly play games single player now (too many assholes have ruined most multiplayer games). But I've been hearing such good things about it I've been tempted to get it anyway. But the bad news was just enough for me to go "well, maybe not yet."
Also I don't think I've given Ticketmaster any money in years, but I don't go to too many live shows anymore. The couple I have are for the rare U.S. appearances of comedy groups like Letterkenny and Aunty Donna, but even then I want to say those were through AXS and not Ticketmaster, and that doesn't seem to be affiliated with Ticketmaster. It's hard to avoid giving Ticketmaster money unless you never go see any in-person shows, though, which is kind of shitty.
If it makes you feel any better, I ended up refunding the game after an hour and a half. It seems extremely repetitive, and like it would only be fun if you have a regular video game group to play with, which I don't have right now. So they didn't end up getting my money anyway.
> Also, what they were doing is outright illegal in Europe.
Do you mean because they required another unrelated service? Because ubisoft/EA etc. do that too.
Or do you mean because they sold a product and then changed it? Because the requirement was documented from the start, just not enforced until the patch.
The problem was that they sold HD2 in Estonia and Philippines for example. They don't have PSN access at all.
Thus they would have to provide false information when creating an account in a valid country, which is an EULA violation which again will result in a ban if caught.
I hate having to make accounts with publishers for games - so I’m happy that everyone got Sony to back down.
I however don’t understand why this game in particular and why Sony in particular received so much backlash, other than it wasn’t required at launch. This isn’t a new practice and most games do this now unfortunately. Microsoft, EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.
Just because most games do it doesn't make it right.
They allowed sales of the game in countries where you could not make a PSN account for one, only to bait and switch those users long after the grace period for refunds had expired on Steam.
Also, there was no need for a PSN account for Steam users. They cite things as "making the game safer for everyone", which doesn't make sense considering how often SONY has leaked user data.
The fact they the game is so beloved by a community that is also large and organized is probably what led to such a massive backlash in such a short amount of time.
All correct, but this still isn’t a unique scenario. Many games that have been very loved with a very active community have had the same requirement over the years, helldivers wasn’t anything new.
I suspect this was just a case of the internet caught hold of something and went nuts as it normally does. Was the outcome positive? Absolutely, but it isn’t a new scenario like everyone’s acting it is.
* The game was being sold in regions where players would not be able to make a PSN account, because of PSN's restrictions being tighter than Steams
* At launch the account linking was not mandatory.
* It was also not clearly communicated at this time that it would become mandatory later.
* Even after their public statement that it would be mandatory, Sony's own FAQ still said that PSN accounts were not required to play any games on PC. This was edited after people noticed (Thanks to Arrowhead's CEO calling attention to the FAQ)
At this point it would be reasonable for players to assume it was not actually mandatory at all, despite wording saying it was
And the worst part is it took months for them to fix so they could make it mandatory. Well outside of the usual return window policy for Steam
As I've said elsewhere, this is not just one screw up, it's a bunch
It would have been a very different story if the first time you launch the game it did not let you play unless you link your PSN, which is what most games with this requirement will be like. Then you can choose to either link your account or happily get your refund because you haven't actually played
Also this game has been mired in mild controversy the entire time it's been live because the dev team is genuinely incompetent ie, they released an update that included new purchasable armor that eliminated electric damage, ie a buff to electric weapons.
The same update made using electric weapons crash most games.
The released a new mech that could fire rockets. The rockets would explode immediately after firing in some cases because they would recognize a collision with the hitbox of the mech you are firing from. That's like, my-first-unity-game level bad programming there.
They released an update that supposedly fixed enemies spawning. The actual result was enemies spawning within view, constantly, to the point that even the easier difficulties would overwhelm you. I'm talking you kill an entire patrol, turn 360 degrees, and an entire new patrol spawns directly on top of the corpse of the previous group. The way the game works, this makes it essentially unplayable.
The game's friend and squad management system doesn't work fully if you play on playstation. Since launch. It also fucks up sometimes on PC if your steam username is too short. None of the Steam user APIs work on usernames, they all use a numeric SteamID
If you aren't the "host" of the session (which actually isn't the actual host of the session!) "Damage over time" effects like setting enemies on fire, or using poison gas, do not work at all, ie 0 damage. That hasn't stopped them from buffing the flamethrower because their "Metrics" (lol) say not enough people use it. They've even released armor that buffs using fire without fixing that it literally doesn't work for 3/4ths of the group.
The premier anti-armor weapon the game has is a knock off of the Javelin anti-tank missile launcher. The lock on has never worked correctly. It sometimes refuses to lock on to an enemy vehicle 10 ft in front of you. After 4 months of complaints, the devs FINALLY put it on the list of "known bugs". When people ask what's taking so long, a dev posted an inane response on discord about how "ray casts are hard and have a lot of edge cases" as if ray casts haven't been a basic tool of game development for thirty years.
Like, Arrowhead is amazing at game "feel", Magica feels awesome, even if I've never been able to adjust to the control scheme. Helldivers one seemed really fun but my friends and I couldn't get multiplayer to work, like it would just ignore some players for no reason.
