We are constantly limit-testing what level of exploitation our players can endure
It's weird how collective action works so well but they only choose to do it for this linking requirement. You could get the rootkits gone as well, gamers.
Most people don't know what they're installing or don't care about their privacy, which is why there's not enough people rising up against kernel level AC's. Also, not being able to play until you create an account is much more upsetting to most people, than just clicking 'update' in League of Legends.
Does the rootkit install alongside the game like without explicit user action? That's pretty unfortunate.
There's a tooltip next to the update button that says something like 'Our Anticheat Vanguard is out now!' or smth like that.
The rest is exactly the same as any other update
That is despicable TBH.
Keep in mind this is purchasing a Sony product after they already showed us who they were with the first rootkit scandal.
The Sony BMG CD copy protection rootkit scandal was a scandal focused on the implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs distributed by Sony BMG in 2005. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and "phone home" with reports on the user's private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.
the problem with that is that the people playing thoose games have no idea what a rootkit is
This! God, please.
And they already got a bunch of new accounts
Like an emotionally abusive partner.
That's part of the enshitifcation process.
Brooooo this victory is an absolute game-changer for us die-hard Xbox fans, and it's downright exhilarating! Sony's constant blunders pale in comparison to the countless triumphs of team Xbox, and this might just be the knockout blow that finally converts those Lamestationers to our side. Brace yourselves for an epic shift as the unrivaled supremacy of our console dazzles and dominates, pulling every gamer into its unstoppable vortex of pure excitement and adrenaline-fueled gaming bliss!👊👊
Whoa, this gave me some late 2000s nostalgia.
"Annnnnnnd post!"
Damn what's that youtubers channel? I always see his videos around then I forget his name when I want to watch more.
I can’t tell if you’re being downvoted by dorks who don’t realise you’re joking or by dorks who DO realise you’re joking and feel attacked. Either way, sad, silly down voters.
Or by dorks who are thoroughly exhausted of the Console Wars and know it's a joke but don't think it's funny. (It's a dead horse with $5 armor)
Get back in your hole console peasant and Xbox shill
Thanks, definitely not Xbox employee.
The amount of downvotes this has makes me worried about Lemmy’s sense of humor
Doritos Dew It Right!
Phil Spencer, is that you?
Why is this downvoted, this is great!
"we're still learning What's best for PC players"
Translation: We're trying multiple predatory methods to see how far we can push PC players and figure out what we can get away with, compared to all the shit shows we successfully pulled off on our own platform.
We all want PlayStation exclusives on PC, their response now is going to be their own launcher. Just a guess on my end.
What's wild to me is they're making their own overlay for their PC games. Ghost of Tsushima is supposed to be the first release title with it. Do they not understand steam already has an overlay? I feel like 2 overlays would just compete and be obnoxious and possibly ever impact performance.
Also, why? If it is for co-op crossplay, just make linking PSN to Steam optional, and state it is needed for inviting/grouping with any PS5 friends. Then do what every other multiplatform game does and show 2 friends list in the game.
"We're still learning just how far we can push PC players."
"we're sorry that we got caught"
This shows the power of steam reviews with it being driven by the actual community. People tried to downplay and belittle its effectiveness, but it being front and center on the store page does have more impact than there would be without steam reviews. If there were no steam reviews the PSN requirement would have been pushed through with it being easier to ignore some random internet comments on social media than a store page.
Reviews aren't pointless, but their impact only goes so far. I am assuming the massive amount of refunds had more to do with it, tbh.
I suspect someone in accounting ran the numbers and decided they stand to lose more to reduced microtransaction sales than they would have gained via selling scraped data.
Though I agreed with you. It's still a win, but we have to be careful not to conflate this with Sony "caring".
I still think the biggest reason why they wanted to push their shitty platform is to artificially push player numbers. "Look how many people use our scam network, see?"
Now the hilarious part is that hopefully someone has to explain why people go these lengths, just to not join their shitty service.
That isn’t why. PlayStation doesn’t view this as a problem and in fairness, I don’t either. If the game had shipped with this requirement, it would’ve been fine. Many people put up with Ubisoft and they have a whole separate account plus launcher.
What Sony actually wanted was to make it easier on their server side to authenticate purchases and then to use the same PSN account systems to matchmaker for easier cross-play.
Would they collect data? I guess. They can already do that if they want as a publisher. So yeah it’s purely just to use their ecosystem, which makes sense.
Insane take imo. How does purchase authentication or cross play suddenly become "easier" with this change? Either it works or it doesn't; having PC players connected to a PSN account doesn't alleviate server load.
Did I mention server load? What I mean is that having a PSN account means that whatever game is processing your account details doesn’t have to deal with Steam accounts, it just deals with a PSN account the same as it would if you were on PS5.
What I’m saying is it streamlines the code on the developers side of the games they’re publishing and again if Sony is using systems already to authenticate purchases or whatever that can be collected in systems they already have.
This isn’t rocket science, PSN may just be a translation layer.
It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.
It's literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can't for the life of me understand how you can think it's "easier" to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they're already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.
Because those systems already exist for the console players. All they’re doing is switching it over to steam but they likely had a translation layer there before to do all the things you’re saying but through PSN instead. Why? Because that system already exists for consoles.
So their options here are that they can take the netcode for consoles and modify it to utilize SteamIDs and fetch data from Steam or they can just turn your Steam ID into a console ID and treat all of the inputs to their systems exactly like they would on the PS5 while fetching them from Steam.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, I’m saying you’d think that just trying to match the console and the way it handles players would be simpler.
Especially when you’re trying to make cross play work. Clearly it wasn’t so they temporarily ditched it. Maybe Sony does just want your data but if that’s true, why would the telemetry gathering be such a big deal? And they also could just use your SteamID for that data gathering. So clearly PSN used to be more integrated than people here are suggesting
But..... that's the exact opposite of what actually happened. The PSN requirement was so buggy they had to disabled it for the game to work.
Correct, I never said it wasn’t buggy either. I’m just pointing out that if you have cross play and you already have console support with console user IDs then it makes sense to just convert PC players into that same console user system.
This is what Xbox used to do when publishing games on Steam and still do with their GamePass stuff. And very similarly, that system also broke things and still breaks things for people.
make it easier on their server side to authenticate purchases and then to use the same PSN account systems to matchmaker for easier cross-play.
Like fraud prevention?
Easier cross play?
I mean yeah this is especially true for online games as this is a form of DRM for Sony and it gives them control to easily reject or accept keys and ban users using their pre-existing systems.
Same thing with cross-play, it’s possible that some of these games were designed to use PSN systems and so that makes integration easy. No clue, but if true it makes sense from Sonys perspective on both of those fronts.
It was not “someone in accounting”
This shit goes all the way to the top. Every manager in the chain will have their take and influence on the numbers.
Sure, and I'm not suggesting said bean counter was responsible for the decision. What I am suggesting is that the only thing that influenced the decision was bottom line finances. Someone ran the numbers, and when the suits discovered that they stand to lose more money than they'd gain, they reversed the decision. Never mistake this as Sony "listening" to anything more than their investors and their bottom line.
It's probably a bit of this and a bit of that. I mean the game went from one of the best revied games to one of the worst in a day. There were refunds and a drop in players all at the same time.
My prediction is that the game will rebound, certainly, but will not reach back to the levels it had before. A percentage of people who refunded won't be buying again and another section probably will quit the game altogether, now or as soon as something newer and shinier shows up. Lots will forget to change their review.
Sony actively hurt their own game and probably made irreparable damage.
I'd imagine that there's math to be done on sales for a mixed review game vs. a overwhelming positive one, and its not favorable.
It's a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It's about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.
Made me imagine a page where everyone everyday can leave 1 vote on how good the government performs
If the scores are too low for a prolonged period of time, the government is dismissed.
(Obviously a very first-second concept with millions of flaws - just a thought)
In a two party system, that would just make it so we switch governments every day.
Two-party system is the enemy of democracy to begin with
But maybe even they would be more inclined to do better everyday
‘member We the People?
Many countries actually have such systems in place today, even Russia (lol) - not that they work too well.
Normally, there are two sources of issues here: petitions can in fact be declined, and, in cases where the signature count depends on scale of the petition they can be intentionally escalated as to make it impossible to gain enough signatures. Besides, in many cases petitions can be left unanswered for longer than promised.
Long story short, the system is open to shenanigans and doesn't make the government truly accountable.
We need the system that would actually make politicians rapidly lose their jobs when they ignore public opinion.
Good detailed response :)
make politicians rapidly lose their jobs when they ignore public opinion.
Under such conditions, would the US have ended slavery or enacted the Civil Rights Act?
Completely depends on who is allowed to vote.
If slaves would have a vote, they'd certainly strongly choose one option :D
Same for the discriminated groups.
If they don't have a vote, this depends on the rest of society in the short run, but can cause violent rebellions in the long one. Democratic system does not eliminate possibility of revolt.
Now do it for things like universal healthcare and taxing the rich!
Country reviews on Steam, do it Gabe
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ or else you basically support Xbox
The sony communities I saw poopooing the whole thing flipped immediately into "WE DID IT" mode, pretending they actually cared about the people that were going to lose access.
This is why Steam reviews should be taken much more seriously. This was impossible to avoid due to the enormous amount of bad press and devs themselves jumping on the hate train, but I’m betting that a lot of review bombing attempts have been quietly offset by the company just paying people for fake reviews. It’s especially obvious when the game has relatively low reviews for months and months, then suddenly bad stuff happens and along with the justified dump of negative reviews, positive ones also skyrocket (99% of which composed of “good game”, random memes or ascii art).
Negative reviews should remain until the purchase restrictions put in place on Steam for non-PSN countries have been reverted.
Until then this looks like a temporary move for damage control and they'll try this again when refunds are less likely and wont be from restricted countries.
There was a theory that the purchase restrictions were put in place by Valve, not Sony (because those countries couldn’t make an account without violating TOS). If so, Valve might shortly remove the restrictions.
Would the publisher not have to request the game not be sold in those countries before Valve restricts the sale of it?
I believe that Valve may be the ones who do it, but just doing it without permission sounds... Illegal and out of their jurisdiction.
