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(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)
To briefly summarize this messy affair, Sony originally planned for PC players on Helldivers 2 to link their accounts to PSN. But when the game suffered extensive launch issues, that mandate was temporarily waived. At the start of May, Sony suddenly decided to reinstate the requirement, resulting in Helldivers 2 beingdelisted from 177 countries.
This was the PR equivalent of spraying Termicide all over the Helldivers 2 community. Where Sony sought control, they instead incubated outrage, triggering aferocious review-bombing campaignthat ultimately convinced the publisher to walk back the PSN requirement. However, the gameremained delistedfrom Steam in many regions.
Then, over this weekend, three more countries were added to the blacklist, namely Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Thisseemingly blindsidedArrowhead’s CEO Johan Pilestedt, who wrote on the Helldivers 2 discord “We have no idea what’s going on. Most devs are on a bank holiday and we just found out through the community.”
Pilestedt then went to investigate, returning some time later with anew message. “It was an administrative error correction–they should have been part of the original restriction and It was noticed when the restriction was put in place for [Ghost of] Tsushima” (which was alsorecently delistedon Steam in over 200 countries that do not have PSN access.)
So, as Pilestedt neatly summarizes “While it doesn’t look positive. It is not an indication of further restrictions.” What it is an indication of, however, is one massive communications snafu. We’ve got a publisher making sudden decisions about a third-party game without informing its developer or the enormous, hugely passionate community that has sprung up around it, while another company notorious for being a black box is the one responsible for pulling the lever.
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Whether or not Sony pulling its games from Steam in certain regions is the right thing to do (in my opinion it is a stupid and shortsighted thing to do) both it and Valve really need to get on the same page with Arrowhead so these changes can be properly communicated.
Regarding the ongoing region restrictions. Pilestedt says the conversation “is still ongoing and is independent of this”. For his part, Pilestedt is very much in favour of there being no restrictions whatsoever. “We (Arrowhead) still want the game to be available everywhere”.
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