That reason is because Arrowhead devs could not program themselves out of a paper bag. It's always been this way, Magica was so crash prone and buggy that they added a spell to crash the game as a joke.
Plenty of dev teams are similarly incompetent. Hell, I've been that useless before. But they evidently do zero quality assurance, and don't seem to have good enough source control to know what changes go in what release. Many of the above problems are "this would be caught by a single person attempting to play the game, how did you not catch this?"
The Arrowhead support staff said (there are only 4 of them) is that they cannot process "conduct-based reviews" of reports because they have so many users. They wanted to outsource those reports to Sony.
Basically they wanted to make it easier and quicker to ban people for hurty words.
The main problem here is that PSN accounts weren't for the benefit of the customers. Sony decides to cut loose Arrowhead tomorrow and keep the IP, the game would continue to operate as usual. Yes, they probably would have to get marketing departments, and the services that Sony was providing as publisher, but those are easier to scale up/get a partner to manage them.
The PSN requirement wasn't baked in the game, it was tacked on 6 months before release. That's why people say that while it was "required" is not "needed". Required should be kept for things that without them, the system would not work.
Part of the issue is that it wasn't required at launch, became one of the top 10 games by sales numbers and the first published by Sony to make it to that point on the leaderboards, then Sony stepped in and tried to juice their numbers.
I'm 80% speculating here, but given my conversations with avid Tekken players, PSN's authentication backend is garbage and held together with sticks and discarded chewing gum. It regularly goes down. This, I'm going to speculate, is why after 24 hours on Steam, Arrowhead made it "optional" to use PSN to log in; The backend servers were hurting and they wanted this game in the hands of as many people as was reasonable. The devs asked people to please wait a little while so the services backing it could cool off. I also remember multiple of my PS5 owning friends complaining they couldn't get the game on launch day because of nebulous authentication errors.
70% of Helldivers2 players are on PC. For any Sony executive, the thought of having PSN numbers juiced up to 3-4x the number they currently have from one game is a blank cheque from God himself.
However, since it wasn't required at (modulo a few days of) launch, it got a worldwide following. Problem 2: PSN isn't globally available, unlike Xbox, EA, Steam, etc.
Xbox/Steam/EA/Ubisoft does not care where you are. IF you have money, they will take it. If you can figure out how to log in, they will let you use your account. Microsoft/Steam work so well because you don't have to think about it: you move, update your card, buy games. Done.
If you move from the US to the EU with Sony, that might require you to forfeit all your games because you cannot change the region you are in [1] and so players have had to come up with contorted workarounds to figure out how to make things work. Players often resort to buying PSN Gift Cards and then redeeming them just so they don't have to create a whole new account or maintain two accounts (which violates the TOS) just to play their games. Technically, playing on an account outside its region violates the PSN ToS if you squint right.
Steam/Xbox/etc just shrug and go "whatever. As long as you have a card we can process the payment for, you can have your video games."
This meant that people who weren't in a PSN-covered country (which is a lot of them!) you cannot create a PSN account and thus cannot play the game without violating the TOS of the PSN by using a VPN to create the account. On top of that, the requirements for making a PSN account in some countries requires proffering up quite a bit of PII to third parties for identity verification, such as in Britain, where many users found themselves having to upload a photo of their ID and a picture just to create the account.
I didn't think having to create a PSN account was that bad to be honest. I'd have preferred them to back down about the NProtect GameGuard rootkit that comes with the game.
A quick Google tells me there's a total of 196 countries. So, are we only talking about 6 countries served by PSN or are there radically different definitions of "country" at work here?
You're right it's more than 6. The 190 figure probably comes from the number of "countries" that were restricted from purchasing the game after (and only after) the PSN account linking was announced. Steam defines a lot of territories and unrecognized regions as "countries". Supported PSN countries are listed here https://www.playstation.com/country-selector/index.html
E: Actually some of the countries in the selector aren't supported for PSN either (at least PH), so I'm no longer sure if there is an offical list of supported PSN countries anywhere.
Why do game developers need to partner with publishers like Sony and endure shit like that? What value does a publisher add in the age of online stores like Steam?
Money. Arrowhead has done a few other (very cool) games before Helldivers 2 (HD1, Magicka) but AFAIK nothing that was popular enough to allow them to finance an expensive product like HD2 on their own. And the success proves them right: ignoring the PSN shitstorm the games is highly liked and got a lot of players. So they where able to use that money to actually build a successful product.
That’s what publishers do (or one of the things): financing of projects the developer itself cannot pay for alone.
Quite a bit, believe it or not. It's often an economies of scale problem, as well as a subject matter expertise problem.
On the front, working with a publisher can help with funding. A publisher will often times front a fair amount of development costs, which depending on funding sources will often time make up a significant portion of the revenue needed for development. When people see exclusivity deals, that happens because the developer receives advanced funding for development costs, usually a significantly larger amount than one would receive from a publisher that has no platform associated with it.
For smaller studios, these teams may not have any marketing expertise. While an independent marketing team may be able to help out with this, the publisher managing this relationship, especially with teams either internal or external that they have experience with, allows the studio to focus on their development efforts.