I know Valve controls their storefront and can absolutely pull games down, just looking for some clarification on whether this could be true or not.
Valve can remove games from sale for any reason they like - it's been a point of consumer contention when they are accused of censorship for certain risque anime games, too.
They can completely remove a game from sale if it turns out to be bricking people's computers or function terribly. (Sony did this with Cyberpunk on PSN, without CDPR's approval)
There may be suspicion the game is not legitimate for sale, for instance it illegally uses someone else's work.
Going country-specific, if a game is revealed to be slightly less than universally positive to the perfectly infallible, totally-not-genocidal Chinese Communist Party, they may want to stop sales in China.
If a game lets you buy it in Tanzania, download it in Tanzania, and then to play, has you sign an agreement that says "I truthfully state that I do not live in Tanzania", then that bone-headed agreement reflects poorly on Valve, so they have almost a legal need to take it out of sale in that country.
Basically, each country has its own laws of sale. Having those switches to turn off sales in certain places is important for the store's own safety. While 60% of the blame for selling a faulty product goes to the manufacturer, 40% still goes to the storefront that chose to stock and sell that faulty good. In this case, the fault was specific to the country of play.
That's right, I have heard of some of these cases, but thank you very much for the info! I definitely didn't want Sony to have any ground to stand on here, so happy that Valve is able to step up to protect consumers however they can.
I wish they'd remove some of the PS2 to PC ports on their store that don't actually run anymore. Prince of Persia, Saints Row 2, etc.
I hope Valve never does this. Tons of games on Steam only work with community fixes, it sets a bad precedent if they pull them because they don’t work in their official state.
It’s better to have them then not, I would just force a disclaimer during sale for abandoned titles that most players have reported that the game does not function without community patches.
Well the guy who made GotR to get saints row working died a few years back and AFAIK the game is effectively nonfunctional for the majority of people who buy it. Those people paid for a product that they cannot use. They could go emulate the game for free and it would run better.
Plus, the owners of the title have a functioning PC version sold elsewhere than Steam. They could easily remedy this if Steam took away their listing.
Is there one for Sims 3 Medieval? A warning that it wasn’t playable on modern OSes would have sufficed.
We don’t know their personal contract, but calling it illegal is ridiculous, I’m sure Valve explicitly allows for this.
That's why I said I wasn't sure and that I was asking for clarification?
Illegal and out of their jurisdiction
Illegal means against the law.. so no.
Out of their jurisdiction, Steam is Valve's platform, so no again.
Valve is the seller in this case, who will be liable for the agreement they have with their customers. If one of their sold product is going to end up massively refunded, who do you think will be processing these? Then Valve has to turn around and get the money from Sony.. guess how Valve estimates that will go.
So step 1 for Valve is limit exposure by stopping sales where you expect issues.
Step 2 is analyzing the potential for refunds in other countries and limiting there as well if deemed to big a risk.
I can only imagine that feedback from Valve to Sony played a role in the decision to not push forward. As large corporations only speak money.. the cost benefit made at Sony must have missed some things to have it now skew the other way.
I'll believe the account requirement will be totally in the past IF the sales to the non PSN countries are reinstated. Cause why limit your customers to countries if that is not necessary.
Honestly I’m keeping my negative review permanent. The game is great and I enjoy it, but besides a temporary back lash I want the sting to stick around to hopefully teach companies about fucking around and finding out.
Maybe you’ll be teaching them that changing course brings no relief from punishment
Maybe he'll be teaching them that trying to force enshittification on people in the first place has repercussions.
It’s obvious corpos learn the wrong lessons all the time.
They won't learn anything. They only nulled their bullshit because it would hurt their financial quarter because their biggest cash cow game at the moment is bombing. They only way to maybe make them learn would be if every single one of the "outraged gamers" would just uninstall and never play it again, but that won't happen and Sony knows that (which is why they can try pulling that shit in the first place).
Good for the peeps in non-PSN countries tho. For them, this is a real win.
"We're still learning what is best for PC players"
Well PlayStation staff member, it definitely isn't having people create another account when they already have a Steam account.
Also gaming on a PC is 40 years old, what do they still have to learn?
How much less bullshit PC players are willing to put up with compared to their console counterparts, apparently.
Uhhhh, people install shit like Vanguard just so that they can keep having their mother insulted in the ingame chat.
And many people put up with cascades of different lauchers (and accounts).
So I am glad that there was some push back this time, but it's not like there would be some sane baseline of PC players in that regard.
Imagine doing this for all kinds of stuff like ads, over priced groceries, other games that required needless launchers.
Just surprising how this works so often and every time there are still people trying to convince everyone to just move on.
If people were capable of choosing long over short term value then the market might be working instead of the shitshow it is right now. IDGI either.
It's almost as if cheaters ruin hyper competitive games like Valorant. How dare they try to keep the game free from cheaters. The nerve!
I'd have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.
Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you'd be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn't caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch "real" cheaters.
Also there could (and should?) be "simply" two launch options. One with "hardcore anti cheat" and one with some much simpler anti-cheat. Then a lobby option what you want to allow. You want to play competitive/league/whatever? Then require the hardcore anti-cheat. Otherwise: why bother.
Yup. At the very least, they shouldn't have made it a requirement for TFT. If it were possible to cheat there that'd be more of a game design problem anyway.
As someone who rehosts an old game after the official servers shutdown, we have a dedicated servers for cheating and real moderators for the non-cheat ones. It works great but big corps don't way to pay for mods.
I also wonder why big companies don't do it to train ML algorithms on the cheat server data too..
Besides that, statistics is an unbeatable tool against cheaters.
Agreed. For detecting cheaters, statistics work like a Dream
Only if you want to cap the skill limit. Otherwise you would typically have a hand full of players that are genuinely just good or rather far outside the normal skill range. I guess with a lot of data collection one might be able to determine if there was some kind of natual progress or sudden skill jumps, but all in all it could weed out legitimate players.
You can detect the hit ratio for shooters and win rates for games with matchmaking, those are really good indicators for cheating.
Honestly I'd rather have a cheater in my lobby than Riot Games deep into the sections of my PC they should never have accessed.
With that said, I do not play Valorant for this reason (and also because it would require me to dualboot since Vanguard cannot be ported on Linux, lol)
I'd be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.
But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that's it. They don't care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.
The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google "valorant cheat .exe" and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.
It's all a fucking smokescreen. Man, people just eat that shit up. Every time. It's almost like the game is saturated in satire and we're spooning it down ourselves.
Oh, wait. fuck.
"You guys actually want to play these things? Yeeesh."
They are used to playstation players who buy a console for twice the price it's worth through discord bots. I don't think they even know what a backlash is
Nowadays a console is just a locked down, less expensive pc. I think buying the components of a ps5 and assembling the pc is more expensive than just buying a console and liberating it, which is what I would do if I was to ever buy one.
which is why the steam deck was such a breath of fresh air, it's what consoles SHOULD be.
A computer built primarily for gaming, sold at a reasonable price, that merrily lets you switch to desktop mode and launch excel for some office work if you want to.
They are learning what level of bullshit PC gamers will tolerate.
Maybe a company that has (mostly) made consoles isn’t exactly playing games or has people on staff on the executive level that play(ed) on a PC. I’m 30 and outside of a brief time I tried to play on a PC I’ve pretty much been console my entire life. My first gaming experiences were all on console. It’s completely logical for a company to make a move like this when they have specialized in one area for a time.
It's called market research.
Just another nail to the bootlicker's coffin of "review bombing does nothing".
God I hate bootlickers. Fuck em.
Review bombing and mass refunding too. Hit them where it hurts
The lack of humility in their statement makes me think they haven't learned anything.
Yea, this reads more like a sorry, this was too forced we will do something more subtle in the future. Not an actual apology.
They don't even say sorry. They did not use the words Sorry, Mistake, Problem, Wrong, or Fault. They say the approximation of "We see you're absolutely outraged. We've decided to change our decisions. We are always improving."
Translated: Dear suckers who keep giving us money for half-finished products. We are sincerely sorry, sorry for getting caught. We thought we could squeeze through with this one, but apparently our PC fans are not as gullible as our console fans.
They haven't. Ghosts of Tsushima's PC release is going to require account-linking from day 1 for the online component. The only thing Sony has learned is that the shittiness has to be ready and working from the start.
Yeah but the humility in their actions shows they did.
AFAIK the game is still banned in countries where you can't get a PSN account and also it still ships with a rootkit, so...
People were saying that might have been Valve just covering themselves from potential lawsuits. We'll just have to see if it's reverted.
Nope nevermind, I was hopeful it was good guy Steam but it was in fact Sony. Fuck Sony. Will never buy another Sony game.
Valve should have done that from day 1.
We're still learning what is best for PC players
We'll keep you updated on future plans
Behind the scenes coming up with the future plans:
Yeah, like, you know what is best for PC players, it just doesn't come together with financial interest :D
and this is why i wish people would make it profitable, fuck AAA titles, give your money to indies who respect the consumers and actually just want to make a fun game.
I wish game devs would found a union that helps developers fund and publish games with no profit incentive, it seems like such an obvious thing to do and has the potential to revolutionizing how people create and play games.
No longer would we be beholden to companies, no longer would developers have to compromise their works for profit, no longer would players have to tolerate predatory bullshit.
Just good games made by passionate people who are happy to have people enjoy their works while being able to afford to live on it.
That's what I normally do - pirate or ignore AAA's, but always buy indies.
The problem with the union idea is that most games just won't pay off huge investments, so there needs to be someone competent who filters out profitable games, and funds games based on expected returns...and at that point we get, essentially, a publisher company. Or maybe a cooperative. But barely a union.
Getting abusive parent vibes from the language of Sony's post.
Corporate PR speak always sounds cringe and I despise it. Just be humans you fucking pricks.
Tbf, I've seen what happens to indies when they're just humans in how they talk to their customers/fans. HR speak exists for a reason unfortunately
Nah, I'd rather they keep speaking like this. Makes it really obvious from the get go who I'm dealing with. If they speak normally, they might blend in
Always is. They went too far. They scale back and try again when the dust has settled.
Oldest trick in the books
Starting off with “we’ve heard your feedback” is something I’ve never heard from an abusive parent?
