Helldivers II Disaster
It was fun while it lasted.
Helldivers II was the great white hope of the gaming world. AAA games are trash now but this one was the kind of game that we all used to love. It was a hell of a lot of game for $40 bucks. There was no pay-to-win or pay-to-cheat. No subscription required to play it. No DLC that was obviously created concurrently. Nothing was disabled for the lower price except Stratagem Hero.
Live service games in recent years have felt more like jobs than recreation. You were forced into a level and kept there. But Helldivers 2 was fun to play with your friends. For the first time in years, I was being reminded of what LAN parties used to be like. It was the community that made the game fun.
And Sony just shot it in the head.
The day that Helldivers 2 was first published, there was a requirement for PC gamers to sign into a Sony PlayStation account. If you didn’t have one, you had to create one. Sony is the publisher and made it a requirement. It’s not the first time this happened. However, 36 hours later Helldivers exploded in a way that no one could have foreseen. The PlayStation sign-in was disabled as part of a fix to raise the server capacity.
Arrowhead Studio never claimed that this requirement was permanently rescinded, but they never reminded the players it was needed either. In fairness to Arrowhead, they were spending those three months in constant crunch mode trying to get their game stable.
This doesn’t change the fact that for three months Steam players didn’t need one.
Yesterday Sony dropped the hammer. All new Steam players would be required to have a Sony PlayStation account in order to play Helldivers II all current players will be required to have one by the end of May. Those without will not be able to play the game.
Shit storm doesn’t begin to describe the reaction. Sony’s at least bothered to make a bullshit statement today. Since this game is cross-platform with Steam they have been unable to ban PC griefers. All they can do is ask Valve to ban and then wait. While this is true, I strongly suspect the real reason is they (1) want PC player data, and (2) boost their numbers on the PlayStation network
One of the many problems with this is that there are quite a few countries that are unsupported by PlayStation. Belarus for one, all of Africa for another. The only thing those players can do is either sign in on a VPN and hope Sony doesn’t notice or just ask for a refund and never play Helldivers again.
As if this wasn’t bad enough for Helldivers 2, the Arrowhead community manager decided to go bug fuck and start shrieking at people online.
The player she was snarling at then said, he was going to demand a refund and then added a parting shot.
As near as I can tell Spitz is no longer an employee of Arrowhead but the damage is done. And I’m afraid the same thing can be said for the Helldiver’s community.
Helldivers II will likely survive this but they are going to lose a lot players. The question now is, how many?
