The game Helldivers 2, which has gained popularity since the beginning of this year, is no longer available for PC through Steam in many countries after the announcement that a PlayStation Network account would become mandatory for players. The problem is that PSN operates in a relatively small number of countries. The situation has led to the following Helldivers 2 has become unavailable in more than 170 regions, according to SteamDB. Steam also refunds money for its purchase regardless of the time spent in the game.
On April 3, Helldivers 2 publisher Sony Interactive announced on the Steam blog that Helldivers 2 players on PC will soon need to register for a PlayStation Network account (if they don’t already have one) to continue playing the game. The company explains that technical issues during the game’s launch forced the publisher to make Steam’s link to PSN optional. However, the grace period will soon end and PSN will become mandatory from Monday.
The news didn’t go down well with the player community: Helldivers 2’s Steam ratings plummeted. As of now, the game has more than 216 thousand strongly negative reviews (17%) and almost 500 thousand mixed reviews (49%).
Sony’s condition actually closes the game to a significant number of users or forces them to violate the company’s license terms. The regional ban on Steam makes it impossible to use the game and PSN via VPN.
«Yes, I was completely unaware of how many countries are unable to create a PSN account when I made that statement. It’s absolutely not our intention to force people to violate Sony’s terms of service or simply not play the game if they are in a restricted region. We need to find a better solution,» the game’s community manager wrote on Discord. CEO of Arrowhead Jean Pylestedt apologized to users for Sony’s decision.
Meanwhile, the website DSOG «has unearthed» that Sony has changed the terms and conditions for releasing its games on PC without an announcement. In 2022, Sony announced that PC gamers would not need to log in to the PlayStation Network. The company made it clear that on PC, logging into the PSN is an optional choice. This information is taken from Sony PlayStation Network 2022 support pages.
Later, Sony quietly changed this page. Now it says that for some PlayStation games you may need to connect to a PSN account, which is in stark contrast to the previous text.
Earlier it became known that Ghost of Tsushima will not require a PSN account for the individual campaign on PC. However, you will still need an account for the cooperative mode.
Sources: Wccftech, VGC, DSOG, Insider Gaming, GamesRadar