“I understand you’re upset but…”
Naw it's more like "we did something we knew would make you incredibly uncomfortable; but now that you're screaming we're worried about the neighbors hearing it and we don't want the cops called on us, so we'll back off until a more opportune time."
Glorious Victory ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Major Order Completed! +50 Medals
Shitstorm = Feedback
Noted...
It's Feedback in the way that microphone feedback is - really bloody loud and painful, and makes you know you've done something wrong
Yeah exactly. And it’s often the only feedback that gets any attention unfortunately. It was getting media attention and getting very loud.
Plus the whole thing was just stupid. They could have accomplished exactly the same thing with little backlash by offering some little in-game trinket for voluntarily linking a PSN account where it was possible to get one. This wasn’t my idea, I saw it somewhere on Lemmy, but that person needs to get a job at Sony stat because the chucklefucks working there now have no clue.
the only feedback they respond to are the feedback that give them concussion.
Where are the: "just make an account bro" people now? Probably pre ordering skyrim the definite edition
I'd imagine some of them are here:
(edit: forgot to un-dox the user)
I’d love to shut up and play Starship Troopers: The Game. But unfortunately, I don’t have a PS5 or gaming PC. Still holding out hope that this will come to Xbox one day.
It has as much chance has Halo Infinite coming to PS5.
Nah there's a bigger chance of Halo coming to PS5 if MS recent moves are anything to go by.
Actually Halo Infinite might come out on ps5. Microsoft is publishing a lot of their games to Playstation atm. Sea of Thieves, Hi-fi rush, Grounded, Pentiment are all out on ps5.
Sea of Thieves was one of the big xbox exclusive games, developed by Rare, which is owned by Microsoft since 2002 and all the games they have made in the last 15+ years have been xbox exclusive.
And here
I don't think politely asking people to change their review so that it reflects reality is a "karen" move.
Just pointing out that the "Just make an account, AH doesn't deserve that" people are on Lemmy as well
But no one in your screenshot is saying that?
They've the same kind of reactions though, get abused and say you're sorry.
I don't see them telling anyone to "say you're sorry" either?
Changing your review to positive is exactly that
I see it more like a "we're good for now I guess, fuck around again and I'll change it back to negative"
Not really though
I was one of them to begin with but once I found out about the whole thing with people of certain countries not able to have an account even though they had already bought the game and were even previously able to play are now locked out, then I was on board.
I'm not against just making accounts, I must have thousands across the internet, what would be one more if I hadn't already had a PSN account.
what would be one more if I hadn’t already had a PSN account.
One more attack vector to gain access to all your other accounts across the internet.
Using a password manager would avoid this. Everyone should ideally use unique passwords per service, that way a single account can't compromise the others.
The loss of personal data however is fricking annoying. If a company has no legitimate reason, I avoid signing up to them.
Looking at you Nvidia, Razar, etc...
@NocturnalEngineer@Isoprenoid i was so infuriated back when nvidia demanded an account for shadowplay. I thought id lose access to the encoder thingy. So glad that it can be used by other software too. Uninstalled the shadowplay/gf experience stuff and never looked back
Wouldn't it be nice to not have your info spread across thosands of accounts that you yourself even implied you don't keep track of?
What sony pulled, and coporate moves like it, are at least in part a result of people saying "meh, what's one more account, I've already got thousands."
We as a community aren't an immaculate entity. Companies don't just make these moves out of nowhere, they analyze what we're willing to do so they can take advantage of those things to make money. That's not some sleazy secret scheme, thats basic market research. If we collectively show we do actually care about this stuff and won't supoort their business when they do it, it might not happen so often.
But the game isn't even available on PlayStation so why am I creating an account? At the very least it's pointless busy work. And apparently not even well thought out.
It's on PS5, what you on about
Isn't it available on PS5?
Not sure where you are getting your info from. I play on PS5.
Demanding we apologize for the negative reviews now that Sony has reverted the change, if the discord server is anything to go by
Playing sims
Probably just playing the game.
For now... 🖕🏽 They worded that so weasely, they're just waiting for the storm to pass and for Legal to come up with some compelling reason why they're totally "obligated" to make it happen, "hands tied" "so sorry" and all that.
Fuck Sony. They made this SOP way back when, and there's no way they let this stop them forever. It's all about profit, not what "we" want.
Backfire 2, Steam refund boogaloo when?
Sounds about right.
"Helldivers 2 players get exactly what they wanted, still unhappy."
You don't lower your guard just because the fight is over. It's not like Sony has morals or any trustworthiness to keep to this even in the midterm.
Or, more rationally, you all invested so much of yourselves into your gamer outrage campaign and built yourselves up as the underdogs fighting the big, mean corporation. And when, to your own surprise, you actually won and got all of your demands met without compromise, you still can't let it go because you managed to incorporate all that upset over a video game into your personal identities over just a few days time.
So now, instead of celebrating your win, you'll limply cling to your hatred of Sony for a few more days or weeks until everyone finds something else to get upset about.
You talk like this never happened before
I talk like I have seen this exact same thing happen over and over and I'm sick of capital-G Gamers throwing tantrums over every inconvenience. You aren't Union Men fighting for your rights. You're gamers upset by a TOS change to your new toy even though Steam was going beyond their own policy to honor refunds.
NGL, you sound like a capital-R Redditor.
Aw, the gamer is upset I forced some introspection into their life.
But no, I'm sorry. You're totally a noble warrior who fought back the evil Sony and now must remain ever vigilant lest Kazuo Hirai leap from the shadows and scream "Riiiiidge Racer" at you and take away your toys while Gabe Newell gives you your money back and sheepishly shrugs like "I know, right? This guy, man."
This is such a weird thing to be upset over, and a weird side to take so passionately that you do.
I don't even play Helldivers, nor do I plan to after this, it's just on the one side there's random upset people, on the other side there is the corp that got infamous for distributing straight up malware in a weird effort to enforce DRM. Why would people go back to being happy with a company that tried to fuck them over, and then walked its position back to the status quo with no commitments of not trying this again later.
The "random upset people" on the former side were perfectly happy to give their money to the "corp" on the latter side before the TOS change. This has nothing to do with how untrustworthy Sony has been in the past and everything to do with upset Gamers wanting to keep their outrage party going even after they got what they wanted.
The problem is who can you give money to for entertainment if not to the same 3 corps who have bought everything, and how else can you protest them doing stuff that's outrageous even by their standards?
Ya, it's the good ol' "voting with your wallet" that can bring companies to their knees
This has nothing to do with the shitstorm (it mostly hit Arrowhead anyway), and I think the review bombing didn’t affect their decision making that much. What I think happened was, Sony saw the massive refunds. They got hit right into the wallet 😩
This makes me smile.
The refunds may have hurt, but what hurt more was the fact that in the last week HD2 went from #1/2 on the Steam global top sellers to #11. The big red "Overwhelmingly Negative" next to a title is a huge turnoff to new buyers.
Some executive somewhere has a chart showing daily sales numbers and watched them fall off a cliff in the last week.
Point taken.
That's what pisses me off with the steam review bombing.
If that's the only way to express discontent then that will fucking sucks for everybody involved in game development.
If at least review bombing was a last resort but now it's the norm.
These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game even though the drama bubble has now popped.
These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game
Good, let them learn their actions have consequences.
Sure let's destroy this game all together because of this issue.
A well thought out and mature reaction is to pretend the game is bad in the steam reviews even though you clocked 100+ hours into it.
I mean there is a ton of things Helldivers does better than any other games and we are gonna trash that because of a PSN account requirements ?
I understand this is a valid issue for certain players but is it a proportionate response to this situation to trash the game on steam? I don't think so.
we are gonna trash that because of a PSN account requirements ?
Yes, next question.
No problem.
Legit question: Did you completely stopped playing Helldivers 2 ?
Is it uninstalled?
Did you ask for a refund ?
Because if you still play the game and at the same time say it should be trashed that's a lot of hypocrisy.
It can't be both. You can criticize the game that's fine. But if you still play it and you are so vocal for its demise then you are definitely part of the problem here.
I never played or bought it, because I hate Sony and don't play always online multiplayer games because they treat players as cattle and not as users.
So you are asking other players to review bomb and try to kill a game you never bought yourself?
Fascinating.
Edit: I think the above conversation is a good example of why I don't think Steam Review Bombing is the best solution. You get people delivering fake reviews sometimes for games they don't even play themselves. I understand why they do that I just don't think that's the right way to do so. And also thinks it's not fair for the actual devs working on the project.
I'm not asking anyone to do anything. I do all my trashing individually and independently. That's a straw man the size of the wicker man.
Yes
Yes
I asked but was denied my first one, and did not submit a second one before Sony walked back the changes.
I don't actually have plans to return to the game, because Sony is consistently fucking with the dev team and the game has now accrued so much technical debt that the constant bugs and issues would impact me every time I log in.
I will also no longer be supporting Sony titles on PC. Even if they release my holy grail Bloodborne, I'll pirate it and play it offline.
Fuck Sony forever, and stop trying to gatekeep hating a company over their shitty practices.
It’s a bad take to tell people their only means of effective protest is not going through proper channels.
Did you have a constructive suggestion or are you just here to defend Sony?
First would you mind telling me where I defend Sony ?
It must be very subtle.
This conversation already starts in bad faith. You are trying to undermine my comment by declaring I'm taking side with Sony.
There is nothing in my recent comments that says Sony has done something right or that I agree with their move. Nothing.
Am I allowed to genuinely think this account issue wasn't that much of a big deal ? Or do I only get to choose if I'm a Sony shill or not ?
I have seen my favorite game franchise getting shat on for years by their developers (EA) and I have seen things thousands of time much worse from EA than this account requirement from PS. Still right to call out Sony for this but this is not a "this game is unplayable" issue like we had many times on other games. So yeah I have a nuanced opinion on this and didnt immediately accept that Sony murdered Helldivers 2 and that the game is dead.
My suggestion is not complicated. Stay truthful in your reviews. That's not rocket science. A lot of these reviews are rating or presenting the game as much worse than they really think it is. Most of these players will review bomb and will play hundred of hours just after that. I'm fucking French I understand what protests are and that being an annoyance is kind of the point. But review bombing on steam and telling a naive player that would definitely enjoy the game that the game is trash will never be cool.