That's not to say this is always sunshine and rainbows. The stories of publisher imposed deadlines, restrictions, etc. are true, usually without a lot of the inside baseball color of the why of these deadlines are required. That said, when Other People's Money comes into play, things always change. The cost of delaying a release is not small, even more so when there are physical products being made and fulfillment to be managed. That's not me being an apologist, just trying to add a bit more color to the social media talking points.
To the point I think you're trying to make though, with the amount of self publishing tools available, it's definitely not the necessity that it used to be to be. However, the dynamics of whether one can do something, vs. whether they're the right ones to do so something are always nuanced, especially when it comes down to the calculus of whether the benefits and the trade offs line up.
They provide a huge advertising presence for one - it's hard not to stand up and take notice when a big company like Sony plasters their front pages with ads about a game.
The other benefit is money. Smaller studios often don't have the up-front capital to outright create a game on their own - a publisher can be that stepping stone.
Do you know what the typical deal is like when that happens? Do they straight up buy the rights to the game beforehand or do the developers get a percentage of the revenue still?
Nah, everyone still loves the game and the studio, so I think it'll be okay. In the future, though, they will be less likely to buy a Sony published game. It was all Sony with this decision, and the studio was publicly upset and in some opposition to what was happening. Personally, I think we need:
1) Data protection laws so it isn't profitable anymore to attach useless accounts to games or make games online-only for a similar reason.
2) Consumer laws so that if a change happened with a digital product that removed a feature or made the product worse in some way that they'd have to offer refunds for users.
Those two things would go a long way in today's digital world. Perhaps there could be an omnibus bill to enshrine these ideas into law, and maybe a few others like net neutrality and dare I say some law to prevent cloud providers from holding your data hostage for extreme outbound transfer fees.
I've seen much worse campaigns that did not cause change that still ended up being fine in the end. Especially for entertainment, most people just want to go in and do their thing, not be a part of a long term protest/strike on a company.
I can't argue that's it's not popular. I just can't imagine why. Watching gameplay footage it looks like any of dozens of similar games. TPS, swarming mobs, orbital strike, woohoo. Would someone tell what this has that makes it so appealing?
First of all, it's incredibly fun to play with friends.
There's a fantastic story, with simple game mechanics and nearly zero immersion breaking elements.
You can load up and completely leave the real world behind, there's nothing that drags you back to it. Ie not a single symbol of today's 2024 earth; we are fully and truly fighting for Super Earth some time in the future.
Also, physics and realism is absolutely brutal. On the higher difficulty levels, your team surviving until the end feels like a real achievement.
The lore of the game is just amazing, and is lifted by epic music and voice acting, plus stellar graphics.
The orbital strikes are effectively unlimited in most cases. I like that this game isn't afraid to give you powerful toys. The devs balance the game around your weapons, not the other way around.
Plus, general execution is top notch and the game is very well optimized; I was getting solid framerates with an i7-4790 and a 1080
I would consider 45 fps "solid" for my needs. I rarely saw it dip below 30 for me
That said I did see some weird framerates on my AMD system... standing on the bridge of your ship overlooking the planet tanked the framerate hard. It has a 2070 Super and a ryzen 5 3600. But that system is in the living room and used like a game console, and I find Helldivers pretty unplayable with a controller, so I dont use it much
Gamers really don't ask much. If those things make up fun playable game it is enough to be popular. I have understood it might be formulaic, but it is well executed.
In the end you could ask same thing about any art. Music is just same notes arranged differently, sometimes with voice lines over it, instruments are mostly same. Movies, pretty much same plot points and similar characters. Same goes for TV shows and books... And all of them are popular.
You have to try it to get it. They've really tuned the gameplay and the four player co op adds a huge amount of depth. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of PVE co op games like this.
I love this genre, and Deep Rock Galactic and Alien Swarm are the only ones that are on the same level. Alien Swarm is even more tactic and punishing (no reviving at all). Full Metal Furies is also very good, but not as similar to the other three.
I've put more hours into Helldivers 1 than any other game I've ever played. Unfortunately I don't currently have a machine capable of playing HD2 but it's the kind of game I would consider buying a proper gaming laptop just to play.
Lots of other games it feels like you are playing a game, there are parts where you like "yah this is like this because game mechanics" that break immersion a lot.
Almost nothing in Helldivers 2 breaks your immersion.
Felt boring to me too. The core mechanic was just shoot everything everywhere with little discrimination and everything felt kinda same. Fun for 5 minutes. It also doesn't help that there's always some annoying racist on voice chat games when you have an accent so that takes out all the joy of co-op unless you have a premade group. Doom Eternal is arguably similar but it has enough variation and finetuning in levels, mobility, powerups, weapons, enemy types, soundtrack to make it very fun.
There's a ton of discrimination in where you shoot and with what.
Yea, the basic enemies on the easiest difficulty levels can just be shot with maximum pew pew. Then you encounter the bug that has a bullet proof headplate and it sticks it down to the ground like a shield when you start shooting - and your bullets will ricochet from it, possibly hitting your teammates if you just go hog wild on it.
Then there are the bigger enemies that have specific weak points - usually on their backs and sides, where you can't shoot but your teammates can when it focuses on you.
And the automatons shoot back, pretty accurately from far away.
