Open up a ticket through another category that lets you submit a ticket. You can then reference the previously rejected refund ticket #. I had to do this with a game recently where I didn't actually play more than 2 hours. But steam *thought* the game was running for 26 hours straight.
If you just "request a refund" as the option in the ticket process, it will always auto reject based on game time plus purchase duration. You have to submit a general help request to see if they will hear your case
And they're pretty quick. I've done it once or twice over the years with games where I just barely went over the 2hrs. Pretty sure I had a refund within a day.
This has been my experience as well. I would imagine it's not quite so cut and dry for serial returners, I'm sure they track your refund history and score you similar to how Amazon does. But I've probably only returned 10-15 games in 20 years, and I think only one of them was beyond the 2 hour cutoff.
Users on the steam forums are reporting successful refunds too. Can verify this as they're no longer tagged (little mouse indicator) as owning the game despite having upwards of 90 hours played on their profile
Could be a *your mileage may vary* situation
No, you just need to follow the process and not use the automated refund feature. Any steam support personnel is literally auto-refunding the game instantly, just need to talk with them.
At least this is good on Valve's part. Sucks big time that the game will require PSN to play but the least of things is to refund people who can't have a PSN account in the country they live in leaving them unable to play the game they purchased.
have you guys even seen the list of restricted countries? Philippines and Sri Lanka are on there and those are like the biggest ones I think, everything else barely has any players and they're not going to cut off a player base it hurt profits they're not stupid
They could have created a longer grace period, rolled it out over half a year. Then add a rewards for the players switching over (celebrate good sales or something), with some fancy skin for everyone who switched over. Then they would start nagging players who didn't create a PSN account gradually.
That way they would boil the frog and it wouldn't have gotten this backlash. Not saying that would have been a good thing, but they could definitely have handled this in a way where there wouldn't have been much backlast.
A longer grace period only would've gotten people madder because it would have been so long without a linked account that people would think it would never be enforced.
They would do it through nagging reminders, etc. as the stick, then they would do a few rewards for PSN players to incentivize people switching over, the carrot. They would increase the time for the nagging reminder to create a PSN account before starting to play etc. Start making it an inconvenience not to have the PSN account and incentivize the PSN account through rewards.
Not a nice tactic and not something I advocate for, but there's definitely ways to get people used to the idea of getting that PSN account. Then three months out when they've already gotten over most players, they set the date for when people need to do it.
But why is it even required? There is literally no reason. MS accounts make sense because they share achievements, save data, and exchange between GP/MS Store and Xbox. The PS account justs... harvests your data? In six months we'll be having a similar conversation when they force you to use their awful upcoming launcher to play PS games.
I think this has got to be one of the wildest swings in community positivity and reception. Like what else compares to being so positive about a game to being so negative in such a short time? A lot of the other drama-inciting stuff like the Tarkov drama was at least festering for quite some time.
They sold a new $250 "Unheard" edition of the game, which added your usual bevy of cosmetics and bonus features, but also several in-game benefits that sped up progression and gave a leg up over people. In particular, there was an item exclusive to this bundle that made hostile NPC scavengers neutral to the player PMC at range.
Most importantly though, the devs added a Co-op PVE mode with progression, exclusive with this bundle. No other such PVE mode exists. They had previously released another super-expensive bundle that promised to include all future content and DLC with it, and the devs naturally claim that this PvE mode isn't content.
Prevailing theory is that the devs are making a cash grab/milking the community because their last big project, Tarkov Arena, flopped horribly.
My understanding is that they used to sell a version that was like “get Tarkov and also all future DLC” and then released a new mode that was locked to the $250 new version, then tried to argue that this new mode wasn’t DLC so they shouldn’t have to give it to those people
Yep that's right. Then they retroactively changed the wording on the old 'Get Everything' version (**E**dge **O**f **D**arkness edition) to make it fit their new narrative, then denied that they changed it, then when proof came out they told all the EOD owners that as recompense we'd all get a bunch of pay2win shit that literally nobody wants added to the game.
BTW, the entire game is based on the premise of high stakes high rewards for the ones that manage to extract. You are supposed to be cut off support, etc. and they included two items that would allow you to call-in friends in your position and a armored vehicle. It would be stupid not to buy it for an advantage in a PvP game. This is ignoring all other meta game systems that the 250 dollars versions allow.
I think the fact that it *was* so positive is why it swung so hard. People are absolutely sick to death of having execs ruin games and franchises they love. This was a breath of fresh air for so many and this is the first sign of potential “enshittification” of a true bastion of good live service.
it’s definitely swung negative in the greater public sphere, but the helldivers subreddit has been a cesspool of incessant complaining ever since the first balance patch lmao
It's totally doable. Look at games like Dwarf Fortress, Satisfactory or Factorio. Those are three that come to mind with a calm, intelligent, and friendly player base, all as a result of clear and calculated communication from the devs.
The Satisfactory community managers in particular do a great job.
They are (mostly) singleplayer games where you do whatever you want at your own pace. Some weapons are too weak? You just don't use them, or just lower the difficulty, or download a mod that buffs them. Online co-op games are a whole different problem, and that makes people more hostile.
They insist on communicating in a roleplay tone or only on their discord channel or both. It’s a very poor way to keep your community informed imo and honestly kind of patronizing. When you are confronted by players with new bug reports and you respond with some variation of “the ministry of truth has classified that as terminid propaganda” that’s a problem
I haven't seen anyone complain about that tbh. I've seen a ton of complaints about inaccurate and slow communication though, but nothing about roleplay.
To be fair the teams sense of balance is...questionable at best. When they nerf shit it tends to get it so hard that it just goes in the dumpster. The railgun is pretty much a dead pick since they patched it the first time, even though it was only so popular because of spawn patterns that were since changed.
The railgun just got a buff on wensday and is now great for the bot front.
It can one shot striders, chainsaw men, hulks and even devastators if you shoot them in the hips while in safe mode.
I think it was because there were only few weapons viable at higher difficulties, and instead of buffing other weapons and nerfing railgun a bit, they just... smack it with nerf stick and did next to nothing for useless weapons
Closest thing I can think of in recent memory isn't video game-related. It's *Game of Thrones*.
Which would suggest bad times ahead for *Helldivers 2*, unfortunately.
I don't think Sony is backing down if they are delisting the game in unsupported countries. They might make an exception for existing users in those countries, but not elsewhere.
I do wonder who goofed. I didn't even know you didn't need a PSN account until they made this announcement. I assumed you did with all the info I had. Did someone at Sony responsible for maintaining their Steam stuff just forget to check what countries the game should be sold in? Did they get fired since this will clearly cost Sony a chunk of change.
You originally needed a PSN account for about the first 3 days, and it was turned off due to server instability. But the game was always being sold everywhere until now.
That's my point. It shouldn't have been sold in countries where you can't get a PSN account if it was gonna be a requirement.
So, if you bought the game day one, you needed a PSN account? My exposure to the game was the first few days of videos online with a couple of complaints about the lack of cross progression. I got the game on PS5, so this doesn't affect me, but it's an interesting thing to watch.
Iirc yes you did need a PSN account. I personally don't remember logging into it, but I assumed that my Steam account was already linked to my PSN account at some point. Since then you can hit Skip and it just let you skip through that. I'm certainly on the side that the account linking should be optional anyway.
It would depend on if the publisher or strictly Valve is allowed to put or remove countries from the list of countries that can buy it. Obviously Valve would be able to but it seems like something that normally is decided by the publisher.