You can say in your review that you don't like that aspect of the game but if the point is only to be negative and untrustworthy this is not the way. Again if you truly suddenly think that game is "the worst game ever" after playing hundreds of hours and learning of the PS requirements then fine but I doubt it's what happens.
Also did you stop to think what is your comment bringing to the table here ? It's just an unnecessarily aggressive comment and doesn't either provide anything beside telling me I'm wrong and it's a bad take.
It’s a bad take to tell people their only means of effective protest is not going through proper channels.
Steam review bombing is absolutely not the proper channel to voice discontent. It's a review. Not a forum, not a dev support channel. It's a review. You are giving your honest feedback on a game. The good and the bad. Not just "the thing everyone told me is bad" and nothing else.
This is not cool to tell devs their game is trash on the steam page if you don't really and truthfully think so.
Absolutely despise th fact that devs have to constantly read their game is trash in steam reviews because some higher-ups decided to go full greed mode.
So yeah Steam REVIEWS are NOT the proper channel to voice discontent. Almost any other forum or social network is. Just not a steam review page.
This type of review bombing is actually against steams terms of service for reviews in the first place, they've stepped in a few times now to hide campaigns like that, I expect they will do the same with this one. Basically it'll keep the recent review metric but, it will hide the reviews from the historical and the overall metric. So worst case out of this will be it has a negative recent reviews for awhile.
your last sentence is actually the exact reason they implemented that policy and they moreorless quote it in their forum post where they talk about how the new system works
These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game even though the drama bubble has now popped.
Steam has a specific thing that appears when you keep playing a lot on a game that you’ve negatively reviewed asking if you want to change it. I think a game is rarely impacted long-term by review bombing for a resolved issue, unless the reviewers actually dropped the game and went on with their lives.
Once again, Arrowhead decided to go with Sony as publisher, they agreed with PSN account linking. No offense, they are are an independent studio, they did not need to do that. It is sad they lost money, but the developers already got paid. The worst thing that can happen is they have to switch jobs.
Arrowhead did not have the infrastructure for this many people. Sony barely pulled it off at launch and cross play still sucks.
I mean, who would've pulled the sudden influx of players? The game being popular was expected, but not in such huge numbers.
Developers generally have a choice between going to one of the massive publishers (which allows for better promotion and for expensive games to pay off, but comes at a cost of their will over devs), or to self-release, which means way less players will even know about the game, not to mention buy it.
Arrowhead realistically only had the first option.
That's not to say there's no fault of theirs in the situation, just that it's not a free choice and that Sony is still the main culprit
If they truly go through that for the promotion, then they are idiots and deserve all the hate. Video games don't blow up because there is a commercial on time square that costs a million dollars, games blow up because they are good and people/youtubers and (yuck) influencers talk about it
If that would be true, all games would be indie titles.
Unfortunately, those promotions DO matter, and absolute majority of indie games never pull it off, because we never even get to hear about them.
Promotion makes a difference between a cool game no one knows about and a game everyone plays.
And when everyone is expected to buy your game, you have much bigger budgets to make the game not just conceptually good, but also greatly executed.
The fact that they specifically mention that date makes me think they're simply pushing the date back
They are just being clear and accurate with their comms. No need to over think it.
They specifically said "not moving forward". Seems pretty clear and concise. No PSN requirement.
And they also said "We're still learning what's best for PC players [...]"
They'll be back.
They won't be back - they're not leaving.
But that phrase also seems like pretty normal rationalizing in an apology.
If I had to bet it was mostly steam issuing refunds and pulling the game in more than 100 countries that changed their mind.
God damn. You people just NEED to be upset about stuff. Like, pathologically.
it couldn't possibly be that people are applying basic pattern recognition
No, a bunch of people here just need to be outraged about something all the time, and pessimistic about everything.
Nothing can ever be even modestly positive. Everything - everything - has to be bad and negative all the time. If it was a cute puppy video, there'd be a bunch of comments about how puppy farms are evil and etc.
It's exhausting.
Not our fault the entire tech industry keeps engineering new ways to give people trust issues.
Can you tell us what positive thing we can get from the account linking debacle?
You just know that there used to be an "…at this time" at the end of that sentence and some good PR folk edited it out because managers are out of touch douches.
Have they reinstated the games back in the 177 countries they delisted it in? Can those people who paid for the game still play it?
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: The access hadn't been removed yet, as the update that would enable account linking wasn't pushed yet. As for the Steam side, I'm pretty sure people who already had the game installed should've had access still, although updates and general unsureness definitely could be obstacles. With this tweet, however, the update is no longer coming, and were just waiting for Sony/Valve to lift the selling/installing restrictions in those countries.
Steam only removes games from the store, and doesn't remove games from anyone's library. Those affected people, if they didn't refund, will still have HD2 in their library. There is also never install restrictions/blocking.
OK now they can go ahead with plan B where they allow you to link your PSN account to get some super cool cosmetic. I wonder what the reaction of the consumers will be then.
I think that's entirely fair and similar to store loyalty cards. You get something in exchange for your datas at least.
Except now many loyalty cards are now required to get sale prices that were previously available without them. It is a bleak world where folks have to potentially choose between affording groceries and protecting their privacy.
That's allright tho.
Wasn't that already the case? That's what they did in most of their other pc ports at least
People actually thought that this was a very cool solution. People are the worst.
I really don't see the problem, provided it is cosmetic. If you don't want to link, you don't get a glittering, whatever in game. If you don't mind sharing your datas, then you get the shiny thing (and everyone knows you don't mind sharing your datas).
I mind.
So if you mind sharing your data, don't get the shiny. You know it will become like that shiny pony back in wow's wrath expansion. It told you more about the person than anything else.
There are legitimate reasons for the devs and Sony to want your psn account linked. It's also reasonable to not want to do so. Why not offer a compromise, like any healthy relationship, and allow, not force, account linking, with a little incentive? Where is the downside to either party?
So, someone in my Discord channel posted a tweet that maybe alters perspective a bit;
To summarize or if the link breaks, one of the devs “knew beforehand” they’d have to require PSN accounts post launch, but disabled them for a smooth launch. That’s interesting, but as long as Sony was acting as publisher I feel like the blame still goes on them for selling the game to non-PSN countries initially.
FYI l: That's the CEO of Arrowhead, who made the game.
Nice! Guess I can add it back to my wishlist and consider buying it soon! Been holding off on it too long
"too long"? The game is 4 months old.
Hot take, don't buy any games which were only released in the last 12 months. Matured games are far more stable
I remember when people on this site were saying Helldivers was already GOTY back on release week, hilarious.
If it wins after this situation, it's definitely not the players choice.
I'd agree with this statement for most games, but the best way to enjoy Helldivers 2 specifically is to play it when the playerbase and the hype is at its peak. The gameplay will still be just as good a year from now, sure, but you'd miss the emergent story being built right now
I won't miss out on any gameplay story by waiting a year. I have a core set of friends, we'll do just fine in a years time.
The only thing I'm missing out on is this dramatic period of instability
Sure, not trying to tell you how to enjoy your games at all! I was just explaining why people would want to play this specific game closer to launch rather than later
Agreed! I was just mostly showing my gratitude to the people fighting Sony and my relief that I can get a chance to play, didn't mean for my message to be taken literal on the "too long" part lol.
That being said, my reasoning for wanting to play it soon is that I've got a few friends who are all now interested in picking it up... I'd rather enjoy the time to play with them now then not be able to play it with them in a year when they've moved onto something else.
This has the "fuck you" energy without the actual word
"we listened to your feedback and made major changes to planned updates" is fuck you energy?
"We listened to our accounting, and the massive wave of refunds and unbought mtx is hurting our numbers. PR isn't happy about the reviews either. We'll keep you updated on future plans for fucking you over!
Do you really think that Sony will actually back down? They are calming down the shitstorm that is going over all media, socials and steam. They'll reorganize and will move on with their plans. Arrowhead and Helldivers is just one of many assets.
Of course not.
The review bombing was serious but I'd eat my hat if this stunt cut revenue by more than 10%. I don't have anything for Helldivers but here's an article about Dragons Dogma 2
10% is a lot by I WANT MORE MONEY RIGHT NOW shareholder metrics
It means the two million people playing it now have to get emails, promotions, and keep sony products in their mind.
They obviously didn't think it would be popular. Just like Wizards of the Coast when they tried to put out a new license that said "anything with the words 'dungeons and dragons' on it becomes our intellectual property", they assumed that pissing off their entire fanbase would be net positive because people will keep buying their stuff no matter how bad it gets.
It does kind of have “We would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!” energy to me.
There’s no way they thought the PSN thing would’ve been a well-received update.
It does?
It does not.
PC gamers with the W for not folding to bad choices. More gamers need to do this.
It's still packaged with that awful and invasive nProtect GameGuard garbage though, so be be aware of what you're buying before you make the choice.
Or just run linux. While that comes with other potential issues... Anti-cheat isn't one of them. Either the game doesn't work (and thus safe from the terribad rootkits), or the "anti-cheat" is stuck in it's sandbox(and thus safe from the rootkit).
I think there'd have been a lot less pushback if the gamers had got something in return, like Steam/PSN cross-buy on Sony published titles.
It's not even like they could claim it being needed for cross-play, because it demonstrably works without it.
Still not going to buy it.
Good. I hope this collaboration will kick all 3rd party launchers stuff from Steam in the future.
It never required a 3rd party launcher, just a PSN account to link to a Steam account.
I know. I was talking about all 3rd party bullshit on Steam. My bad, I could've written more clearly.
So how are PS players, playing now?
Their account seems to be as useless as, your comma.
Never thought I would see the day.
At least this whole situation shines light on how greedy Sony is, even tho those lesser aware.
I don't think anyone thought otherwise.
Good, otherwise they'd know that Kendrick would put out a diss track on them.
More like
It's weird how collective action works so well but they only choose to do it for this linking requirement. You could get the rootkits gone as well, gamers.