The difficulty is pretty dynamic too, there are rules on how it works, but you very rarely get a break in the fighting and on higher difficulties running away is an important skill - you don't get points for shooting every enemy on the map, you just waste limited ammunition.
And then there is the plot with an actual human GM deciding what happens instead of some algorithm combined with nice immersion and a bonkers Starship Troopers-esque (the movie not the book) world.
If they hadn't forced it and instead would've gone like "Hey if you link a PSN account you get this special <Sony IP branded> item set and achievements" people would've done it willingly.
Not everyone, but a good amount. Then they could've gauged the percentage of non-PSN linked players and re-evaluate.
Basically Sony went with the stick and never even attempted a carrot.
I have no words to describe how much I hate this. I bought a game recently, It Takes Two, also from Steam and I had to create an EA Account in order to be able to start this OFFLINE game.
I didn't want to give my infos to EA, so I used an alias adress from Fastmail. I linked the game to the account and, a couple of days later, EA suddenly banned my account, with the game still on it :). Obviously no reason given
They said I can still play what I purchased tho, but that really turned me off from the game.
Huh. I thought the big fat DRM warning was from Steam, but after your post and before replying, I checked without extensions, and it didn’t show up. So this is actually a feature of the Augmented Steam extension [0]: https://i.imgur.com/5QKoUJB.png
I did the same thing, but AFAICT I don't see any way to continue playing?
I've applied for a refund on Steam explaining that due to this requirement it is essentially money stolen, but I got a negative reply based on a high play time (17 hours, including about half idle because I left the house with it running).
I was hoping the current situation would relax the refund policy to include account-linking based fraud to be part of the ToS, but that probably won't be the case now.
when I log in into the EA Client, it says that my account is banned, but I still see the game and I can start it. Any other function is disabled. Is that not working for you?
I cannot log into the account at all, so I'm stuck with the launcher.
Weirdly enough the account is still linked with my Steam account, so I can log from one to the other in the browser, but not in the game.
The EA account linking is the only thing keeping me from purchasing It Takes Two. Companies are so desperate to track my data they would rather not have my sale.
I doubt this is a controversial point, at least not in this crowd, but I'd love to see some good legislation around what it means to sell digital products, and how they are allowed to change or not allowed to change over time, whether they can be retracted, etc.
We see companies retracting licences for content regularly now (probably because we're 10+ years into these services being popular and contracts once deemed "long" are starting to expire), and we see unreasonable requirements being put on consumers after purchase. While all cases I've seen so far have been well within the terms of sale/service, they clearly go against user expectations, and consumers are clearly not accounting for these possibilities when purchasing (rightly so in my opinion). Just saying "that's the contract" isn't working, it's time for governments to step in and lay down some ground rules.
It would certainly take legislation (because companies have chosen that customer hostile, one sided contracts are currently in their interest), but I think extending something like first sale doctrine to “digital goods” would almost immediately open markets for format and resale.
In my opinion it doesn’t matter that there isn’t a fool proof way to prevent copies because companies have burned their goodwill and destroyed any post-sale value. Customers don’t understand that they are “licensing” content when the buttons they click on literally say “buy the digital version” (Nintendo), Buy (Xbox), Purchase (Steam), “Buy Now” (PlayStation), “Rent or Buy” (Amazon). They also have been burned over and over again through no fault of their own (except believing companies wouldn’t screw them over ) going all the way back to at least 2003 with PlaysForSure™ when Walmart decided to shut down their license servers and anything anyone had bought was no longer playable.
Likewise, if license servers need to be shuttered, customers must get the right to remove DRM encumbrance. Companies that sell DRMd content should be required to put unlock methods in escrow in case of bankruptcy.
So I agree. Long past time. Balance needs to be restored toward the public interest.
While I don’t like current copyright terms, if customer right to resell, format shift, etc. are restored, I feel like that at least brings us back to the state of the world 25 years ago. It wouldn’t make pirated copies any more legal than they are today (or selling a copy while keeping a “backup”), but all of that can be dealt with separately.
This has been brought up by a collective, in response to Ubisoft removing an online-only racing game from players libraries after purchase when they shut it down.
UK government has commented on this in a bit of a non-answer compared to other petitions: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/659071. However, it seems like there is legislation around intentionally omitting material information at the time of sale where there are plans to break or worsen the quality of a game later. It is prohibited by UK law.
There is now a movement called “Stop Killing Games” which seeks to clarify what the laws are for these sorts of scenarios worldwide, and to establish at least a weak precedent for a publisher being penalized for such behaviour.
Not only technical challenges, e.g. disabling some feature for the sake of security which will lock out some players... But what about content updates?
What if one is really unpopular?
Don't take me for a troll, I mean, what is a good update? Objectively!?
Because there would be this giant loop hole if you say "every content update is fine", that a studio wanting to kill off a game, they could just create a shitty update that most players hate and say "creative freedom"
What is really needed imo, is having technical updates distinct from content updates as much as possible and the ability to choose the content version for players... And self hosting servers etc.
You're right, this is absolutely something that needs to be figured out. People buy apps, get an update, and dislike the re-design.