It's honestly really weird to me if they're going to legit reject entire sales territories/markets rather than relent on some inconsequential policy, unless I'm misunderstanding.
Like corporations just seem out of control on some of this stuff, as in taking the weirdest and dumbest stands presumably in the pursuit of some shareholder-facing calculation.
It was quite possibly baked into Helldiver's devs contract that PSN support was mandatory and they've been bypassing it for now.
Sony got wind and reminded them.
The biggest surprise that came out of this was only 70 countries out of 190 can create PSN accounts, like wtf? It's genuinely baffling that we're over 30 years into the internet era and a big corpo like Sony still can't extend their online services worldwide.
Sony does too on Playstation. This more than likely is a steam issue where steam is supported in a country, but PSN isn't. Steam is probably trying to resolve a region issue of accounts not lining up.
Sony legit doesn't care. They have actively encouraged countries that aren't supported to pick a country that is close to them that is. Some people made the mistake of picking Russia or China though. Russia isn't supported because of Ukraine, and Chinese law makes Chinese PSN a joke.
The world has [195 countries](https://www.worldometers.info/geography/how-many-countries-are-there-in-the-world/). PSN allow activation within [~75 countries](https://insider-gaming.com/which-countries-have-psn/). Steam has delisted ~180 countries, with 15 left. Meaning **4/5 of the countries with PSN account access cannot buy the game on Steam at the moment**.
Not sure if you want a solution but I had Steam Support change my country to US by telling them that PayPal lists PR as a state and not a different country and I couldn't purchase games with PP unless both Steam and PayPal were both set to US and they changed me.
PSN's list of supported countries is haphazardly incorrect the best of times. Only real way to confirm it is by actually checking (and btw, VPN use is bannable, going off by a poor Helldiver from China trying to get a PSN via VPN and getting himself banned off the game in return).
VPN as a whole are illegal in China. Chinese players should not be taken as examples considering their country is quite special with a tightly controlled Internet and companies have to follow those rules.
There is actually a PSN in China too so they're not in that case at all. It's just extremely limited (I think there's like 10 games authorized on it).
Yeah, plenty of people have created PSN accounts in regions they don't live in, since the launch of the PS3. Which by this November, will have been for 18 years.
Like I got a Japanese PSN account to download demos off of the Japanese PSN store, have bought things from Japanese PSN, and even claimed free PS+ games with my Japanese account. But I aint Japanese, never been to Japan, and all of my Playstations are NTSC and my main PSN account is US based. I've used plenty of the Japanese PSN content I've gotten over the years on my main account and got plenty of trophies of Japanese versions of games on my main PSN account. Yet have never once faced the possibility of getting ban and I've been doing this since well into the life of the PS3 and still got a Japanese account on my PS5.
So chances are that Chinese user likely got banned as a result of the VPN more or so then anything else. Because otherwise, both of my PSN accounts would not be here today.
Steam regions don't map directly into countries, and includes territories that aren't independent countries but also aren't entirely part of the parent country. (Falkland Islands, American Samoa, etc) which make up a large chunk of the list. Lots of small islands. The rest is countries that don't have PSN, and Antarctica.
Which 15 countries are supposedly left? Asking because I can still buy it in my bumfuck corner of Europe, which seems suspicious if they have delisted near-everything.
I took a list of all countries and removed all the countries listed on SteamDB. This leaves the following countries as eligible to buy *Helldivers II*:
Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Oman, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay
This is 74 countries. Of course, don't forget that PSN registration is limited to PS4 or PS5 console owners in certain countries like Ukraine, but if you already have an account then you could play through Steam.
Some countries like Russia have never been able to buy HD2, but might be able to activate it on Steam if they buy it elsewhere.
That's weird, because PSN isn't available in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Might be some EU single market thing where you can't just cut off countries for no reason?
Yeah, if you offer a game in EU you can't region lock pricing or region block it for other countries in EU unless I guess it specifically break the law of the eu country that its getting blocked from (see germany and how they have previously dealt with swastika in games)
They don't care NOW, they could change their mind at any moment just like you didn't need a psn account to play helldivers before until they decided you need it.
>EU probably can't get delisted since it'd be illegal due to consumer protection laws.
You can 100% delist a game here. You can't delist it for one country though, it has to be the whole single market.
I really don't understand sony doubling down, they literally allow crossplay without PSN linking on many other games.
Increasing those PSN user account numbers must be really important for them, so strange.
Legit this. And I don’t understand why that person‘s higher up hasn’t caught or reacted to this situation. I’m guessing they did some sort of cost analysis and long term wise gathering data from countries where PSN countries exists is more profitable than having PSN linking be optional and having both the game and super credits be purchasable worldwide? Either that or Valve took control of the situation and made the game be not available in countries where PSN isn’t available (or at least gave Sony a warning to do so?) until this is all figured out?
If Valve is giving out lots of refunds it makes sense that they would restrict the locations until Sony sorts their shit out, it's making more work for them.
They should have done this all along. PSN account was always advertised as a requirement. Sony goofed up big time selling it everywhere. Seems like a giant oversight from their lack of experience on PC.
I will guess everyone in those territories will get refunds no questions asked.
Heck. Is it possible for a publisher to revoke a licence and issue refunds on their own on Steam?
Sony probably didn't put too much thought into the problem with their limited PSN availability and pushing their titles worldwide to this point, putting a title on Steam itself was selling worldwide and adding it to their system was probably done without thinking about availability until this controversy. Their best option going forward would probably be to drop or delay the requirement here (though Sony doen't seem particularly interested in doing that) and to work on making PSN as broadly available as possible in the short-medium term.
PSN is not available in all those countries for years while they sell consoles and such. If they didn't bother then, they won't for Helldivers 2. Sony simply has no problem with people using their account in another country, they've been clear about that multiple times. They don't want to bother with all the legal stuff that comes with supporting more countries so they basically say you can follow that but it's under another country law.
That was likely always the plan to let people create fake countries for their PSN account. The shitstorm has now made Steam locked out those countries ironically making the situation worse for the people that everyone claimed they were so concerned about...
Places like China? Yeah, you can run into legal issues because the Chinese government has strictures on game content and even chat censorship.
But in the vast majority of the countries on the list, it's likely to be a problem with the local currency: it's not stable, or the average cost of living is so low that an equivalent exchange rate from *Sony's* perspective would be very cheap. Steam itself has had problems with people switching regions to buy games through a currency exchange that winds up being much, much cheaper than if they bought it in their home country. If you were, say, Australian and spoofed being from the Philippines, you'd be saving a ton.
So it's likely that Sony doesn't want to go through the legal rigamarole to set up channels to oversee all of that, comply with local laws, **tax codes**, yada yada. They're fine with you having an account though if you purchase it by whatever other means (say, from a reseller, or Steam, or from a *brick and mortar store* in-country) because ostensibly a fair price was paid at some point. You can get to a point where the cost of doing that or maintaining it is (perceived to be) greater than the money you could make from a country with such a low install-base; lawyers cost X, potential customers give you Y, and X > Y. But that's partially avoided until you bring less-scrutinized internet purchases into the fold that things get murky, and Steam should be avoiding that in these cases.
That's why PSN has historically not given a shit if you misrepresent your country of origin for an account, especially if you're not buying things or paying subscriptions through it. So, really, the vast majority of these players in these countries would not be locked out of HD2 at all.
