Sony has cancelled their planned update for Helldivers 2 which would require a linked PSN account for the game on PC, following a days long campaign by the community to pushback against the plan.
“We’ve heard your feedback” the company writes on Twitter, before saying that “We’re still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable.”
That’s putting a brave face on things, after the Helldivers 2 community went into open revolt on Friday and through the weekend. Having been trained by the game’s shared galactic campaigning, the most vocal and active parts of the player base flooded the Discord servers and Reddit, and embarked on a campaign that has plunged the user review metric on Steam down from being generally positive to “Mixed” with all recent reviews being “Mostly Negative”.
There was also a note of glee yesterday when, with one of the key complaints being that PSN is not available worldwide and that this requirement would exclude players, Helldivers 2 was delisted in 177 regions on Steam – it’s most likely that this was done by Valve, who were being barraged with refund requests over the effective change in terms of use.
Sony could have weathered the storm but have decided to back down on this one for fear of hurting their reputation, and of seeing the game’s player counts tumble – this weekend saw one third fewer peak players than last weekend.
Sony’s full statement reads:
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 learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we’ll keep you updated on future plans.
What this means for Sony’s PC gaming plans going forward isn’t quite clear. Certainly it seems that Helldivers 2, which has not leant upon PSN in any user-facing way will remain an island – outside of cross-play, there’s no shared friends lists, no cross-progression, no shared trophies or anything like that – however, future games will likely still require PSN from the start. The upcoming PC release of Ghost of Tsushima will feature the first iteration of a PlayStation overlay for their PC games, and will require a PSN account in order to play the online Legends mode.
Andrewww
And now, we only have to manage to direct all that energy spent on non-issues to solve real problems this world faces, and our planet would be saved in no time..!