I think this is a place where legislation should probably be explicitly hands-off, I could see something in legislating differently between access and usability, i.e. allowing apps to change pretty much however they like as long as users are fundamentally able to access the same product as before. Users wouldn't like this, but it would protect companies in some way.
Good in spirit, but I don't really see how you'd get a government to care unless the company is dumb and makes a false advertisement ("we guarantee 10 years of service!" cancelled after 6 months). It'd be hard to enforce a company to make them keep a service they don't want to maintain up.
And then there are simply some borderline content that isn't technically out of service. e.g. You may have bought a digital version of Final Fantasy VII on the PS3 (and PSP/PSV), but it didn't entitle the user to own the PS4, nor PS5 version of FF7 (Which IIRC, each are separate releases you need to pay for). It's sucky, but your PS3 version is still downloadable, and playable on those older platforms. And based on history, it should still be downloadable for an extended period even when the PS3 store shuts down.
I see your point, I wasn't trying to say that all updates should be prevented, but more that I think legislation is needed to categorise different types of updates, and then set requirements around each.
For example, I think it could define a "security update" and require security updates for the reasonable lifetime of the software/device (the EU already requires warranty repairs for reasonable device lifetime). It could define "content" and make clear the expectations around removing access to content when licences expire or how companies must communicate timelines to buyers. I imagine it would explicitly not cover all updates though as for almost any update there will be some category of users who perceive it to be "hostile" because they don't like it, but I think that's just how software evolves and not something worth changing.
I think the decision here was bad or more than a bad decision. From what I read, this was always the plan, but the overloaded servers at launch had them remove authentication to more quickly ramp up to the unexpected player count.
If this was all settled at launch, it wouldn't be any worse than a blizzard or Ubisoft release, which do requires their respective accounts.
>Who allows these bad decisions to happen in the first place?
The people who make them. Usually middle managers with some metric they want to show off to justify a bonus or promotion, not someone connected at all to the creation or usage of a thing, just one of the somewhat useless phase transition between stockholder and individual contributor.
Who would have such ideas that worsen the product to extract more profits in a capitalist system? A true miracle..
Cynicism aside, that record has been played a thousand times. There is a certain manegerial class who are unable to create anything of lasting value themselves, so they fooled themselves into believing that the destructive skill of milking money out of good things until they are broken is somehow a merit.
The value they create is always based on exhausting external resources, be it the environment, safety culture or brand trust. The good kind of business person would be able to take a thing and make money while creating value that lasts for society, employees and the company alike. Those have become rare however.
I get that linking a PSN account is kind of annoying, but what about it warranted the uproar that it received? Genuinely asking, not concern trolling or whatever.
The problem is that they sold the game in a lot of countries where you couldn't register a PSN account, including a few countries in the EU. In specific cases like Ukraine you have to own the console to be able to register a PSN account.
They've changed the Steam game entry to not allow selling in those countries, but some people from them already bought the game. PSN is only available in like 1/3 of all the countries Steam supports. And if you use a VPN or something, they can ban you for breaking ToS.
If the ban was for cheating, then it's very much "cool". Cheating in an online game should earn you a ban from all online games, period. Any other argument is akin to saying "people who do not cheat deserve a worse experience than those who do."
> Cheating in an online game should earn you a ban from all online games, period.
That implies a level of consolidation and control that I'm definitely not comfortable with. No, I don't think botting in RuneScape should mean I can't play Helldivers 2.
On each individual level yes it is warranted like singular reviews or a few comments around. Due to number of concerned customers it does get big and as such grows to rather big uproar. But for me adding extra step I don't need justifies a review and a few comments. Not that I ever bought the game.
Cutting off access to purchased game in countries where you cannot create a PSN account and you can no longer refund the game, because most likely you've played more than 2 hours. PSN isn't even available in every European country, despite the game being sold globally.
And if an email isn't much, then an kernel anticheat won't change much privacy-wise either.
Am I the only one who doesn’t care about account linking that much? Like, what are they going to steal from me that Google, Meta, Apple, doesn’t have already.
Plus if people wanted to protest, go against PlayStation directly, don't fuck up an indie studio that finally made it after 15+ of releasing games, this decision was made by Sony, not them.
I think you're missing the point here. Lots of people bought Helldivers 2 and happen to live in countries like Estonia where it'll no longer be possible to play the game because PS doesn't operate there. Even more people don't have PlayStation accounts and specifically don't want them. They bought the game in good faith and now the terms have been changed on them to something unpalatable.
This shouldn't be possible. If you buy something it should belong to you. It shouldn't be subject to the whims of companies who simply don't care about you.
In the case of not been able to play what you bought legally, I agree, it’s BS. I do remember reading that developers were working on a solution for this.
But my point remains for people screwing up the little guy (Arrowhead Studios).
With games you often really can not separate the publisher, the studio and the game from each other. And honestly in feedback consumer should not need to care where the demand for change came from. Maybe attacking studio is not fair, but attacking game due to changes by publisher or developer certainly is.
In some countires, e.g. the UK, creating a PSN account apparently requires sending Sony a copy of your ID. Given Sony's stellar record of not getting hacked this quite naturally doesn't sit well with some people.