Most people don't know what they're installing or don't care about their privacy, which is why there's not enough people rising up against kernel level AC's. Also, not being able to play until you create an account is much more upsetting to most people, than just clicking 'update' in League of Legends.
Does the rootkit install alongside the game like without explicit user action? That's pretty unfortunate.
There's a tooltip next to the update button that says something like 'Our Anticheat Vanguard is out now!' or smth like that. The rest is exactly the same as any other update
That is despicable TBH.
Keep in mind this is purchasing a Sony product after they already showed us who they were with the first rootkit scandal.
For the kids:
the problem with that is that the people playing thoose games have no idea what a rootkit is
This! God, please.
And they already got a bunch of new accounts
Like an emotionally abusive partner.
That's part of the enshitifcation process.
Brooooo this victory is an absolute game-changer for us die-hard Xbox fans, and it's downright exhilarating! Sony's constant blunders pale in comparison to the countless triumphs of team Xbox, and this might just be the knockout blow that finally converts those Lamestationers to our side. Brace yourselves for an epic shift as the unrivaled supremacy of our console dazzles and dominates, pulling every gamer into its unstoppable vortex of pure excitement and adrenaline-fueled gaming bliss!👊👊
Whoa, this gave me some late 2000s nostalgia.
"Annnnnnnd post!"
Damn what's that youtubers channel? I always see his videos around then I forget his name when I want to watch more.
Internet Comment Etiquette
Thank you!
Bounced on my boys joystick to this for hours
Great shitpost!
This sounds like a chatGPT post ngl
Lmaooo
I can’t tell if you’re being downvoted by dorks who don’t realise you’re joking or by dorks who DO realise you’re joking and feel attacked. Either way, sad, silly down voters.
Or by dorks who are thoroughly exhausted of the Console Wars and know it's a joke but don't think it's funny. (It's a dead horse with $5 armor)
Get back in your hole console peasant and Xbox shill
Thanks, definitely not Xbox employee.
The amount of downvotes this has makes me worried about Lemmy’s sense of humor
Doritos Dew It Right!
Phil Spencer, is that you?
Why is this downvoted, this is great!
"we're still learning What's best for PC players"
Translation: We're trying multiple predatory methods to see how far we can push PC players and figure out what we can get away with, compared to all the shit shows we successfully pulled off on our own platform.
We all want PlayStation exclusives on PC, their response now is going to be their own launcher. Just a guess on my end.
What's wild to me is they're making their own overlay for their PC games. Ghost of Tsushima is supposed to be the first release title with it. Do they not understand steam already has an overlay? I feel like 2 overlays would just compete and be obnoxious and possibly ever impact performance.
Also, why? If it is for co-op crossplay, just make linking PSN to Steam optional, and state it is needed for inviting/grouping with any PS5 friends. Then do what every other multiplatform game does and show 2 friends list in the game.
"We're still learning just how far we can push PC players."
"we're sorry that we got caught"
This shows the power of steam reviews with it being driven by the actual community. People tried to downplay and belittle its effectiveness, but it being front and center on the store page does have more impact than there would be without steam reviews. If there were no steam reviews the PSN requirement would have been pushed through with it being easier to ignore some random internet comments on social media than a store page.
Reviews aren't pointless, but their impact only goes so far. I am assuming the massive amount of refunds had more to do with it, tbh.
I suspect someone in accounting ran the numbers and decided they stand to lose more to reduced microtransaction sales than they would have gained via selling scraped data.
Though I agreed with you. It's still a win, but we have to be careful not to conflate this with Sony "caring".
I still think the biggest reason why they wanted to push their shitty platform is to artificially push player numbers. "Look how many people use our scam network, see?"
Now the hilarious part is that hopefully someone has to explain why people go these lengths, just to not join their shitty service.
That isn’t why. PlayStation doesn’t view this as a problem and in fairness, I don’t either. If the game had shipped with this requirement, it would’ve been fine. Many people put up with Ubisoft and they have a whole separate account plus launcher.
What Sony actually wanted was to make it easier on their server side to authenticate purchases and then to use the same PSN account systems to matchmaker for easier cross-play.
Would they collect data? I guess. They can already do that if they want as a publisher. So yeah it’s purely just to use their ecosystem, which makes sense.
Insane take imo. How does purchase authentication or cross play suddenly become "easier" with this change? Either it works or it doesn't; having PC players connected to a PSN account doesn't alleviate server load.
Did I mention server load? What I mean is that having a PSN account means that whatever game is processing your account details doesn’t have to deal with Steam accounts, it just deals with a PSN account the same as it would if you were on PS5.
What I’m saying is it streamlines the code on the developers side of the games they’re publishing and again if Sony is using systems already to authenticate purchases or whatever that can be collected in systems they already have.
This isn’t rocket science, PSN may just be a translation layer.
It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.
It's literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can't for the life of me understand how you can think it's "easier" to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they're already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.
Because those systems already exist for the console players. All they’re doing is switching it over to steam but they likely had a translation layer there before to do all the things you’re saying but through PSN instead. Why? Because that system already exists for consoles.
So their options here are that they can take the netcode for consoles and modify it to utilize SteamIDs and fetch data from Steam or they can just turn your Steam ID into a console ID and treat all of the inputs to their systems exactly like they would on the PS5 while fetching them from Steam.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, I’m saying you’d think that just trying to match the console and the way it handles players would be simpler. Especially when you’re trying to make cross play work. Clearly it wasn’t so they temporarily ditched it. Maybe Sony does just want your data but if that’s true, why would the telemetry gathering be such a big deal? And they also could just use your SteamID for that data gathering. So clearly PSN used to be more integrated than people here are suggesting
But..... that's the exact opposite of what actually happened. The PSN requirement was so buggy they had to disabled it for the game to work.
Correct, I never said it wasn’t buggy either. I’m just pointing out that if you have cross play and you already have console support with console user IDs then it makes sense to just convert PC players into that same console user system.
This is what Xbox used to do when publishing games on Steam and still do with their GamePass stuff. And very similarly, that system also broke things and still breaks things for people.
Like fraud prevention?
Easier cross play?
I mean yeah this is especially true for online games as this is a form of DRM for Sony and it gives them control to easily reject or accept keys and ban users using their pre-existing systems.
Same thing with cross-play, it’s possible that some of these games were designed to use PSN systems and so that makes integration easy. No clue, but if true it makes sense from Sonys perspective on both of those fronts.
It was not “someone in accounting”
This shit goes all the way to the top. Every manager in the chain will have their take and influence on the numbers.
Sure, and I'm not suggesting said bean counter was responsible for the decision. What I am suggesting is that the only thing that influenced the decision was bottom line finances. Someone ran the numbers, and when the suits discovered that they stand to lose more money than they'd gain, they reversed the decision. Never mistake this as Sony "listening" to anything more than their investors and their bottom line.
It's probably a bit of this and a bit of that. I mean the game went from one of the best revied games to one of the worst in a day. There were refunds and a drop in players all at the same time.
My prediction is that the game will rebound, certainly, but will not reach back to the levels it had before. A percentage of people who refunded won't be buying again and another section probably will quit the game altogether, now or as soon as something newer and shinier shows up. Lots will forget to change their review.
Sony actively hurt their own game and probably made irreparable damage.
I'd imagine that there's math to be done on sales for a mixed review game vs. a overwhelming positive one, and its not favorable.
It's a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It's about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.
Made me imagine a page where everyone everyday can leave 1 vote on how good the government performs
If the scores are too low for a prolonged period of time, the government is dismissed.
(Obviously a very first-second concept with millions of flaws - just a thought)
In a two party system, that would just make it so we switch governments every day.
Two-party system is the enemy of democracy to begin with
But maybe even they would be more inclined to do better everyday
‘member We the People?
Many countries actually have such systems in place today, even Russia (lol) - not that they work too well.
Normally, there are two sources of issues here: petitions can in fact be declined, and, in cases where the signature count depends on scale of the petition they can be intentionally escalated as to make it impossible to gain enough signatures. Besides, in many cases petitions can be left unanswered for longer than promised.
Long story short, the system is open to shenanigans and doesn't make the government truly accountable.
We need the system that would actually make politicians rapidly lose their jobs when they ignore public opinion.
Good detailed response :)
Under such conditions, would the US have ended slavery or enacted the Civil Rights Act?
Completely depends on who is allowed to vote.
If slaves would have a vote, they'd certainly strongly choose one option :D
Same for the discriminated groups.
If they don't have a vote, this depends on the rest of society in the short run, but can cause violent rebellions in the long one. Democratic system does not eliminate possibility of revolt.
Now do it for things like universal healthcare and taxing the rich!
Country reviews on Steam, do it Gabe
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ or else you basically support Xbox
The sony communities I saw poopooing the whole thing flipped immediately into "WE DID IT" mode, pretending they actually cared about the people that were going to lose access.
This is why Steam reviews should be taken much more seriously. This was impossible to avoid due to the enormous amount of bad press and devs themselves jumping on the hate train, but I’m betting that a lot of review bombing attempts have been quietly offset by the company just paying people for fake reviews. It’s especially obvious when the game has relatively low reviews for months and months, then suddenly bad stuff happens and along with the justified dump of negative reviews, positive ones also skyrocket (99% of which composed of “good game”, random memes or ascii art).
Negative reviews should remain until the purchase restrictions put in place on Steam for non-PSN countries have been reverted.
Until then this looks like a temporary move for damage control and they'll try this again when refunds are less likely and wont be from restricted countries.
https://steamdb.info/sub/137730/history/?changeid=23416542
Democracy has not won yet.
There was a theory that the purchase restrictions were put in place by Valve, not Sony (because those countries couldn’t make an account without violating TOS). If so, Valve might shortly remove the restrictions.
Would the publisher not have to request the game not be sold in those countries before Valve restricts the sale of it?
I believe that Valve may be the ones who do it, but just doing it without permission sounds... Illegal and out of their jurisdiction.
I know Valve controls their storefront and can absolutely pull games down, just looking for some clarification on whether this could be true or not.
Valve can remove games from sale for any reason they like - it's been a point of consumer contention when they are accused of censorship for certain risque anime games, too.