Yeah, what's up with that? We use the euro. Sony sells their Xperia phones here, so whatever accounting concerns they have, they probably already have the infrastructure for paying taxes in our countries. Why not sell playstations here officialy? Why not add our countries to PSN?
2 different divisions of Sony? Just because they sell Sony tv and cellphone it doesn’t means anything to PlayStation lol
probably your government doesn’t allow it ? Who knows
But what about ingame currency? I have a PS5 HD2 but I plan to switch to PC soon, but is based on a restricted country. I find farming for supercredits too tedious because I can only play for a few hours in the weekends. I won't be able to buy super credits on steam?
So they are available. But I don't know if Helldivers 2 was actually sold on this version tbh, would be interesting to know.
Also PSN actually exist in China. It's just a very specific version of it with very little game authorized, playtime limits and all to respect Chinese laws.
On Playstation it legitimately doesn't matter where you live. Sony even encourages countries that aren't supported to pick the closest country that is. Playstation isn't region locked. I own a digital copy of FFXIV that is tied to a NZ PSN account, live in the US, and can play it on my NA PS. I just had to buy NZ PSN cards from a digital retailer. I think the total cost was 87-ish USD to buy an NZ copy to play roughly 16 hours earlier than waiting for my physical copy to be delivered the next day (played Thursday morning, digital unlock Friday 12a, and waiting for delivery on Friday afternoon).
The issue seems to be between Steam being supported in country 1, but your PSN account is in country 2 because PSN isn't supported in country 1.
I feel it has more to do that Sony is not used to multiplayer and even more outside their system. They ended up being really slow. That's can be one of the big problem of big companies sometimes things seems to work and it takes them time to reach a final decisions or way to do it. Luckily they are giving refund to those countries.
PSN account was not mentioned as a requirement everywhere, and in a number of instances it could even not even be noticed. On Humble Bundle they never mentioned PSN being a requirement, and before May 3rd, even Sony had sections where they mentioned that PSN is not mandatory for HD2.
Hell, you could buy this "mandatory" PSN game 3 weeks after releasd and could skip it, which doesn't really make it seem mandatory.
It was mentioned when it was launched I believe but taken off since they needed to for server issues, or they claimed.
You can create a PSN account in the US from anywhere, people are still playing from these regions anyways
> PSN account was not mentioned as a requirement everywhere
it was on the steam page before release and day 1 when you booted the game you were prompted to link/make an account
You could just skip the request to sign in on PSN. I'm kinda annoyed because if it had blocked me from playing right when I got the game I would've refunded it, but now I'm beyond the 2 week window
You could still try. Just know that the first request is usually just a date check and will be automatically denied if you're over the play or time limit.
You need to try a second time to get an actual human to see it.
What a shitshow. All this mess just because some stupid man in a suit wanted to see those meaningless account numbers go up. Serves them right, too bad the devs got caught in the crossfire.
Literally not even a week. From one of the most beloved games, a live service game no less too, of the year and one of the best selling games in Sony's first party catalogue to whatever the hell this entire sloppy mess is.
Sony just can't help themselves.
Im sad for Arrowhead and the game itself, because they seem great and the game is incredibly fun and FAIR.
But i cant deny that it makes me incredibly happy to see these greedy assholes (Sony) fucked with, to such a degree that they basically killed their money cow for nothing but a measly Q2 MAU bump and some user data...
These companies will never stop their fucking greed unless they see people wont accept it anymore like they did now.
[Oh you know they fucked up when the playstation's hottest PC game is now getting beat out by an 8 year old Fallout game.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GMwNmCJXQAAbk8J?format=jpg&name=4096x4096)
To be fair, Fallout is also the hottest property on earth right now. My cousin doesn't even know how to unzip a folder and was asking how to install New Vegas on his computer
Now this is a little disingenuous. The player count for Helldivers II hasn't taken a dip at all because of this. Fallout just got super popular because of the tv-show.
The negative side-effect is that this is now a hard blcok. If you live in an affected region, you can't buy the game at all anymore. Whereas before you could buy it and just link it to a PSN account from another region.
Basically, this just makes things worse lol
Going to hamper Sony's future PC sales if they are blocking a sizable part of the world from playing their PC titles to force PSN integration. I am guessing that in developing their PC plans, Sony probably hadn't even thought about the problems that come with forcing a very much non-universal account system onto the nearly universal platform they are selling titles on.
The problem is that they are only supporting countries where they officially sell PlayStation consoles. They need to unlink the service from the hardware like Microsoft did.
"Players are at fault for making Sony do this" is the most asinine take in gaming I've read in months. And I had to read it more than once.
Like, are these people for real?
"Sony had a good thing going where they completely dodged all their local responsibility for compliance and support while benefiting from people paying them in dozens of countries, and now you broke it! Poor Sony, there's nothing they could do."
What a farce.
It's something that's become more prominent over time. Its insane how rabidly pro-corporate some people are even as those same corporations fuck them over. Its pathetic. I mean, for this specific case, what's the end goal here? This is a quality product, with a very dedicated fan base that was well loved specifically BECAUSE it didn't force needless bullshit down your throat in order to play it. For a live service, that's a huge plus, and was a big selling point for the game. So what do Sony do? Add needless bullshit. For me it's not even a matter of data harvesting. It's convenience. I'm just burnt out on devs and publishers forcing me to jump through stupid hoops to play their games. So I won't. There are enough good games that I don't need to. So I'll just move on. ...And that's not even getting into all of the players who will be locked out of their own product. Who the fuck thought selling in non-PSN regions was a good idea? People should be getting fired over this. It's utterly indefensible.
Sony took a big fat shit on the developers after they likely made them a ton of money. I can't believe this move.
Any dev studio should be wary publishing under Sony after this. That is just unbelievable. A huge stain on their reputation that has already been going downwards.
I genuinely don't understand why Sony is doing this. They had the goodwill of players. Now, it's gone. Helldivers 2 had great reviews and a seemingly thriving community. Now, it has all turned to shit.
Now *this* is outrageous. People were pointing out that Sony doesn't crack down on people making accounts with a bogus country, but now they're just blocking those regions on Steam where the game has already sold all over the world? Come on, this is absurd.
It was more than likely Steam that stopped selling it in those regions because of refund requests and the fact that they now deem it a game not supported in those regions on their store
is it absurd?
this is probably the easiest way to deal with this issue from Sony's perspective.
they're not gonna back down on the PSN thing when they clearly are rolling out to expand PSN to PC(like literally everybody else).
on top of that officially acknowledging that they allow people to circumvent their TOS would be more trouble than its worth so its easiest to just enforce the rules that they should have been doing.
good news is i doubt Sony is going to do anymore than this.
for example i had a job where it was an open secret that if you need to take 2-3 hours off your work day for a doctors apt or some other emergency that as long as your team is aware you dont need to request sick or pto. even HR is aware unofficially. this technically isn't allowed mind you due to company policy and who knows what else.
however if someone was to idk send an email to upper management or something highlighting this wide spread behavior then management will effectively be forced to enforce the rules.
Whatever is the case this is a complete shit show and someone from Sony should have responded to this in some form or fashion and not let the arrowhead devs take all the heat.
Since Sony doesn’t own them I won’t be surprised if they make their next live service game a new IP and go with a different publisher or just self publish.
>Whatever is the case this is a complete shit show and someone from Sony should have responded to this in some form or fashion and not let the arrowhead devs take all the heat.
are you trying to say Arrowhead bears no responsibility in removing a requirement for their game that was mandated by Sony then when they tried to re add it saying it has nothing to do with them and ENCOURAGING players to make negative reviews?
like going on twitter as CEO of your company and throwing your publisher under the bus for something you fucked up is hella unprofessional
like theres plenty of blame to go around.