(Disclaimer: never played Hell divers 2, not a shooter fan, and I have had PSN since near the beginning)
I'm surprised they cancelled it. Sony finally had their popular GaaS, one that released under their helm, and it seemed to be their big portal into getting more sign-ups from a platform they were starting to experiment with. I guess they didn't want to risk the PR hit in this tumultuous year, especially after having to layoff so much talent not even a few months ago.
That said, I'll still make my hot take here and say how I hate how gamers will praise review systems to help organically inform each other if products, but then abuse it (and likely bot it) whenever any slight inconvenience makes it way in here. Review bombs are a tool that get weaker the more it is utilized, and we've already seen them being used previously to protest political decisions tangentially attached to the game. Or even review bomb unrelated games who simply have the same publisher.
The tumultuous user review system with little oversight makes me understand why Epic was hesitant to put that into their storefront roadmap for years, and why Sony/Nintendo (AFAIK) don't make it easy to change your reviews retroactively.
They should mention inconveniences in the review, those are relevant.
My take is that while reviews can be weaponized (and Steam does attempt to flag that,) companies are throwing the phrase "review bombing" around to try and undermine legitimate reviews and concerns from paying customers.
Epic's choice to avoid reviews, despite the resources they have at hand, is pretty squarely anti-consumer and part of why they struggle to gain consumer trust with their store.
> to manipulate an online rating system with a semiorganized campaign of unfavorable user reviews, often as a general statement of disapproval for a creator, a publisher, or other business, rather than a genuine opinion about a specific product or experience
And yeah, that's not a bad definition. This situation seem to meet that definition. It's all relative, but I don't think needing to make a free account completely ruins the experience for 99% of modern online gamers.
>Epic's choice to avoid reviews, despite the resources they have at hand, is pretty squarely anti-consumer and part of why they struggle to gain consumer trust with their store.
I think it's simply a "lose more" scenario. The sentiment changed on Epic very quickly when they had a game people wanted on Steam, so it's a pile on reason to justify their reason to love/hate. It could be spun one way or another based on mood.
I'm not claiming that review bombing doesn't exist, if it didn't Steam wouldn't need systems to counter it. I'm saying that certain companies try to save face by falsely claiming that legitimate negative reviews, sometimes left in mass, are part of a coordinated campaign or stem from illegitimate intent/sources. Often the root cause of mass negative reviews is that the business legitimately prioritized the wrong thing, made some bad/anti-customer decision, or communicated poorly with their community.
In regards to Epic, I'm not sure which game you're referencing. I don't really get the sense that the sentiment has changed and last I saw the Epic Games store still wasn't profitable after 5 years [0]. Anecdotally, the people I know using the Epic Store either do it for Fortnite/Rocket League or just to claim the free games (and some of those people never go back to play them.)
As an aside, I think the Fortnite store may have some dark patterns, but overall Epic actually does a good job of knowing who the customers are and giving them what they want, to great success. (Apologies if I'm not using the correct terms for the Epic stuff, but I just don't use it.)
> I hate how gamers will praise review systems to help organically inform each other if products, but then abuse it (and likely bot it)
This is the genius thing about Steam reviews. You can’t bot it unless you are ready to spend thousands of $$$. This plus the playtime tag next to the review arguably makes it more valuable than the often bought out “gaming journalist” crowd’s opinion.
Youtube removing the dislike indicator in a similar vein wasn’t done to “protect against review bombing”. It done to shield certain very sensitive people from rightful criticism.
>You can’t bot it unless you are ready to spend thousands of $$$.
By this point I wouldn't be surprised if some did. It's a pretty tiny price to sway an entire public's opinion.
But i think the more realistic issue here is brigading. Gamers can easily coordinate together and use their accounts to post/change their reviews simply because "[social media] told me to"
>This plus the playtime tag next to the review arguably makes it more valuable than the often bought out “gaming journalist” crowd’s opinion.
As long as people don't read the actual reviews and they simply look at a number or blue/red text, the core issue doesn't change. Review bombs wouldn't work if people weren't so shallow about how they research their purchase.
This is not a hot take, but uninformed one. They sold a game with PSN requirement in the countries where PSN was not available at all. You would just lose access to your game after 4 months, how is that a slight inconvenience? It's a pretty big legal mess they almost got themselves into.
There are probably times when you could make an argument like this, but this isn't one of them. A company pulled something very anti-consumer, and the review system was instrumental in holding them accountable.
>You would just lose access to your game after 4 months, how is that a slight inconvenience?
Unless you were physically unable to make a PSN account, this is the exaggeration I fear from such review bombs. And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas? I would bet it is less than 84,000 people.
>There are probably times when you could make an argument like this, but this isn't one of them.
I don't think it's a good thing to only point out a systematic issue when it's inconviient. That's how these "but it worked here" sorts of issues become abused. I'd rather point out how this snowball is rolling before it becomes a boulder later on, especially when boulders have already formed and gone not nearly as mentioned.
>A company pulled something very anti-consumer,
Pet peeve: "anti-consumer" has lost all meaning. Paying $10 more was "anti consumer", downloading a store of your own preference is "anti-consumer". Now making an account you don't like is "anti-consumer"? You see how this word has gotten diluted in the gaming community, no?
