Color me impressed that the gaming community actually cares about this. Certainly more egregious abuse has been levied at them in the past and ignored.
Honestly I’m more annoyed by the rootkit “anti-cheat” the game uses, than this Sony action. It’s easy enough to make a burner email account for Sony, and for better or worse, I’m not in one of the countries impacted.
They DEFINITELY need to refund all players that are from newly blocked countries - anything short of a full refund is unacceptable, but it’s not like people have cared that PSN is unavailable in Nigeria before this point.
All that said, I love seeing the community putting Sony’s feet on the fire for implementing even mildly anti-consumer BS. I just wish the outrage was more consistent
Honestly I’m more annoyed by the rootkit “anti-cheat” the game uses, than this Sony action.
Exactly. Little/no backlash when the game was announced with these anti-features. It’s not even a competitive game. If one of my teammates was cheating I’d probably just laugh.
Not saying I don’t think they deserve to be upset, it’s just strange when and what they choose to be upset about.
It’s easy enough to make a burner email account
Except it is because you have to connect said account to your Steam account.
another one big thing is those of us who care just straight up don’t buy the game, and without buying the game we can’t leave a negative review, and we moved on and not talked about it anymore.
What happened here is affecting people who have spent money on this game, who can leave review and actually cannot just walk away without having your spent money thrown into the void.
It’s easy enough to make a burner email account for Sony, and for better or worse, I’m not in one of the countries impacted
Some countries require an ID verification
Right? This game requires users install a kernel-level anti-cheat in order to run. That’s a huge privacy and security risk just to play a non-competitive video game. Nobody seemed to care about that, but signing up for PlayStation Network? That’s where gamers draw the line!
I mean, I’m glad they’re finally pushing back against terrible corporate decisions but what set them off is puzzling.
The difference is everyone CAN install a bad anti-cheat, or decide to not do it.
But if people who bought the game suddenly CAN’T legally play it anymore, because PSN doesn’t allow accounts in their country, they don’t even have a choice.
Selling the game in those regions in the first place was deeply wrong, but then taking away the ability to play AFTER they sold it to people, that’s a bridge too far.
And we’re not just talking about most of Africa (not that that would be less bad), we’re also talking about countries like Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, those are EU members, how is there no PSN available there?
People are already playing games with anticheat like Apex, Fortnite, Valorant, League, Genshin Impact, etc so that part is the least surprising.
I think it’s because PC gamers are often anti console so having to sign up to PSN and you don’t even own a PlayStation feels very wrong.
It’s a branding issue. If they required you to have an “Arrowhead Network” account login no-one would bat an eye… Even if it was just rebadged PSN.
Yeah but it’s been said before: this is not the 1st or the 14th game to required 3rd party fuckin’ accounts for no reason and received very few complaints.
Usually it’s forced at launch so if people don’t like it they can refund immediately. This is an odd situation where it went from being skippable to suddenly a requirement. People got used to not needing another account for the game.9
Yeah compared to rootkits, micro transactions, unfinished games at launch, publisher launchers, seems there’s no shortage of things to whinge about in the current gaming space.
This game has a couple of those things but generally has been the best co-op shooting experience since Left for Dead 2 to me. Helldivers 1 was a blast too though.
I feel like the level of whiplash this game is getting is similar to that of Cyberpunk but I could be exaggerating. If the game wasn’t so successful at checking people’s boxes at the outset, I think we wouldn’t be having this discussion today. It being so popular is why there are a ton of people freaking out. I’m not saying it’s not warranted, just observing.
Needless to say, Sony is never going to allow an account linking grace period in any of their games going forward. It looks like they gave the kids candy and then took it away, better for them to just not give the candy in the first place.
Edit to add: I also find it hard to stomach the amount of ire to some degree because the creative devs had nothing to do with this and clearly put a ton of energy and love into the game. They even have a unique connection to the community through the bespoke game master, Joel. I’m pretty torn about it: I want the gaming industry to stop this full speed charge toward enshittification like, literally, every other aspect of life now. But I don’t want developers to have to not only worry about mass layoffs and internal industry enshittification on top of reactionary blowback from the people they make the games for.
I will say I have the luxury of living in a country that’s supported by PSN and already have an account, so it colors my opinions.
If it makes you feel any better, one of Arrowhead’s community managers specifically said to take the anger to steam. It makes it very public that people are unhappy, and it’s more likely to get Sony to change the policy. So the devs are aware of why this is happening, and it appears that to an extent at least, support the negative reviews
For me personally, it just got to me that Sony gave negative shits while Arrowhead was fighting an uphill battle getting their game playable in the face of overnight success, and now that everything is great and the hard work is done, Sony’s seeing dollar signs and pushing their fucking corpo bullshit on a studio that sees zero benefit and suffers all the fallout. They’re all too happy to shit where Arrowhead eats and it pisses me off.
Hate is just love getting all twisted up. You can’t get this kind of negativity from something that’s always been awful, it has to be deeply loved first in order for the hate to properly flow.
Overwatch 2 being at only 18% positive brings me joy
I’m actually surprised they increased it that much. Last time I checked, it was swimming at 9%.
steam deleted a LOT of reviews on the overwatch page at some point (probably repeatedly, probably an automated system).
their “anti-review-bombing” measures sure love to fire when even when the community does have legitimate complaints.
so overwatch hasn’t gotten better, they just keep deleting some of the negative reviews…
Ah yes
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Battlegrounds