Earlier this week, Helldivers 2 players on PC were told that they’d soon need to link their Steam account to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account. Two days later and the game has received 100,000 new negative reviews on Steam.
What’s more, developers at Arrowhead have made several statements to say that they’re on the players’ side.
“Ouch, right in the review score,” tweeted Arrowhead game Studio’s CEO and creative director Johan Pilestedt. “Well, I guess it’s warranted. Sorry everyone for how this all transpired. I hope we will make it up and regain the trust by providing a continued great game experience. I just want to make great games!”
When Pilestedt made that comment yesterday, Helldivers 2 still had a ‘Mostly Positive’ user review rating on Steam, with a ‘Mixed’ rating based on reviews just from the past two weeks. As of the time of writing this post, the overall rating is now Mixed – indicating only 59% positive reviews – and recent reviews are Mostly Negative.
Internal discussions are ongoing about the mandatory linking change and while I can’t reveal details, the response from our dev teams has been pretty universally negative and we’re looking for better options,” wrote Arrowhead community manager Spitz on the Helldivers Discord (as shared by Reddit user Navar4477).
Spitz also said that the decision and announcement were carried out by Sony, not by Arrowhead themselves.
Players object to the requirement to link their PSN accounts for a range of reasons, from the basic inconvenience to more general data collection and privacy concerns. The change is of particular concern to those players in regions where it’s not possible to sign-up for a PSN account. An earlier comment from Arrowhead had suggested that such players should sign-up to PSN for a region other than that which they reside, but doing so would actually breach Sony’s own terms of service.
“If a better solution isn’t provided for players who are in regions without PSN coverage, I’m assured that we won’t be making the requirement mandatory for those players,” wrote Spitz. “We’re not going to force people to either break Sony TOS or not play the game.”
Sony have brought more and more of their games to PC in recent years, typically years after their initial console exclusive release. Helldivers 2 is a little different, in that they’re publishing the game and it’s developed by a third-party studio they don’t own, and it was released on PC and PlayStation platforms simultaneously. That cross-platform release is part of why it has been such a huge success; it’s reportedly the seventh highest grossing Sony published game of all time, with more than half its sales on PC. It’s also just a great game.
All of which makes it a real big dumb shame that the experience is being tarnished for players by an unnecessary account requirement.