I miss when inconveniences were just that, inconvient. Not a declaration of war for capitalism.
>And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas? I would bet it is less than 84,000 people.
It was delisted from 177 regions [0]. This apparently includes the CIS region [1], which has a population of nearly 240 million. You might be underestimating a bit.
There's so many confounding variables that there's no way to know if that's true or not. People often speak English on the internet, despite it not being their first language. Not every one of these regions may have heard about this in the few days it was active and so may have not participated in the reviews. And some people will just suck it up and say oh well, despite being affected. Regardless of the number affected (which is not insignificant), it completely prevents them from using a product which they purchased, and that's simply not acceptable.
>Regardless of the number affected (which is not insignificant), it completely prevents them from using a product which they purchased, and that's simply not acceptable.
I'd agree with refunds on a core level, yes.
I think my main issue here is that people who very much can access PSN are the ones making the most fuss. So it feels like a deflection rather than a core inability to play from players.
Also, the fact that this isn't the first time these regions had to deal with PSN. I bet some of them simply made accounts on a nearby, supported country. I'd bet the number of accounts being banned for such situations is multiple magnitudes less than the review bomb.
I don't think there's any evidence that this is the case, but even if it is true, so what? If anything, it's good to see American gamers standing up for those from other countries. An injury to one is an injury to all, and solidarity is the only way you can make large companies pay attention.
> And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas?
Countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Åland islands (a part of Finland) are excluded from PSN for some technicality.
As is the whole country of Philippines. (110 million people).
I'm kinda suspecting this is some weird Sony thing where they want to have a legal entity in each country with PSN and don't want the hassle - or more stupidly don't want to offer service if it's not translated to the native language.
>And yes, I know PSN supports less countries than Steam, but how many people on the internet really reside in one of those non-supported areas? I would bet it is less than 84,000 people.
I don't think it's a very good point to make. "I'm a consumer, but it doesn't affect MY bottom line, so it's not anti-consumer". Well, sure, I guess.
>I don't think it's a good thing to only point out a systematic issue when it's inconviient. That's how these "but it worked here" sorts of issues become abused. I'd rather point out how this snowball is rolling before it becomes a boulder later on, especially when boulders have already formed and gone not nearly as mentioned.
That's how you appear tone deaf. You're making your "hot take" under a legitimate case of review systems working as they were intended, it's not part of the systematic issue.
>Pet peeve: "anti-consumer" has lost all meaning. Paying $10 more was "anti consumer", downloading a store of your own preference is "anti-consumer". Now making an account you don't like is "anti-consumer"? You see how this word has gotten diluted in the gaming community, no?
I miss when inconveniences were just that, inconvient. Not a declaration of war for capitalism.
I'm not sure what war you think anyone is declaring, this is merely a bunch of frustrated paid customers voicing their opinion. There are many things in gaming, and well everywhere else, that are indeed anti-consumer. I think it's why it may appear to you that the word is diluted. Ultimately, it's down to communication between the company and their customers: if the market views something anti-consumer as "acceptable", then those things would not cause a negative reaction of this scale. I'm not saying Sony was unjustified in requiring a PSN link, but it was communicated poorly and after the game has already been sold to people who would be losing their access a result of it. It's not a new practice either: many games do require you to create an account with their or someone else's service to enable different online features, like crossplay. It's not really a problem until it's handled in a way that it becomes one.
We can't really define economic philosophy in this fashion.
>That's how you appear tone deaf.
So when a broken clock shows the corect time and you point out how the clock is broke, you're "tone deaf"? Maybe others need to widen their perspectives instead of cherry-picking the times it happened to work in their favor.
As far as I'm concerned, if you support a review bomb now, you support it when people use it to pretotest pro/anti-Taiwan, or when bigots protest some LGBT game, or when some personal drama happens and fans retaliate. It's all "their opinion", right?
But I've seen dozens of these and gamers pretend they can pick and choose when to open and close pandora's box. They chose poorly.
> There are many things in gaming, and well everywhere else, that are indeed anti-consumer. I think it's why it may appear to you that the word is diluted.
It's diluted because no one can even define what "anti-consumer" means. That's how buzzwords become created. If you use the same word to define needing an account to play on an online server and literal fraud, you only dilute the latter meaning by comparing a trivial issue with a serious (and illegal) one.
>if the market views something anti-consumer as "acceptable", then those things would not cause a negative reaction of this scale.
Yeah, because the market is a really good arbiter of morals. So what I get out of this is that releasing a broken game without promised content isn't "abti-consumer" because enough people bought it anyway. Aka "becsuse it's still fun".
If you don't understand how the above can happen and why I'm frustrated by how fickle the market is, we won't see eye to eye on this issue. I know nothing here will change with Steam or review bombs or the next gaming drama. But if they can rant on a place that impacts user decisions, I can rant at the bottom of a social media post on a technical forum, one that used to have more nuanced discussions of such issues.
>That said, I'll still make my hot take here and say how I hate how gamers will praise review systems to help organically inform each other if products, but then abuse it (and likely bot it) whenever any slight inconvenience makes it way in here.
