Helldivers 2 – Sony pulls defeat from the jaws of victory (Picture: Sony Interactive Entertainment)
The new PSN login policy for Helldivers 2 has caused it to be withdrawn from sale in many countries, as players review bomb the game.
Online shooter Helldivers 2 had been one the biggest surprise hits of the year, but all of a sudden its soaraway success has crash landed in a sea of angry user reviews, as the game is pulled from sale in much of the world.
It’s still available in the UK, US, and other key PlayStation regions but because the PC version now requires you to link your PlayStation Network (PSN) account before you start that’s caused predictable problems in the 177 countries around the world that don’t have easy access to PSN.
How Sony didn’t see that problem coming is a mystery but the review rating for the game on Steam is now ‘overwhelmingly negative’, with developer Arrowhead Game Studios admitting it has no clue what to do about the problem.
That’s such a monumental miscalculation it’s hard to believe it’s all true but trouble started brewing on Friday when Arrowhead revealed that the game was always supposed to require you to link to a PSN account in order to play, but that a ‘grace period’ had been created at launch where it was not needed.
This was something most people were completely unaware of (the US PlayStation website specifically says it’s not necessary for any game) but Sony now insists that from Monday, May 6 new players will have to link their Steam account to a PSN account to play. Those already playing will have to do so by May 30, with it becoming a mandatory requirement for everyone on June 4.
This immediately led to tsunami of negative reviews on Steam (over 225,000 at time of writing) but Sony has refused to issue any refunds – although some players have reported that going through Steam alone has worked.
There’s been no official comment from Arrowhead, but CEO and Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has been busy on Twitter, admitting to one disgruntled fan that he doesn’t know what they should do given that PSN isn’t supported in their country.
He also tweeted that, ‘We are talking solutions with PlayStation, especially for non-PSN countries. Your voice has been heard, and I am doing everything I can to speak for the community – but I don’t have the final say.’
He then admitted that problem was partially his fault: ‘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 six months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles,’ he added.
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For their part, Sony has claimed that the primary reason for requiring a PSN account is to prevent online abuse and to make appealing bans easier. The real reason, of course, is that they want your details so that they can market to you more effectively, which is always the reason for these sorts of things.
It’s all a colossal disaster and at the moment it’s not clear who it’s going to resolve itself and whether players will return once things have calmed down.
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