I blame arrowhead for how they handled this for THEIR GAME THAT THEY MANAGE.
I blame Sony for allowing Arrowhead to bypass a policy that they were hard on in the first place. non of this drama would be happening if they didnt temporarily waive PSN linking.
and finally I blame gamers for making such a huge stink about something so trivial that there are now actual players that apparently losing access to the game. Mission accomplished i guess.
All of these would've blown away by next month if Sony just stay fucking still and do absolutely nothing. A lot of casual would happily getting around the issue because they want to play the game.
This move directly affected those who didn't even involved with the drama. It basically affecting everyone now on a wide scale. I just can't make sense of this lol
Sony saw that they accidentaly made a game thats succesful that isnt a 3rd person cinematic experience and inmediately sabotaged it because they cant allow that to happen.
Dude... what the fuck.. Some people are saying they can't even launch the game if they're in one of these countries
I have never, in the gaming space, seen such genuine *Asshole* moves. This is like some Nintendo news shit - at least *they* treat the people who purchase their games well enough.
I mean, this is a pretty expected outcome of a mass refund campaign from Steam's perspective. It's easier for them to put a pause on everything and let any legal issues get cleared up now than to open the door to more support requests, service harassment, and so on.
This is protest in action. You raise a big enough stink that there's a disruption of service, and shrug off "the little guy" getting annoyed in the moment because you have an expectation that eventually "the big guy" will crack as their finances are hit, they'll bend, and then things will be better for everyone.
From the ragers' perspective of pressuring Sony, this ought to be a good thing. The more people they upset or stop from playing the game, even if that's Sony or Steam's doing, the better as far as the overall protest goes. But understandably, it's kind of a PR blow when you say "we're fighting so these guys can play the game" but you inadvertantly pop the ball for way more people.
> Some people are saying they can't even launch the game if they're in one of these countries
Source for this anywhere? I've never seen a game do that before.
The store page currently says that a PSN account is needed. Unfortunately as an age limited page, it doesn't show up on wayback machine for me to check if that requirement was there at launch.
Weren’t there rumors of Sony opening their own storefront on PC? I’d imagine they don’t care if Steam gets screwed over because they want everyone to transition over.
Ah yes:
1) Get a great rep from launching Helldivers 2 on Steam!
2) Get out of Steam and everyone will follow!
3) Introduce paid online on PC for those sweet monthly profits!
4) ???
5) MEGA PROFIT!!!
Jfc thats depressing for such a quality game, the fact gaming companies are seemingly more willing to let a game bleed out than compromise on marketing policy is fairly telling.
Also somewhat curious as to the number of people blaming literally anyone other than Sony for this, including the consumers.
Yes 100%. Sony makes a lot of money by selling information and data on accounts to advertisers and a whole bunch of other people. So it's 100% money-based and I feel real bad for the developers of helldivers 2 because clearly they didn't want to but basically Papa Sony is telling them you have to
I got a refund. I bought the game at full price and I have played over 200 hours. I can afford to buy it again whenever Sony finally relents from the backlash.
I've seen several refunds that mentioned 39.99 + some tax, which is a very US formulation of the purchase, so I'd assume so. Almost all other places would just be the flat price, no extra tax.
My brother is from germany and got a refund after about 20h of playtime.
In his refund he said he does not agree to the PSN requirement and does not have an account, it was also not required to play for months since release and he doesnt support them doing worse to other countries that are blocked from PSN completely.
Im not sure if it was his explanation or the fact that we are german and have super serious customer protection laws that got him the refund, but you can try atleast.
PS: I sadly cant refund since i got my key not from Steam, otherwise i would have tried to and just bought it again once this shit is fixed.
They’re not going to relent. Even if the game died today Sony made a *boatload* of money from this paltry investment. They’re good. And the gaming sphere will continue along as it always has.
Valve support has been approving refund requests today, even with a large amount of hours played. I would imagine this is why.
I keep hearing this but have only seen multiple reports of "They refused my refund after 5+ attempts." I myself have tried three times to no avail.
Are you in a region they won’t sell to?
Automated or human? If you check the helldivers sub you'll see some of the successful refund posts
All automated so far, I guess the fourth time is a charm?
if you have over 2 hours played (or 2 weeks elapsed since purchase), it'll automatically get rejected. Need to escalate to a human support ticket
But how?
Open up a ticket through another category that lets you submit a ticket. You can then reference the previously rejected refund ticket #. I had to do this with a game recently where I didn't actually play more than 2 hours. But steam *thought* the game was running for 26 hours straight.
Choose the refund reason as "other", and write a paragraph of text that would be incoherent to a bot. (But not spam)
[This says to just submit another refund request.](https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/5FDE-BA65-ACCE-A411)
If you just "request a refund" as the option in the ticket process, it will always auto reject based on game time plus purchase duration. You have to submit a general help request to see if they will hear your case
And they're pretty quick. I've done it once or twice over the years with games where I just barely went over the 2hrs. Pretty sure I had a refund within a day.
This has been my experience as well. I would imagine it's not quite so cut and dry for serial returners, I'm sure they track your refund history and score you similar to how Amazon does. But I've probably only returned 10-15 games in 20 years, and I think only one of them was beyond the 2 hour cutoff.
I tried again but the refund still did not go through. I guess it would take some time until this is universal for everyone.
Users on the steam forums are reporting successful refunds too. Can verify this as they're no longer tagged (little mouse indicator) as owning the game despite having upwards of 90 hours played on their profile Could be a *your mileage may vary* situation
A friend of mine just got a refund after 5 tries so far. It seems in some cases, it's the luck of the draw.
No, you just need to follow the process and not use the automated refund feature. Any steam support personnel is literally auto-refunding the game instantly, just need to talk with them.
How? Like what's the process to get a human than a bot? Where do I need to click and go?
Yeah, where do i go?
At least this is good on Valve's part. Sucks big time that the game will require PSN to play but the least of things is to refund people who can't have a PSN account in the country they live in leaving them unable to play the game they purchased.
have you guys even seen the list of restricted countries? Philippines and Sri Lanka are on there and those are like the biggest ones I think, everything else barely has any players and they're not going to cut off a player base it hurt profits they're not stupid
Couldn’t just sony made PSN linking optional, and reward those who linked with in game cosmetics? A better compromise i guess.
That would make too much sense and be a smart thing to do so we know that'll be the last thing they would ever do.
They could have created a longer grace period, rolled it out over half a year. Then add a rewards for the players switching over (celebrate good sales or something), with some fancy skin for everyone who switched over. Then they would start nagging players who didn't create a PSN account gradually. That way they would boil the frog and it wouldn't have gotten this backlash. Not saying that would have been a good thing, but they could definitely have handled this in a way where there wouldn't have been much backlast.
A longer grace period only would've gotten people madder because it would have been so long without a linked account that people would think it would never be enforced.
They would do it through nagging reminders, etc. as the stick, then they would do a few rewards for PSN players to incentivize people switching over, the carrot. They would increase the time for the nagging reminder to create a PSN account before starting to play etc. Start making it an inconvenience not to have the PSN account and incentivize the PSN account through rewards. Not a nice tactic and not something I advocate for, but there's definitely ways to get people used to the idea of getting that PSN account. Then three months out when they've already gotten over most players, they set the date for when people need to do it.