If a game lets you buy it in Tanzania, download it in Tanzania, and then to play, has you sign an agreement that says "I truthfully state that I do not live in Tanzania", then that bone-headed agreement reflects poorly on Valve, so they have almost a legal need to take it out of sale in that country.
Basically, each country has its own laws of sale. Having those switches to turn off sales in certain places is important for the store's own safety. While 60% of the blame for selling a faulty product goes to the manufacturer, 40% still goes to the storefront that chose to stock and sell that faulty good. In this case, the fault was specific to the country of play.
That's right, I have heard of some of these cases, but thank you very much for the info! I definitely didn't want Sony to have any ground to stand on here, so happy that Valve is able to step up to protect consumers however they can.
I wish they'd remove some of the PS2 to PC ports on their store that don't actually run anymore. Prince of Persia, Saints Row 2, etc.
I hope Valve never does this. Tons of games on Steam only work with community fixes, it sets a bad precedent if they pull them because they don’t work in their official state.
It’s better to have them then not, I would just force a disclaimer during sale for abandoned titles that most players have reported that the game does not function without community patches.
Well the guy who made GotR to get saints row working died a few years back and AFAIK the game is effectively nonfunctional for the majority of people who buy it. Those people paid for a product that they cannot use. They could go emulate the game for free and it would run better.
Plus, the owners of the title have a functioning PC version sold elsewhere than Steam. They could easily remedy this if Steam took away their listing.
Is there one for Sims 3 Medieval? A warning that it wasn’t playable on modern OSes would have sufficed.
We don’t know their personal contract, but calling it illegal is ridiculous, I’m sure Valve explicitly allows for this.
That's why I said I wasn't sure and that I was asking for clarification?
Illegal means against the law.. so no.
Out of their jurisdiction, Steam is Valve's platform, so no again.
Valve is the seller in this case, who will be liable for the agreement they have with their customers. If one of their sold product is going to end up massively refunded, who do you think will be processing these? Then Valve has to turn around and get the money from Sony.. guess how Valve estimates that will go.
So step 1 for Valve is limit exposure by stopping sales where you expect issues.
Step 2 is analyzing the potential for refunds in other countries and limiting there as well if deemed to big a risk.
I can only imagine that feedback from Valve to Sony played a role in the decision to not push forward. As large corporations only speak money.. the cost benefit made at Sony must have missed some things to have it now skew the other way.
I'll believe the account requirement will be totally in the past IF the sales to the non PSN countries are reinstated. Cause why limit your customers to countries if that is not necessary.
Honestly I’m keeping my negative review permanent. The game is great and I enjoy it, but besides a temporary back lash I want the sting to stick around to hopefully teach companies about fucking around and finding out.
Maybe you’ll be teaching them that changing course brings no relief from punishment
Maybe he'll be teaching them that trying to force enshittification on people in the first place has repercussions.
It’s obvious corpos learn the wrong lessons all the time.
They won't learn anything. They only nulled their bullshit because it would hurt their financial quarter because their biggest cash cow game at the moment is bombing. They only way to maybe make them learn would be if every single one of the "outraged gamers" would just uninstall and never play it again, but that won't happen and Sony knows that (which is why they can try pulling that shit in the first place).
Good for the peeps in non-PSN countries tho. For them, this is a real win.
Well PlayStation staff member, it definitely isn't having people create another account when they already have a Steam account.
Also gaming on a PC is 40 years old, what do they still have to learn?
How much less bullshit PC players are willing to put up with compared to their console counterparts, apparently.
Uhhhh, people install shit like Vanguard just so that they can keep having their mother insulted in the ingame chat.
And many people put up with cascades of different lauchers (and accounts).
So I am glad that there was some push back this time, but it's not like there would be some sane baseline of PC players in that regard.
Imagine doing this for all kinds of stuff like ads, over priced groceries, other games that required needless launchers.
Just surprising how this works so often and every time there are still people trying to convince everyone to just move on.
If people were capable of choosing long over short term value then the market might be working instead of the shitshow it is right now. IDGI either.
It's almost as if cheaters ruin hyper competitive games like Valorant. How dare they try to keep the game free from cheaters. The nerve!
I'd have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.
Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you'd be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn't caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch "real" cheaters.
Also there could (and should?) be "simply" two launch options. One with "hardcore anti cheat" and one with some much simpler anti-cheat. Then a lobby option what you want to allow. You want to play competitive/league/whatever? Then require the hardcore anti-cheat. Otherwise: why bother.
Yup. At the very least, they shouldn't have made it a requirement for TFT. If it were possible to cheat there that'd be more of a game design problem anyway.
As someone who rehosts an old game after the official servers shutdown, we have a dedicated servers for cheating and real moderators for the non-cheat ones. It works great but big corps don't way to pay for mods.
I also wonder why big companies don't do it to train ML algorithms on the cheat server data too..
Besides that, statistics is an unbeatable tool against cheaters.
Agreed. For detecting cheaters, statistics work like a Dream
Only if you want to cap the skill limit. Otherwise you would typically have a hand full of players that are genuinely just good or rather far outside the normal skill range. I guess with a lot of data collection one might be able to determine if there was some kind of natual progress or sudden skill jumps, but all in all it could weed out legitimate players.
You can detect the hit ratio for shooters and win rates for games with matchmaking, those are really good indicators for cheating.
Honestly I'd rather have a cheater in my lobby than Riot Games deep into the sections of my PC they should never have accessed.
With that said, I do not play Valorant for this reason (and also because it would require me to dualboot since Vanguard cannot be ported on Linux, lol)
I'd be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.
But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that's it. They don't care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.
The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google "valorant cheat .exe" and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.
It's all a fucking smokescreen. Man, people just eat that shit up. Every time. It's almost like the game is saturated in satire and we're spooning it down ourselves.
Oh, wait. fuck.
"You guys actually want to play these things? Yeeesh."
They are used to playstation players who buy a console for twice the price it's worth through discord bots. I don't think they even know what a backlash is
Nowadays a console is just a locked down, less expensive pc. I think buying the components of a ps5 and assembling the pc is more expensive than just buying a console and liberating it, which is what I would do if I was to ever buy one.
which is why the steam deck was such a breath of fresh air, it's what consoles SHOULD be.
A computer built primarily for gaming, sold at a reasonable price, that merrily lets you switch to desktop mode and launch excel for some office work if you want to.
They are learning what level of bullshit PC gamers will tolerate.
Maybe a company that has (mostly) made consoles isn’t exactly playing games or has people on staff on the executive level that play(ed) on a PC. I’m 30 and outside of a brief time I tried to play on a PC I’ve pretty much been console my entire life. My first gaming experiences were all on console. It’s completely logical for a company to make a move like this when they have specialized in one area for a time.
It's called market research.
Just another nail to the bootlicker's coffin of "review bombing does nothing".
God I hate bootlickers. Fuck em.
Review bombing and mass refunding too. Hit them where it hurts
The lack of humility in their statement makes me think they haven't learned anything.
Yea, this reads more like a sorry, this was too forced we will do something more subtle in the future. Not an actual apology.
They don't even say sorry. They did not use the words Sorry, Mistake, Problem, Wrong, or Fault. They say the approximation of "We see you're absolutely outraged. We've decided to change our decisions. We are always improving."
Translated: Dear suckers who keep giving us money for half-finished products. We are sincerely sorry, sorry for getting caught. We thought we could squeeze through with this one, but apparently our PC fans are not as gullible as our console fans.
They haven't. Ghosts of Tsushima's PC release is going to require account-linking from day 1 for the online component. The only thing Sony has learned is that the shittiness has to be ready and working from the start.
Yeah but the humility in their actions shows they did.
AFAIK the game is still banned in countries where you can't get a PSN account and also it still ships with a rootkit, so...
People were saying that might have been Valve just covering themselves from potential lawsuits. We'll just have to see if it's reverted.Nope nevermind, I was hopeful it was good guy Steam but it was in fact Sony. Fuck Sony. Will never buy another Sony game.
Valve should have done that from day 1.
Behind the scenes coming up with the future plans:
Yeah, like, you know what is best for PC players, it just doesn't come together with financial interest :D
and this is why i wish people would make it profitable, fuck AAA titles, give your money to indies who respect the consumers and actually just want to make a fun game.
I wish game devs would found a union that helps developers fund and publish games with no profit incentive, it seems like such an obvious thing to do and has the potential to revolutionizing how people create and play games.
No longer would we be beholden to companies, no longer would developers have to compromise their works for profit, no longer would players have to tolerate predatory bullshit.
Just good games made by passionate people who are happy to have people enjoy their works while being able to afford to live on it.
That's what I normally do - pirate or ignore AAA's, but always buy indies.
The problem with the union idea is that most games just won't pay off huge investments, so there needs to be someone competent who filters out profitable games, and funds games based on expected returns...and at that point we get, essentially, a publisher company. Or maybe a cooperative. But barely a union.
Getting abusive parent vibes from the language of Sony's post.
Corporate PR speak always sounds cringe and I despise it. Just be humans you fucking pricks.
Tbf, I've seen what happens to indies when they're just humans in how they talk to their customers/fans. HR speak exists for a reason unfortunately
Nah, I'd rather they keep speaking like this. Makes it really obvious from the get go who I'm dealing with. If they speak normally, they might blend in
Always is. They went too far. They scale back and try again when the dust has settled.
Oldest trick in the books
Starting off with “we’ve heard your feedback” is something I’ve never heard from an abusive parent?
“I understand you’re upset but…”
Naw it's more like "we did something we knew would make you incredibly uncomfortable; but now that you're screaming we're worried about the neighbors hearing it and we don't want the cops called on us, so we'll back off until a more opportune time."
Glorious Victory ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Major Order Completed! +50 Medals
Shitstorm = Feedback
Noted...
It's Feedback in the way that microphone feedback is - really bloody loud and painful, and makes you know you've done something wrong
Yeah exactly. And it’s often the only feedback that gets any attention unfortunately. It was getting media attention and getting very loud.
Plus the whole thing was just stupid. They could have accomplished exactly the same thing with little backlash by offering some little in-game trinket for voluntarily linking a PSN account where it was possible to get one. This wasn’t my idea, I saw it somewhere on Lemmy, but that person needs to get a job at Sony stat because the chucklefucks working there now have no clue.
the only feedback they respond to are the feedback that give them concussion.