Your "slight inconvenience" is someone else's dealbreaker. Everyone has a right to an opinion. If many people are pissed off, especially about legitimate gripes like privacy-invasive accounts and subscription schemes being sprung on them, then they deserve to be heard. If they bought the game (or someone bought it for them) then they deserve to give a review, even if it's a review that you'd rather not hear.
I'd hope it wouldn't be a hot take to suggest that not every opinion is equal.
And that's my core issue. In spirit, you make a review to inform others of a product (many of whom have not experienced it), not to act as your personal mouthpiece for whatever political issue (unless your audience is in fact a political one. e.g. You have a review site based on LGBT friendly content). As such you need to keep an audience in mind for a review. I wouldn't make a review for Pokemon in the same way to someone who maybe played one game decades ago, compared to a fellow fan who's played nearly every main entry. Different audience, different content.
I appreciate different lenses, but for these general platforms your audience is often "interested in game, is it good?". I don't think making a PSN account is enough to say "game is bad, don't buy". So I wouldn't put that in a general user review anymore than I would complaining about some small story inconsistency from an Easter egg in a game (even if it itself is a controversy in the specific community).
But I'll admit this is a very personal quirk, perhaps outdated from a bygone era when communities were tight knit and you learned to talk differently with newcomers vs other regulars. General user reviews aren't very useful to me because there is simply so many ways to get the raw footage and see for myself if it has what I like. But I appreciate deeper comparisons and retrospectives after I played a game.
There really is no such thing as 'gamers', any more than there are 'movie-goers' or 'streamers'. Everybody does it. Some demographics will love to tribe up just for the sake of it. Some will just shrug and move on. One of the saddest things about game marketing is how it's still hyper-focused on horny teens.
That said: As long as companies can change their TOS, content or even the availability of their game, the review system should be equally flexible.
>There really is no such thing as 'gamers', any more than there are 'movie-goers' or 'streamers
I do think there are such things as movie-goers and streamers. There is a difference between "I watch a marvel movie a few times a year" and "I watch a few different kinds of movies a month and discuss them at movie club meetings".
We can bikeshed the name but I'm really just talking about enthusiasts who do more than popular consumption within a hobby/medium.The stereotype doesn't matter much to my main point.
>As long as companies can change their TOS, content or even the availability of their game, the review system should be equally flexible.
My point was that review systems are not the place for "flexible" reviews, unless the game itself fundamentally changed. You can make petitions and post on social media and make videos and all that. But I don't think a user review platform is the place for the aforementioned tribalism.
The only reason I'm not fully against it is because consumers shouldn't just base their purchase of products on how popular it is (a literal fallacy in debate). They should be able to read some reviews, see that it useless or tribal to your opinon, and find proper reviews or ways to evaluate media. But that's a bigger societal can of worms to open.
> and it seemed to be their big portal into getting more sign-ups from a platform they were starting to experiment with
What’s the point of forcing people to sign up? Some form of coercive marketing opportunity? Or just number go up for shareholders? Because it seems like they’re literally providing 0 value to HD2 gamers. Like both now, and in the future. It’s beyond useless, no?
Same as Gamepass, I assume. Larger numbers of PSN, more people to advertise to for stuff like PS Now, easier monitoring of accounts for cheaters. The one piece of value I heard was that you can earn both Steam achievements and PSN trophies at once for those that care about that.
>Because it seems like they’re literally providing 0 value to HD2 gamers.
If we're being blunt, Sony provided value by giving money to Arrowhead to make a game they sold at half the price of a AAA release. I am predominantly single player, but it seems to be a tiny "cost" to make a free account to help support for a continual service, one whose only MTX seems to be a non-expiring battle pass (and maybe some cosmetics?).
I'm mostly saying this for the future rather than present. I think the only change they'll make next time is to make super sure PSN works at launch to prevent this kerfuffle.
The claim, based on the reporting I heard, was that it had to do with managing in game abuse. Sony likely has lots of tools to tracking and managing PSN account behavior and banning bad actors.
Probably not the best of phrasing. They probably didn't have to (they can definitely keep people employed for years to come if push came to shove), but to give some official details:
- Sony lost some valuations due to needing to lower their PS5 hardware sales projection from 25m to 21m for 2023
- Sony's YoY operating margin fell from 9% to 6%
The reasons for these are a topic of its own (and I'm sure I can dig up a HN post on that very subject), but in a nutshell: the number did not go up, and as usual these "low" numbers are made up for by letting go of labor, the highest expense in any given company.
Their success is proof that if you care for your game and your players first of all, and not micro transactions or "spreading the message", you can truly create something special.
To see the community come together for the Major Orders (HD2 rewards everyone if e.g. key planets are taken, creating a sense of urgency rarely seen) has been great.
To me, this created the force that came to play this weekend as everyone united in support of those who had no possible way of creating a PSN account - by putting pressure on Sony in any way possible.
The Devs recommended updating the reviews and submitting refund requests as a valid way of voicing discontent - so we did. Also, Pilestedt/ Arrowhead took full and complete ownership over missteps around the requirements. This transparency was refreshing to see!
It'll be interesting to see how long it takes for the reviews to be updated in the days ahead. The victory will only make the community stronger!