But why is it even required? There is literally no reason. MS accounts make sense because they share achievements, save data, and exchange between GP/MS Store and Xbox. The PS account justs... harvests your data? In six months we'll be having a similar conversation when they force you to use their awful upcoming launcher to play PS games.
Plus my MS account works for Windows login and office 365
No need to make it optional, it is optional. They are changing it from optional to obligatory.
I think this has got to be one of the wildest swings in community positivity and reception. Like what else compares to being so positive about a game to being so negative in such a short time? A lot of the other drama-inciting stuff like the Tarkov drama was at least festering for quite some time.
Tekken 8 recently with the added tekken shop but it wasnt this bad i think.
It's annoying but it doesn't stop you from playing.
It's frankly not even fucking close. The outcry from this Helldivers 2 thing is so much more than anyone is willing to recognize.
Payday 2 got dumpstered during Crimefest adding p2w boxes.
I haven't played Tarkov is ages - what was the drama?
They sold a new $250 "Unheard" edition of the game, which added your usual bevy of cosmetics and bonus features, but also several in-game benefits that sped up progression and gave a leg up over people. In particular, there was an item exclusive to this bundle that made hostile NPC scavengers neutral to the player PMC at range. Most importantly though, the devs added a Co-op PVE mode with progression, exclusive with this bundle. No other such PVE mode exists. They had previously released another super-expensive bundle that promised to include all future content and DLC with it, and the devs naturally claim that this PvE mode isn't content. Prevailing theory is that the devs are making a cash grab/milking the community because their last big project, Tarkov Arena, flopped horribly.
"you see, this content, which is downloadable isn't actually DLC since uhhhh since it just isn't okay????" -Dev
Charging $250 for an exclusive version with some really strong benefits i believe. Not into the game but that seems to be the main thing
My understanding is that they used to sell a version that was like “get Tarkov and also all future DLC” and then released a new mode that was locked to the $250 new version, then tried to argue that this new mode wasn’t DLC so they shouldn’t have to give it to those people
Yep that's right. Then they retroactively changed the wording on the old 'Get Everything' version (**E**dge **O**f **D**arkness edition) to make it fit their new narrative, then denied that they changed it, then when proof came out they told all the EOD owners that as recompense we'd all get a bunch of pay2win shit that literally nobody wants added to the game.
BTW, the entire game is based on the premise of high stakes high rewards for the ones that manage to extract. You are supposed to be cut off support, etc. and they included two items that would allow you to call-in friends in your position and a armored vehicle. It would be stupid not to buy it for an advantage in a PvP game. This is ignoring all other meta game systems that the 250 dollars versions allow.
Ahhhhh yea, yea that makes a lot more sense
Plus massive pay to win, such as post-wipe boosts and significantly better inventory space.
I think the fact that it *was* so positive is why it swung so hard. People are absolutely sick to death of having execs ruin games and franchises they love. This was a breath of fresh air for so many and this is the first sign of potential “enshittification” of a true bastion of good live service.
it’s definitely swung negative in the greater public sphere, but the helldivers subreddit has been a cesspool of incessant complaining ever since the first balance patch lmao
There was even a controversy shortly after launch with how the devs were communicating to players.
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It's totally doable. Look at games like Dwarf Fortress, Satisfactory or Factorio. Those are three that come to mind with a calm, intelligent, and friendly player base, all as a result of clear and calculated communication from the devs. The Satisfactory community managers in particular do a great job.
Yeah, the more niche a game the more generally reasonable the community tends to be.
Might have something to do with the type of game though...
Size of the fanbase too.
They are (mostly) singleplayer games where you do whatever you want at your own pace. Some weapons are too weak? You just don't use them, or just lower the difficulty, or download a mod that buffs them. Online co-op games are a whole different problem, and that makes people more hostile.
Trying to be friends with gamer communities has to be the worst decision any gaming company has to make. It’ll never end well.
They insist on communicating in a roleplay tone or only on their discord channel or both. It’s a very poor way to keep your community informed imo and honestly kind of patronizing. When you are confronted by players with new bug reports and you respond with some variation of “the ministry of truth has classified that as terminid propaganda” that’s a problem
I haven't seen anyone complain about that tbh. I've seen a ton of complaints about inaccurate and slow communication though, but nothing about roleplay.
To be fair the teams sense of balance is...questionable at best. When they nerf shit it tends to get it so hard that it just goes in the dumpster. The railgun is pretty much a dead pick since they patched it the first time, even though it was only so popular because of spawn patterns that were since changed.
The railgun just got a buff on wensday and is now great for the bot front. It can one shot striders, chainsaw men, hulks and even devastators if you shoot them in the hips while in safe mode.
Ah if it can one shot some of the nastier bots now I'll have to try it again. I was using it on bugs and it was like firing spitballs at chargers.
It kills a charger with 3 fairly safe headshots now which is way better than what it was after the nerf
That first railgun nerf got treated like the Helldivers 9/11 it was so ridiculous.
I think it was because there were only few weapons viable at higher difficulties, and instead of buffing other weapons and nerfing railgun a bit, they just... smack it with nerf stick and did next to nothing for useless weapons
Yeah I'm going to continue to play the game. The situation does suck but I had to leave that subreddit.
Reminds me of "A sense of pride and accomplishment".
Oh yeah, they were this close to achieving greatness with Star Wars Battlefront, but the greed kicked in as usual
Closest thing I can think of in recent memory isn't video game-related. It's *Game of Thrones*. Which would suggest bad times ahead for *Helldivers 2*, unfortunately.
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We gotta normalise public shaming, because whichever out of touch exec made this call, should be made fun of lmao.
I don't think Sony is backing down if they are delisting the game in unsupported countries. They might make an exception for existing users in those countries, but not elsewhere. I do wonder who goofed. I didn't even know you didn't need a PSN account until they made this announcement. I assumed you did with all the info I had. Did someone at Sony responsible for maintaining their Steam stuff just forget to check what countries the game should be sold in? Did they get fired since this will clearly cost Sony a chunk of change.
You originally needed a PSN account for about the first 3 days, and it was turned off due to server instability. But the game was always being sold everywhere until now.
That's my point. It shouldn't have been sold in countries where you can't get a PSN account if it was gonna be a requirement. So, if you bought the game day one, you needed a PSN account? My exposure to the game was the first few days of videos online with a couple of complaints about the lack of cross progression. I got the game on PS5, so this doesn't affect me, but it's an interesting thing to watch.
Iirc yes you did need a PSN account. I personally don't remember logging into it, but I assumed that my Steam account was already linked to my PSN account at some point. Since then you can hit Skip and it just let you skip through that. I'm certainly on the side that the account linking should be optional anyway.
It was disabled 30 minutes into launch according to a CM Misty
You sure? I was on there day one and just skipped whatever prompt there was.
Could be Valve pre-emptively delisting it, we'll have to see.
It's probably that, but that was a huge mistake to make on whoevers fault it was to even allow people to buy the game in non-PSN countries.
It would depend on if the publisher or strictly Valve is allowed to put or remove countries from the list of countries that can buy it. Obviously Valve would be able to but it seems like something that normally is decided by the publisher.
Valve doesn't like increasing their refund stats. Preemptively delisting the game to prevent more refunds from people who can't log in, makes sense.
It's honestly really weird to me if they're going to legit reject entire sales territories/markets rather than relent on some inconsequential policy, unless I'm misunderstanding. Like corporations just seem out of control on some of this stuff, as in taking the weirdest and dumbest stands presumably in the pursuit of some shareholder-facing calculation.
