Personally, I think the best way to protest this is to continue to play and use the servers to the point of overload, but no one buy anymore super credits. Make Sony continue to pour money into the servers but get no return as no one buys war bonds anymore. Would take ENORMOUS coordination, but Sony not getting paid by this cash cow yet having to still put money into their servers would hit them where it hurts, line go down.
Pipe dream, but if everyone just didn’t buy in game content for a little bit, I think they would see the effect. As of right now though, they don’t care, because “consumers will pay for anything”
Do you know what Sony and its stakeholders would see? High player counts and growing active PSN userbase.
The best way to protest is to stop playing, request a refund, and rate the game negatively everywhere. Arrowhead is now talking to Sony about dropping the mandatory linked account, showing them that they’ve fucked the golden goose will get their attention better than trying to strain the infrastructure.
Arrowhead also knowingly sold a game in markets where it wouldn’t be possible to play the game, even at launch with the restrictions in place you could buy the game in these markets. Steam also allowed these games to be sold in markets where they knew the restrictions wouldn’t allow them to play the game.
They fucked up and are now trying to deflect blame from themselves, yeah Sony is shitty, but arrowhead and steam both saw dollar bills and tried taking them.
Edit, if anything, Sony can turn this around that Arrowhead and Steam strong armed their way out of the contract requirements. Steam and arrowhead should take the fall and costs in this one if that’s the case.
Or, Arrowhead didn’t know that only certain regions of the world can make PSN accounts and Steam isn’t directly involved in the creation of any individual store page unless they have reason to be - like limiting the regions Helldivers 2 is sold in after the fact.
You and I both have no way of knowing whether or not Arrowhead knew that they were selling their game in regions where people wouldn’t be able to play it, but I could totally see it being the case where Sony didn’t tell them and it just never occurred to them that that was a possibility because it’s not an issue where the company is located. The PSN account requirement was in the game and listed on the store page from day one; it was only temporarily made optional due to how overloaded the servers were at launch. Arrowhead themselves said they expected an active userbase of around 10k people.
And if Steam is anything like Etsy, then the most involvement they have with setting up any individual store page is their automated systems like the profanity filter. I run a business on Etsy and they have no direct involvement with any of my store besides providing the hosting platform and systems to create the storefront and listings (as well as backend systems like tracking pageviews and such). The only time that they’d get involved personally would be if something like this happened.
Regardless of where the blame lies, I think Arrowhead are the only ones who will suffer unless Sony relents on the PSN account requirement. The money for refunds isn’t gonna come out of Valve’s pockets, and I can’t imagine Sony forking over the cash now that they’ve taken their cut.
I don’t see Sony caring about reviews and refunds, they are the publisher, they will let the developer be the fall guy, walk away smelling like roses and go on to the next method of fleecing gamers. Bottom line is all that matters. They made their money off on Helldivers, they could hit the kill switch right now and be up. I just don’t see this ending well for arrowhead, and I see this blowing over for Sony, not even a footnote. I hope I’m wrong, I really do.
Make Sony continue to pour money into the servers
I work in IT. I can pretty much guarantee that server load for a game like this is nonexistent from a cost perspective. They’re not going to be using cloud services, they’re going to privately host because it’s way cheaper. Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution. Whatever cost they had for servers is already paid. Electricity and facilities costs are whatever because they are paying it anyway. They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks compared to the money spent building this thing or marketing it.
Gaming protests of popular games never work unless the objective doesn’t alter the bottom line.
I’ma press X to doubt here.
They’re not going to be using cloud services
Job listing for back-end engineer at Arrowhead says:
- Cloud Engineering: Utilize Azure services to build and optimize cloud-based backend components and make use of monitoring tools to track live performance.
Our tech stack
- NET/C#, Docker, Kubernetes/AKS, Azure, SQL Server, CosmosDB, Redis, Grafana, Terraform
Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution.
CEO said during the early day playercount woes:
It’s not a matter of money or buying more servers. It’s a matter of labour. We need to optimise the backend code. We are hitting some real limits.
They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks
A good back-end engineer is at least 100k. And a just-keep-the-lights-on crew is probably 3-4 of them.
FWIW: I also work in IT, on an IoT system that you might also assume has a “nonexistent” server cost. (I assure you, the cost exists.) I also used to work in game dev.
That said: Yeah, protesting by playing the game is a severely misguided notion.
I completely understand where you are coming from. Not being knowledgeable about IT infrastructure and how to host game servers, I was making assumptions based on how publishers are shutting down games that have low play count. Assuming it was a nominal amount of money to house and maintain servers for a game that generates no revenue, multiple servers for 100s of thousands of players that generates zero revenue would be noticeable. But if it’s just pennies, then it really would just be a drop in the bucket.
Sony should hurt in the bottom line for this, and I don’t see them caring about reviews and refunds, they will just move on to the next fleecing method.