Where are the: "just make an account bro" people now? Probably pre ordering skyrim the definite edition
I'd imagine some of them are here:
(edit: forgot to un-dox the user)
I’d love to shut up and play Starship Troopers: The Game. But unfortunately, I don’t have a PS5 or gaming PC. Still holding out hope that this will come to Xbox one day.
It has as much chance has Halo Infinite coming to PS5.
Nah there's a bigger chance of Halo coming to PS5 if MS recent moves are anything to go by.
Actually Halo Infinite might come out on ps5. Microsoft is publishing a lot of their games to Playstation atm. Sea of Thieves, Hi-fi rush, Grounded, Pentiment are all out on ps5.
Sea of Thieves was one of the big xbox exclusive games, developed by Rare, which is owned by Microsoft since 2002 and all the games they have made in the last 15+ years have been xbox exclusive.
And here
I don't think politely asking people to change their review so that it reflects reality is a "karen" move.
Just pointing out that the "Just make an account, AH doesn't deserve that" people are on Lemmy as well
But no one in your screenshot is saying that?
They've the same kind of reactions though, get abused and say you're sorry.
I don't see them telling anyone to "say you're sorry" either?
Changing your review to positive is exactly that
I see it more like a "we're good for now I guess, fuck around again and I'll change it back to negative"
Not really though
I was one of them to begin with but once I found out about the whole thing with people of certain countries not able to have an account even though they had already bought the game and were even previously able to play are now locked out, then I was on board.
I'm not against just making accounts, I must have thousands across the internet, what would be one more if I hadn't already had a PSN account.
One more attack vector to gain access to all your other accounts across the internet.
Using a password manager would avoid this. Everyone should ideally use unique passwords per service, that way a single account can't compromise the others.
The loss of personal data however is fricking annoying. If a company has no legitimate reason, I avoid signing up to them.
Looking at you Nvidia, Razar, etc...
@NocturnalEngineer @Isoprenoid i was so infuriated back when nvidia demanded an account for shadowplay. I thought id lose access to the encoder thingy. So glad that it can be used by other software too. Uninstalled the shadowplay/gf experience stuff and never looked back
Wouldn't it be nice to not have your info spread across thosands of accounts that you yourself even implied you don't keep track of?
What sony pulled, and coporate moves like it, are at least in part a result of people saying "meh, what's one more account, I've already got thousands."
We as a community aren't an immaculate entity. Companies don't just make these moves out of nowhere, they analyze what we're willing to do so they can take advantage of those things to make money. That's not some sleazy secret scheme, thats basic market research. If we collectively show we do actually care about this stuff and won't supoort their business when they do it, it might not happen so often.
But the game isn't even available on PlayStation so why am I creating an account? At the very least it's pointless busy work. And apparently not even well thought out.
It's on PS5, what you on about
Isn't it available on PS5?
Not sure where you are getting your info from. I play on PS5.
Demanding we apologize for the negative reviews now that Sony has reverted the change, if the discord server is anything to go by
Playing sims
Probably just playing the game.
For now... 🖕🏽 They worded that so weasely, they're just waiting for the storm to pass and for Legal to come up with some compelling reason why they're totally "obligated" to make it happen, "hands tied" "so sorry" and all that.
Fuck Sony. They made this SOP way back when, and there's no way they let this stop them forever. It's all about profit, not what "we" want.
Backfire 2, Steam refund boogaloo when?
Sounds about right.
"Helldivers 2 players get exactly what they wanted, still unhappy."
You don't lower your guard just because the fight is over. It's not like Sony has morals or any trustworthiness to keep to this even in the midterm.
Or, more rationally, you all invested so much of yourselves into your gamer outrage campaign and built yourselves up as the underdogs fighting the big, mean corporation. And when, to your own surprise, you actually won and got all of your demands met without compromise, you still can't let it go because you managed to incorporate all that upset over a video game into your personal identities over just a few days time.
So now, instead of celebrating your win, you'll limply cling to your hatred of Sony for a few more days or weeks until everyone finds something else to get upset about.
You talk like this never happened before
I talk like I have seen this exact same thing happen over and over and I'm sick of capital-G Gamers throwing tantrums over every inconvenience. You aren't Union Men fighting for your rights. You're gamers upset by a TOS change to your new toy even though Steam was going beyond their own policy to honor refunds.
NGL, you sound like a capital-R Redditor.
Aw, the gamer is upset I forced some introspection into their life.
But no, I'm sorry. You're totally a noble warrior who fought back the evil Sony and now must remain ever vigilant lest Kazuo Hirai leap from the shadows and scream "Riiiiidge Racer" at you and take away your toys while Gabe Newell gives you your money back and sheepishly shrugs like "I know, right? This guy, man."
This is such a weird thing to be upset over, and a weird side to take so passionately that you do.
I don't even play Helldivers, nor do I plan to after this, it's just on the one side there's random upset people, on the other side there is the corp that got infamous for distributing straight up malware in a weird effort to enforce DRM. Why would people go back to being happy with a company that tried to fuck them over, and then walked its position back to the status quo with no commitments of not trying this again later.
The "random upset people" on the former side were perfectly happy to give their money to the "corp" on the latter side before the TOS change. This has nothing to do with how untrustworthy Sony has been in the past and everything to do with upset Gamers wanting to keep their outrage party going even after they got what they wanted.
The problem is who can you give money to for entertainment if not to the same 3 corps who have bought everything, and how else can you protest them doing stuff that's outrageous even by their standards?
Don't feed the fuck clown.
I didn't have anything to do with this and never got involved. I watched from the sides. I don't even play or own Helldivers 2.
You don't get to do something shitty then expect everyone to be happy. If you want that, you shouldn't have done the shitty thing in the first place.
Seriously. Jesus Christi, peopke
"Sorry, we'll have to do it in a few months again to see if you still can mobilize this much".
"You know that thing where the initial assault is just a ploy to draw people in for the real attack?"
Holy shit I was wrong
Now, now, don't be hasty. Sony can still screw it up somehow.
In today's digital media, any post where a person admits they were wrong deserves an upvote regardless of the subject.
Getting almost 300k negative reviews in 2 days will do that.
Holy shit, what did https://lemmy.zip/u/therealjcdenton do to deserve those?
Cyberbullying works 🎉
Is that the new term for boycott?
Ya, it's the good ol' "voting with your wallet" that can bring companies to their knees
This has nothing to do with the shitstorm (it mostly hit Arrowhead anyway), and I think the review bombing didn’t affect their decision making that much. What I think happened was, Sony saw the massive refunds. They got hit right into the wallet 😩
This makes me smile.
The refunds may have hurt, but what hurt more was the fact that in the last week HD2 went from #1/2 on the Steam global top sellers to #11. The big red "Overwhelmingly Negative" next to a title is a huge turnoff to new buyers.
Some executive somewhere has a chart showing daily sales numbers and watched them fall off a cliff in the last week.
Point taken.
That's what pisses me off with the steam review bombing.
If that's the only way to express discontent then that will fucking sucks for everybody involved in game development.
If at least review bombing was a last resort but now it's the norm. These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game even though the drama bubble has now popped.
Good, let them learn their actions have consequences.
Sure let's destroy this game all together because of this issue.
A well thought out and mature reaction is to pretend the game is bad in the steam reviews even though you clocked 100+ hours into it.
I mean there is a ton of things Helldivers does better than any other games and we are gonna trash that because of a PSN account requirements ?
I understand this is a valid issue for certain players but is it a proportionate response to this situation to trash the game on steam? I don't think so.
Yes, next question.
No problem.
Legit question: Did you completely stopped playing Helldivers 2 ?
Is it uninstalled?
Did you ask for a refund ?
Because if you still play the game and at the same time say it should be trashed that's a lot of hypocrisy.
It can't be both. You can criticize the game that's fine. But if you still play it and you are so vocal for its demise then you are definitely part of the problem here.
I never played or bought it, because I hate Sony and don't play always online multiplayer games because they treat players as cattle and not as users.
So you are asking other players to review bomb and try to kill a game you never bought yourself?
Fascinating.
Edit: I think the above conversation is a good example of why I don't think Steam Review Bombing is the best solution. You get people delivering fake reviews sometimes for games they don't even play themselves. I understand why they do that I just don't think that's the right way to do so. And also thinks it's not fair for the actual devs working on the project.
I'm not asking anyone to do anything. I do all my trashing individually and independently. That's a straw man the size of the wicker man.
Yes
Yes
I asked but was denied my first one, and did not submit a second one before Sony walked back the changes.
I don't actually have plans to return to the game, because Sony is consistently fucking with the dev team and the game has now accrued so much technical debt that the constant bugs and issues would impact me every time I log in.
I will also no longer be supporting Sony titles on PC. Even if they release my holy grail Bloodborne, I'll pirate it and play it offline.
Fuck Sony forever, and stop trying to gatekeep hating a company over their shitty practices.
It’s a bad take to tell people their only means of effective protest is not going through proper channels.
Did you have a constructive suggestion or are you just here to defend Sony?
First would you mind telling me where I defend Sony ?
It must be very subtle.
This conversation already starts in bad faith. You are trying to undermine my comment by declaring I'm taking side with Sony. There is nothing in my recent comments that says Sony has done something right or that I agree with their move. Nothing.
Am I allowed to genuinely think this account issue wasn't that much of a big deal ? Or do I only get to choose if I'm a Sony shill or not ? I have seen my favorite game franchise getting shat on for years by their developers (EA) and I have seen things thousands of time much worse from EA than this account requirement from PS. Still right to call out Sony for this but this is not a "this game is unplayable" issue like we had many times on other games. So yeah I have a nuanced opinion on this and didnt immediately accept that Sony murdered Helldivers 2 and that the game is dead.
My suggestion is not complicated. Stay truthful in your reviews. That's not rocket science. A lot of these reviews are rating or presenting the game as much worse than they really think it is. Most of these players will review bomb and will play hundred of hours just after that. I'm fucking French I understand what protests are and that being an annoyance is kind of the point. But review bombing on steam and telling a naive player that would definitely enjoy the game that the game is trash will never be cool. You can say in your review that you don't like that aspect of the game but if the point is only to be negative and untrustworthy this is not the way. Again if you truly suddenly think that game is "the worst game ever" after playing hundreds of hours and learning of the PS requirements then fine but I doubt it's what happens.
