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'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.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/playstation/wiki/guides/psn-regions...