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
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The fuck clowns are buying up our culture. It's hard to not participate in it. I don't play these kinds of games, but I've nothing on people who do. We should beat up the fuck clowns until they serve society again.
And just to be clear, I am advocating violence in the form of stringent regulations binding corporations towards socially beneficial paths. I advocate for violent anti-trust measures to the point even the execs don't know who is still working for them and who has been broken off to another company to compete freely. And I want worker protections that cause mind-bending fear in wage thieves.
How about we just not advocate violence at all? Regulations can be helpful but also the government needs to make sure it is not creating unconstitutional laws that violate people's rights, and that includes their right to make bad choices. Otherwise the law will end up more authoritarian than free.
Sorry, I went too deep into sarcasm in there. I wasn't advocating for violence, just laws protecting society and people that are strong enough to deter corps from breaking them.
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.
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 😩
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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!👊👊
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