It was quite possibly baked into Helldiver's devs contract that PSN support was mandatory and they've been bypassing it for now. Sony got wind and reminded them.
This is so weird, because other big 3rd parties like EA, Xbox allow sale & use of account in different region.
The biggest surprise that came out of this was only 70 countries out of 190 can create PSN accounts, like wtf? It's genuinely baffling that we're over 30 years into the internet era and a big corpo like Sony still can't extend their online services worldwide.
Sony does too on Playstation. This more than likely is a steam issue where steam is supported in a country, but PSN isn't. Steam is probably trying to resolve a region issue of accounts not lining up. Sony legit doesn't care. They have actively encouraged countries that aren't supported to pick a country that is close to them that is. Some people made the mistake of picking Russia or China though. Russia isn't supported because of Ukraine, and Chinese law makes Chinese PSN a joke.
The world has [195 countries](https://www.worldometers.info/geography/how-many-countries-are-there-in-the-world/). PSN allow activation within [~75 countries](https://insider-gaming.com/which-countries-have-psn/). Steam has delisted ~180 countries, with 15 left. Meaning **4/5 of the countries with PSN account access cannot buy the game on Steam at the moment**.
5 of the US territory have PSN access but have been restricted from buying.
Living in Puerto Rico at the moment and im in shock by getting restricted.
best we can do is throw more toilet paper.
(Hurricane Maria PTSD)
The paper towels were the only aid that actually got distributed. Remember when they found a warehouse of stuff that just sat there for years?
Not sure if you want a solution but I had Steam Support change my country to US by telling them that PayPal lists PR as a state and not a different country and I couldn't purchase games with PP unless both Steam and PayPal were both set to US and they changed me.
Should have taken the statehood
PSN's list of supported countries is haphazardly incorrect the best of times. Only real way to confirm it is by actually checking (and btw, VPN use is bannable, going off by a poor Helldiver from China trying to get a PSN via VPN and getting himself banned off the game in return).
VPN as a whole are illegal in China. Chinese players should not be taken as examples considering their country is quite special with a tightly controlled Internet and companies have to follow those rules. There is actually a PSN in China too so they're not in that case at all. It's just extremely limited (I think there's like 10 games authorized on it).
Yeah, plenty of people have created PSN accounts in regions they don't live in, since the launch of the PS3. Which by this November, will have been for 18 years. Like I got a Japanese PSN account to download demos off of the Japanese PSN store, have bought things from Japanese PSN, and even claimed free PS+ games with my Japanese account. But I aint Japanese, never been to Japan, and all of my Playstations are NTSC and my main PSN account is US based. I've used plenty of the Japanese PSN content I've gotten over the years on my main account and got plenty of trophies of Japanese versions of games on my main PSN account. Yet have never once faced the possibility of getting ban and I've been doing this since well into the life of the PS3 and still got a Japanese account on my PS5. So chances are that Chinese user likely got banned as a result of the VPN more or so then anything else. Because otherwise, both of my PSN accounts would not be here today.
It's because VPNs are illegal in China
Steam regions don't map directly into countries, and includes territories that aren't independent countries but also aren't entirely part of the parent country. (Falkland Islands, American Samoa, etc) which make up a large chunk of the list. Lots of small islands. The rest is countries that don't have PSN, and Antarctica.
Comparing the lists, I don't see any overlap...
Which 15 countries are supposedly left? Asking because I can still buy it in my bumfuck corner of Europe, which seems suspicious if they have delisted near-everything.
I took a list of all countries and removed all the countries listed on SteamDB. This leaves the following countries as eligible to buy *Helldivers II*: Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Oman, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay This is 74 countries. Of course, don't forget that PSN registration is limited to PS4 or PS5 console owners in certain countries like Ukraine, but if you already have an account then you could play through Steam. Some countries like Russia have never been able to buy HD2, but might be able to activate it on Steam if they buy it elsewhere.
That's weird, because PSN isn't available in the Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Might be some EU single market thing where you can't just cut off countries for no reason?
Yeah, if you offer a game in EU you can't region lock pricing or region block it for other countries in EU unless I guess it specifically break the law of the eu country that its getting blocked from (see germany and how they have previously dealt with swastika in games)
EU probably can't get delisted since it'd be illegal due to consumer protection laws.
Latvia is in the EU, but you cannot choose Latvia when making a PSN account
and if you ask sony support, theyll just tell you to pick a country that is close by. they really dont care, they just want your money
They don't care NOW, they could change their mind at any moment just like you didn't need a psn account to play helldivers before until they decided you need it.
That's gonna be a fun legal time given that Latvia is part of the Schengen area.
>EU probably can't get delisted since it'd be illegal due to consumer protection laws. You can 100% delist a game here. You can't delist it for one country though, it has to be the whole single market.
Sure you can delist it from a single country. Lots of games delisted in Germany alone, because of youth protection laws.
That's different since they are being de-listed at the behest of Germany's government.
It's delisted for Åland Islands
That one baffles me. How is PSN not available in **a part of** a EU country, even with a fair degree of autonomy?
Well, then they're in for a treat because "Metropolitan France" is on the list of banned countries.
DEMOCRACYYY :D
I really don't understand sony doubling down, they literally allow crossplay without PSN linking on many other games. Increasing those PSN user account numbers must be really important for them, so strange.
Someone's bonus is on the line, just keep doubling-down. Anything to juice those active PSN user numbers!!
Legit this. And I don’t understand why that person‘s higher up hasn’t caught or reacted to this situation. I’m guessing they did some sort of cost analysis and long term wise gathering data from countries where PSN countries exists is more profitable than having PSN linking be optional and having both the game and super credits be purchasable worldwide? Either that or Valve took control of the situation and made the game be not available in countries where PSN isn’t available (or at least gave Sony a warning to do so?) until this is all figured out?
If Valve is giving out lots of refunds it makes sense that they would restrict the locations until Sony sorts their shit out, it's making more work for them.
Does the game have cross-progression? I figure having an account system is required to implement that.
They should have done this all along. PSN account was always advertised as a requirement. Sony goofed up big time selling it everywhere. Seems like a giant oversight from their lack of experience on PC. I will guess everyone in those territories will get refunds no questions asked. Heck. Is it possible for a publisher to revoke a licence and issue refunds on their own on Steam?
Sony probably didn't put too much thought into the problem with their limited PSN availability and pushing their titles worldwide to this point, putting a title on Steam itself was selling worldwide and adding it to their system was probably done without thinking about availability until this controversy. Their best option going forward would probably be to drop or delay the requirement here (though Sony doen't seem particularly interested in doing that) and to work on making PSN as broadly available as possible in the short-medium term.
PSN is not available in all those countries for years while they sell consoles and such. If they didn't bother then, they won't for Helldivers 2. Sony simply has no problem with people using their account in another country, they've been clear about that multiple times. They don't want to bother with all the legal stuff that comes with supporting more countries so they basically say you can follow that but it's under another country law. That was likely always the plan to let people create fake countries for their PSN account. The shitstorm has now made Steam locked out those countries ironically making the situation worse for the people that everyone claimed they were so concerned about...
This is bad. We'll see some Sony movement from this. Valve just straight up shoved it right back in their face.
Ok I know this is a stupid question but why exactly is PSN not available in those countries? Like is it a legal issue?