Also did you stop to think what is your comment bringing to the table here ? It's just an unnecessarily aggressive comment and doesn't either provide anything beside telling me I'm wrong and it's a bad take.
Steam review bombing is absolutely not the proper channel to voice discontent. It's a review. Not a forum, not a dev support channel. It's a review. You are giving your honest feedback on a game. The good and the bad. Not just "the thing everyone told me is bad" and nothing else.
This is not cool to tell devs their game is trash on the steam page if you don't really and truthfully think so.
Absolutely despise th fact that devs have to constantly read their game is trash in steam reviews because some higher-ups decided to go full greed mode.
So yeah Steam REVIEWS are NOT the proper channel to voice discontent. Almost any other forum or social network is. Just not a steam review page.
This type of review bombing is actually against steams terms of service for reviews in the first place, they've stepped in a few times now to hide campaigns like that, I expect they will do the same with this one. Basically it'll keep the recent review metric but, it will hide the reviews from the historical and the overall metric. So worst case out of this will be it has a negative recent reviews for awhile.
your last sentence is actually the exact reason they implemented that policy and they moreorless quote it in their forum post where they talk about how the new system works
Steam has a specific thing that appears when you keep playing a lot on a game that you’ve negatively reviewed asking if you want to change it. I think a game is rarely impacted long-term by review bombing for a resolved issue, unless the reviewers actually dropped the game and went on with their lives.
Once again, Arrowhead decided to go with Sony as publisher, they agreed with PSN account linking. No offense, they are are an independent studio, they did not need to do that. It is sad they lost money, but the developers already got paid. The worst thing that can happen is they have to switch jobs.
Arrowhead did not have the infrastructure for this many people. Sony barely pulled it off at launch and cross play still sucks.
I mean, who would've pulled the sudden influx of players? The game being popular was expected, but not in such huge numbers.
Developers generally have a choice between going to one of the massive publishers (which allows for better promotion and for expensive games to pay off, but comes at a cost of their will over devs), or to self-release, which means way less players will even know about the game, not to mention buy it.
Arrowhead realistically only had the first option.
That's not to say there's no fault of theirs in the situation, just that it's not a free choice and that Sony is still the main culprit
If they truly go through that for the promotion, then they are idiots and deserve all the hate. Video games don't blow up because there is a commercial on time square that costs a million dollars, games blow up because they are good and people/youtubers and (yuck) influencers talk about it
If that would be true, all games would be indie titles.
Unfortunately, those promotions DO matter, and absolute majority of indie games never pull it off, because we never even get to hear about them.
Promotion makes a difference between a cool game no one knows about and a game everyone plays.
And when everyone is expected to buy your game, you have much bigger budgets to make the game not just conceptually good, but also greatly executed.
The fact that they specifically mention that date makes me think they're simply pushing the date back
They are just being clear and accurate with their comms. No need to over think it.
They specifically said "not moving forward". Seems pretty clear and concise. No PSN requirement.
And they also said "We're still learning what's best for PC players [...]"
They'll be back.
They won't be back - they're not leaving.
But that phrase also seems like pretty normal rationalizing in an apology.
If I had to bet it was mostly steam issuing refunds and pulling the game in more than 100 countries that changed their mind.
God damn. You people just NEED to be upset about stuff. Like, pathologically.
it couldn't possibly be that people are applying basic pattern recognition
No, a bunch of people here just need to be outraged about something all the time, and pessimistic about everything.
Nothing can ever be even modestly positive. Everything - everything - has to be bad and negative all the time. If it was a cute puppy video, there'd be a bunch of comments about how puppy farms are evil and etc.
It's exhausting.
Not our fault the entire tech industry keeps engineering new ways to give people trust issues.
Can you tell us what positive thing we can get from the account linking debacle?
You just know that there used to be an "…at this time" at the end of that sentence and some good PR folk edited it out because managers are out of touch douches.
Have they reinstated the games back in the 177 countries they delisted it in? Can those people who paid for the game still play it?
Short answer: Yes.
Longer answer: The access hadn't been removed yet, as the update that would enable account linking wasn't pushed yet. As for the Steam side, I'm pretty sure people who already had the game installed should've had access still, although updates and general unsureness definitely could be obstacles. With this tweet, however, the update is no longer coming, and were just waiting for Sony/Valve to lift the selling/installing restrictions in those countries.
Steam only removes games from the store, and doesn't remove games from anyone's library. Those affected people, if they didn't refund, will still have HD2 in their library. There is also never install restrictions/blocking.
OK now they can go ahead with plan B where they allow you to link your PSN account to get some super cool cosmetic. I wonder what the reaction of the consumers will be then.
I think that's entirely fair and similar to store loyalty cards. You get something in exchange for your datas at least.
Except now many loyalty cards are now required to get sale prices that were previously available without them. It is a bleak world where folks have to potentially choose between affording groceries and protecting their privacy.
That's allright tho.
Wasn't that already the case? That's what they did in most of their other pc ports at least
People actually thought that this was a very cool solution. People are the worst.
I really don't see the problem, provided it is cosmetic. If you don't want to link, you don't get a glittering, whatever in game. If you don't mind sharing your datas, then you get the shiny thing (and everyone knows you don't mind sharing your datas).
I mind.
So if you mind sharing your data, don't get the shiny. You know it will become like that shiny pony back in wow's wrath expansion. It told you more about the person than anything else.
There are legitimate reasons for the devs and Sony to want your psn account linked. It's also reasonable to not want to do so. Why not offer a compromise, like any healthy relationship, and allow, not force, account linking, with a little incentive? Where is the downside to either party?
So, someone in my Discord channel posted a tweet that maybe alters perspective a bit;
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/575881390999207956/1236869629008412714/not-surprised-but-damn-v0-jjr7xh7eqlyc1.png?ex=663a3cdb&is=6638eb5b&hm=3f4ff94b3a29dceb2e973e1e61abcf84c92220571d32a7b05c2966b74ccb241b&
To summarize or if the link breaks, one of the devs “knew beforehand” they’d have to require PSN accounts post launch, but disabled them for a smooth launch. That’s interesting, but as long as Sony was acting as publisher I feel like the blame still goes on them for selling the game to non-PSN countries initially.
FYI l: That's the CEO of Arrowhead, who made the game.
Nice! Guess I can add it back to my wishlist and consider buying it soon! Been holding off on it too long
"too long"? The game is 4 months old.
Hot take, don't buy any games which were only released in the last 12 months. Matured games are far more stable
I remember when people on this site were saying Helldivers was already GOTY back on release week, hilarious.
If it wins after this situation, it's definitely not the players choice.
I'd agree with this statement for most games, but the best way to enjoy Helldivers 2 specifically is to play it when the playerbase and the hype is at its peak. The gameplay will still be just as good a year from now, sure, but you'd miss the emergent story being built right now
I won't miss out on any gameplay story by waiting a year. I have a core set of friends, we'll do just fine in a years time.
The only thing I'm missing out on is this dramatic period of instability
Sure, not trying to tell you how to enjoy your games at all! I was just explaining why people would want to play this specific game closer to launch rather than later
Agreed! I was just mostly showing my gratitude to the people fighting Sony and my relief that I can get a chance to play, didn't mean for my message to be taken literal on the "too long" part lol.
That being said, my reasoning for wanting to play it soon is that I've got a few friends who are all now interested in picking it up... I'd rather enjoy the time to play with them now then not be able to play it with them in a year when they've moved onto something else.
!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
This has the "fuck you" energy without the actual word
"we listened to your feedback and made major changes to planned updates" is fuck you energy?
"We listened to our accounting, and the massive wave of refunds and unbought mtx is hurting our numbers. PR isn't happy about the reviews either. We'll keep you updated on future plans for fucking you over!
Do you really think that Sony will actually back down? They are calming down the shitstorm that is going over all media, socials and steam. They'll reorganize and will move on with their plans. Arrowhead and Helldivers is just one of many assets.
Of course not.
The review bombing was serious but I'd eat my hat if this stunt cut revenue by more than 10%. I don't have anything for Helldivers but here's an article about Dragons Dogma 2
10% is a lot by I WANT MORE MONEY RIGHT NOW shareholder metrics
It means the two million people playing it now have to get emails, promotions, and keep sony products in their mind.
They obviously didn't think it would be popular. Just like Wizards of the Coast when they tried to put out a new license that said "anything with the words 'dungeons and dragons' on it becomes our intellectual property", they assumed that pissing off their entire fanbase would be net positive because people will keep buying their stuff no matter how bad it gets.
It does kind of have “We would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!” energy to me.
There’s no way they thought the PSN thing would’ve been a well-received update.
It does?
It does not.
PC gamers with the W for not folding to bad choices. More gamers need to do this.
It's still packaged with that awful and invasive nProtect GameGuard garbage though, so be be aware of what you're buying before you make the choice.
Or just run linux. While that comes with other potential issues... Anti-cheat isn't one of them. Either the game doesn't work (and thus safe from the terribad rootkits), or the "anti-cheat" is stuck in it's sandbox(and thus safe from the rootkit).
I think there'd have been a lot less pushback if the gamers had got something in return, like Steam/PSN cross-buy on Sony published titles.
It's not even like they could claim it being needed for cross-play, because it demonstrably works without it.
Still not going to buy it.
Good. I hope this collaboration will kick all 3rd party
launchersstuff from Steam in the future.It never required a 3rd party launcher, just a PSN account to link to a Steam account.
I know. I was talking about all 3rd party bullshit on Steam. My bad, I could've written more clearly.
So how are PS players, playing now?
Their account seems to be as useless as, your comma.
Never thought I would see the day.
At least this whole situation shines light on how greedy Sony is, even tho those lesser aware.
I don't think anyone thought otherwise.
Good, otherwise they'd know that Kendrick would put out a diss track on them.
Cool to see. I might buy this game :)
Revert your negative reviews guys
lol