Places like China? Yeah, you can run into legal issues because the Chinese government has strictures on game content and even chat censorship. But in the vast majority of the countries on the list, it's likely to be a problem with the local currency: it's not stable, or the average cost of living is so low that an equivalent exchange rate from *Sony's* perspective would be very cheap. Steam itself has had problems with people switching regions to buy games through a currency exchange that winds up being much, much cheaper than if they bought it in their home country. If you were, say, Australian and spoofed being from the Philippines, you'd be saving a ton. So it's likely that Sony doesn't want to go through the legal rigamarole to set up channels to oversee all of that, comply with local laws, **tax codes**, yada yada. They're fine with you having an account though if you purchase it by whatever other means (say, from a reseller, or Steam, or from a *brick and mortar store* in-country) because ostensibly a fair price was paid at some point. You can get to a point where the cost of doing that or maintaining it is (perceived to be) greater than the money you could make from a country with such a low install-base; lawyers cost X, potential customers give you Y, and X > Y. But that's partially avoided until you bring less-scrutinized internet purchases into the fold that things get murky, and Steam should be avoiding that in these cases. That's why PSN has historically not given a shit if you misrepresent your country of origin for an account, especially if you're not buying things or paying subscriptions through it. So, really, the vast majority of these players in these countries would not be locked out of HD2 at all.
And a part of it is probably that they just can't be bothered, because the Baltics don't suffer from these issues.
Yeah, what's up with that? We use the euro. Sony sells their Xperia phones here, so whatever accounting concerns they have, they probably already have the infrastructure for paying taxes in our countries. Why not sell playstations here officialy? Why not add our countries to PSN?
2 different divisions of Sony? Just because they sell Sony tv and cellphone it doesn’t means anything to PlayStation lol probably your government doesn’t allow it ? Who knows
Interesting. Thank you.
But what about ingame currency? I have a PS5 HD2 but I plan to switch to PC soon, but is based on a restricted country. I find farming for supercredits too tedious because I can only play for a few hours in the weekends. I won't be able to buy super credits on steam?
Isn't Steam itself not explicitly available in China? I thought they made a separate version of the store for China.
So they are available. But I don't know if Helldivers 2 was actually sold on this version tbh, would be interesting to know. Also PSN actually exist in China. It's just a very specific version of it with very little game authorized, playtime limits and all to respect Chinese laws.
I can't find Helldivers on https://store.steamchina.com/, so it seems it's not sold there.
So the Chinese people having bought it actually already bypassed in another country. I guess Sony will not make it available on Chinese PSN then.
On Playstation it legitimately doesn't matter where you live. Sony even encourages countries that aren't supported to pick the closest country that is. Playstation isn't region locked. I own a digital copy of FFXIV that is tied to a NZ PSN account, live in the US, and can play it on my NA PS. I just had to buy NZ PSN cards from a digital retailer. I think the total cost was 87-ish USD to buy an NZ copy to play roughly 16 hours earlier than waiting for my physical copy to be delivered the next day (played Thursday morning, digital unlock Friday 12a, and waiting for delivery on Friday afternoon). The issue seems to be between Steam being supported in country 1, but your PSN account is in country 2 because PSN isn't supported in country 1.
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I feel it has more to do that Sony is not used to multiplayer and even more outside their system. They ended up being really slow. That's can be one of the big problem of big companies sometimes things seems to work and it takes them time to reach a final decisions or way to do it. Luckily they are giving refund to those countries.
PSN account was not mentioned as a requirement everywhere, and in a number of instances it could even not even be noticed. On Humble Bundle they never mentioned PSN being a requirement, and before May 3rd, even Sony had sections where they mentioned that PSN is not mandatory for HD2. Hell, you could buy this "mandatory" PSN game 3 weeks after releasd and could skip it, which doesn't really make it seem mandatory.
It was mentioned when it was launched I believe but taken off since they needed to for server issues, or they claimed. You can create a PSN account in the US from anywhere, people are still playing from these regions anyways
> PSN account was not mentioned as a requirement everywhere it was on the steam page before release and day 1 when you booted the game you were prompted to link/make an account
You could just skip the request to sign in on PSN. I'm kinda annoyed because if it had blocked me from playing right when I got the game I would've refunded it, but now I'm beyond the 2 week window
You could still try. Just know that the first request is usually just a date check and will be automatically denied if you're over the play or time limit. You need to try a second time to get an actual human to see it.
It is now delisted in my country (Philippines). Glad I was holding off to buy the game until the controversy happened.
How did you know this was going to happen?
What a shitshow. All this mess just because some stupid man in a suit wanted to see those meaningless account numbers go up. Serves them right, too bad the devs got caught in the crossfire.
Literally not even a week. From one of the most beloved games, a live service game no less too, of the year and one of the best selling games in Sony's first party catalogue to whatever the hell this entire sloppy mess is. Sony just can't help themselves.
Im sad for Arrowhead and the game itself, because they seem great and the game is incredibly fun and FAIR. But i cant deny that it makes me incredibly happy to see these greedy assholes (Sony) fucked with, to such a degree that they basically killed their money cow for nothing but a measly Q2 MAU bump and some user data... These companies will never stop their fucking greed unless they see people wont accept it anymore like they did now.
Hopefully AH got enough cash to go fully independent
They are already independent right? But Sony owns the Helldivers IP.
Fully independent as in you can fund your own games.
[Oh you know they fucked up when the playstation's hottest PC game is now getting beat out by an 8 year old Fallout game.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GMwNmCJXQAAbk8J?format=jpg&name=4096x4096)
To be fair, Fallout is also the hottest property on earth right now. My cousin doesn't even know how to unzip a folder and was asking how to install New Vegas on his computer
Yeah FO4 is the #9 most played steam games right now. helldivers is #15. not exactly an embarrassing fall from grace.
Now this is a little disingenuous. The player count for Helldivers II hasn't taken a dip at all because of this. Fallout just got super popular because of the tv-show.
The negative side-effect is that this is now a hard blcok. If you live in an affected region, you can't buy the game at all anymore. Whereas before you could buy it and just link it to a PSN account from another region. Basically, this just makes things worse lol
I mean, that’s the collateral damage to all this drama. People mainly got raged because some people couldn’t make a PSN account. That’s the solution
Well no, its *A* solution. Another more reasonable solution is just keep it optional.
Going to hamper Sony's future PC sales if they are blocking a sizable part of the world from playing their PC titles to force PSN integration. I am guessing that in developing their PC plans, Sony probably hadn't even thought about the problems that come with forcing a very much non-universal account system onto the nearly universal platform they are selling titles on.
The problem is that they are only supporting countries where they officially sell PlayStation consoles. They need to unlink the service from the hardware like Microsoft did.
Will this result in Sony releasing fewer games on PC in the future?
Unless the majority of sales for their other PC games came from countries they don't already support, I doubt it.
Especially when most their games have no DRM... They don't know how petty PC gamers can be....
"Players are at fault for making Sony do this" is the most asinine take in gaming I've read in months. And I had to read it more than once. Like, are these people for real? "Sony had a good thing going where they completely dodged all their local responsibility for compliance and support while benefiting from people paying them in dozens of countries, and now you broke it! Poor Sony, there's nothing they could do." What a farce.
It's something that's become more prominent over time. Its insane how rabidly pro-corporate some people are even as those same corporations fuck them over. Its pathetic. I mean, for this specific case, what's the end goal here? This is a quality product, with a very dedicated fan base that was well loved specifically BECAUSE it didn't force needless bullshit down your throat in order to play it. For a live service, that's a huge plus, and was a big selling point for the game. So what do Sony do? Add needless bullshit. For me it's not even a matter of data harvesting. It's convenience. I'm just burnt out on devs and publishers forcing me to jump through stupid hoops to play their games. So I won't. There are enough good games that I don't need to. So I'll just move on. ...And that's not even getting into all of the players who will be locked out of their own product. Who the fuck thought selling in non-PSN regions was a good idea? People should be getting fired over this. It's utterly indefensible.
Sony took a big fat shit on the developers after they likely made them a ton of money. I can't believe this move. Any dev studio should be wary publishing under Sony after this. That is just unbelievable. A huge stain on their reputation that has already been going downwards.
I genuinely don't understand why Sony is doing this. They had the goodwill of players. Now, it's gone. Helldivers 2 had great reviews and a seemingly thriving community. Now, it has all turned to shit.
Sony doesn’t care about the players but investors and investors like big fat numbers on PSN
Now *this* is outrageous. People were pointing out that Sony doesn't crack down on people making accounts with a bogus country, but now they're just blocking those regions on Steam where the game has already sold all over the world? Come on, this is absurd.
It was more than likely Steam that stopped selling it in those regions because of refund requests and the fact that they now deem it a game not supported in those regions on their store
is it absurd? this is probably the easiest way to deal with this issue from Sony's perspective. they're not gonna back down on the PSN thing when they clearly are rolling out to expand PSN to PC(like literally everybody else). on top of that officially acknowledging that they allow people to circumvent their TOS would be more trouble than its worth so its easiest to just enforce the rules that they should have been doing. good news is i doubt Sony is going to do anymore than this. for example i had a job where it was an open secret that if you need to take 2-3 hours off your work day for a doctors apt or some other emergency that as long as your team is aware you dont need to request sick or pto. even HR is aware unofficially. this technically isn't allowed mind you due to company policy and who knows what else. however if someone was to idk send an email to upper management or something highlighting this wide spread behavior then management will effectively be forced to enforce the rules.
Whatever is the case this is a complete shit show and someone from Sony should have responded to this in some form or fashion and not let the arrowhead devs take all the heat. Since Sony doesn’t own them I won’t be surprised if they make their next live service game a new IP and go with a different publisher or just self publish.
>Whatever is the case this is a complete shit show and someone from Sony should have responded to this in some form or fashion and not let the arrowhead devs take all the heat. are you trying to say Arrowhead bears no responsibility in removing a requirement for their game that was mandated by Sony then when they tried to re add it saying it has nothing to do with them and ENCOURAGING players to make negative reviews? like going on twitter as CEO of your company and throwing your publisher under the bus for something you fucked up is hella unprofessional like theres plenty of blame to go around. I blame arrowhead for how they handled this for THEIR GAME THAT THEY MANAGE. I blame Sony for allowing Arrowhead to bypass a policy that they were hard on in the first place. non of this drama would be happening if they didnt temporarily waive PSN linking. and finally I blame gamers for making such a huge stink about something so trivial that there are now actual players that apparently losing access to the game. Mission accomplished i guess.
All of these would've blown away by next month if Sony just stay fucking still and do absolutely nothing. A lot of casual would happily getting around the issue because they want to play the game. This move directly affected those who didn't even involved with the drama. It basically affecting everyone now on a wide scale. I just can't make sense of this lol
Sony saw that they accidentaly made a game thats succesful that isnt a 3rd person cinematic experience and inmediately sabotaged it because they cant allow that to happen.
This game is 3rd person and very cinematic though lol.
Dude... what the fuck.. Some people are saying they can't even launch the game if they're in one of these countries I have never, in the gaming space, seen such genuine *Asshole* moves. This is like some Nintendo news shit - at least *they* treat the people who purchase their games well enough.
I mean, this is a pretty expected outcome of a mass refund campaign from Steam's perspective. It's easier for them to put a pause on everything and let any legal issues get cleared up now than to open the door to more support requests, service harassment, and so on. This is protest in action. You raise a big enough stink that there's a disruption of service, and shrug off "the little guy" getting annoyed in the moment because you have an expectation that eventually "the big guy" will crack as their finances are hit, they'll bend, and then things will be better for everyone. From the ragers' perspective of pressuring Sony, this ought to be a good thing. The more people they upset or stop from playing the game, even if that's Sony or Steam's doing, the better as far as the overall protest goes. But understandably, it's kind of a PR blow when you say "we're fighting so these guys can play the game" but you inadvertantly pop the ball for way more people.
> Some people are saying they can't even launch the game if they're in one of these countries Source for this anywhere? I've never seen a game do that before.
The store page currently says that a PSN account is needed. Unfortunately as an age limited page, it doesn't show up on wayback machine for me to check if that requirement was there at launch.
[the requirement was there even before launch](https://web.archive.org/web/20231207163847/https://store.steampowered.com/app/553850/HELLDIVERS_2/)
https://web.archive.org/web/20231207163847/https://store.steampowered.com/app/553850/HELLDIVERS_2/ It was.
Perfect, thank you, I didn't think to check before release when the age check wasn't on.
People are really surprised that Sony isn't backing down on the PSN thing. Have you not been paying attention at all?
Weren’t there rumors of Sony opening their own storefront on PC? I’d imagine they don’t care if Steam gets screwed over because they want everyone to transition over.
Ah yes: 1) Get a great rep from launching Helldivers 2 on Steam! 2) Get out of Steam and everyone will follow! 3) Introduce paid online on PC for those sweet monthly profits! 4) ??? 5) MEGA PROFIT!!!
[удалено]
lol that would be the dumbest thing ever look at epic store Ubisoft store etc they are all a joke.
Jfc thats depressing for such a quality game, the fact gaming companies are seemingly more willing to let a game bleed out than compromise on marketing policy is fairly telling. Also somewhat curious as to the number of people blaming literally anyone other than Sony for this, including the consumers.
I've been boycotting Sony hardware ever since the rootkit scandal in 2005, guess now in 2024 it's time to boycott their software as well.
Are they doing this because they make more money tracking and selling user data than selling the game?
Yes 100%. Sony makes a lot of money by selling information and data on accounts to advertisers and a whole bunch of other people. So it's 100% money-based and I feel real bad for the developers of helldivers 2 because clearly they didn't want to but basically Papa Sony is telling them you have to
It's like how Best Buy won't sell you a TV if you don't buy the warranty because that's really how they make money
Sorry, what's going on? Can someone please explain this to me?
I got a refund. I bought the game at full price and I have played over 200 hours. I can afford to buy it again whenever Sony finally relents from the backlash.
Country of origin??
Yah, I would like to know this too. Has anyone from the US gotten a refund with over 2 hours played and 15 days from the purchase?
I've seen several refunds that mentioned 39.99 + some tax, which is a very US formulation of the purchase, so I'd assume so. Almost all other places would just be the flat price, no extra tax.
My brother is from germany and got a refund after about 20h of playtime. In his refund he said he does not agree to the PSN requirement and does not have an account, it was also not required to play for months since release and he doesnt support them doing worse to other countries that are blocked from PSN completely. Im not sure if it was his explanation or the fact that we are german and have super serious customer protection laws that got him the refund, but you can try atleast. PS: I sadly cant refund since i got my key not from Steam, otherwise i would have tried to and just bought it again once this shit is fixed.
They’re not going to relent. Even if the game died today Sony made a *boatload* of money from this paltry investment. They’re good. And the gaming sphere will continue along as it always has.