Helldivers 2 has been a breath of fresh air within the games industry for simply providing a fun and relatively inexpensive experience to its players. The hyperbolic “Super Earth” raiding a plethora of planets to extract ‘Element 710’, an obvious stand-in for ‘OIL’, while screaming about delivering Freedom & Democracy to Bugs & Automotans has struck a cord across the gaming space. However, a controversial change may spell doom for the game as a post on X from the official Helldivers 2 account says that it will be mandatory to have a PSN account to keep playing after stating it was optional.
The post explains that the account linking is meant to ‘protect’ players by allowing the game to permanently BAN anyone engaged in griefing and abuse, but doesn’t cite any specific examples. However, this doesn’t make much sense, given that players with a Steam account could already be banned and unable to access the game if they did run afoul of their vague and nebulous rules. At best, this would only prevent someone who has bought the game twice for Steam and then Playstation 5 when they get one of their accounts banned, but the likelihood of someone spending that much for the purpose of losing access would make up an insignificant percentage of the total player base.
The post does state that this will only affect new players to the game on May 6th, and current players will be forced to start on May 30th. It should be made clear that anyone who purchased the game on Steam was told that the requirement was mandatory but was also given an option to simply skip this step, which has led to obvious confusion.
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The timing of this change also seems a little too coincidental as Sony has been receiving a large backlash and cancellation of their PSN subscribers after the release of StellarBlade. A game that had at first promised to buck the trend of Modern AAA releases but was later dropped with a Day One patch that did censor two of the main character’s outfits in spite of it being an M-rated title. Having one of the most popular games currently out on Steam requiring a PSN account would help to alleviate some of that bleeding as the game is still regularly seeing over 100k concurrent players each day at peak hours on Steam.
However, in a reply to the official Helldivers 2 Account, another X user pointed out that it was only a few days prior that Sony revealed a new patent that would auto-detect so-called ‘harassment’ and ban their users without a report needing to be submitted. Given the game is cross-platform and Steam users can easily hook up with PS5 users, this mandatory account linking would mean that Sony’s new system would allow Steam players to be punished under their platform’s rules.
But that’s not the only downside to this change.
While gamers in the States and most of the Western world can simply create PSN accounts, which will do absolutely nothing for them and simply give Sony access to their information, other players from around the world will be permanently kept out as PSN is only available in 69 countries. These gamers will be forced to pay for a VPN and hope that it will allow them to access the game, but it will inevitably lead to a drop in players as these individuals will likely choose to avoid these extra steps to access the game.
And then there is the fact that PSN is a notoriously insecure platform that has had its user’s information hacked on multiple occasions. From having their subscriber’s card information stolen to having the accounts themselves stolen!
Is this the end of Helldivers 2 as we know it? Quite possibly. While Playstation5 users are used to being forced to use a PSN account to play various games Steam users are far less likely to sign up for such an inherently flawed service for the sake of playing just one game. No matter how much fun that game may be.
After X user @MasteroftheTDS posted a compilation of outraged players posting about this change, another user replied with a video showing the complete disregard to the players by one of Helldivers 2 Community Managers on their official Discord. After someone on Discord had posted about how this would lead to many players choosing to leave the game, they coldly responded with, “I thought you were refunding and leaving”. So it seems that the official response to Helldivers 2 is that the wants and needs of the players are a far and distant cry to the demands from Sony.
Only the upcoming months will tell if Helldivers 2 will manage to weather this storm that they and Sony have managed to culminate, and Fandom Pulse will stay tuned to upcoming changes made to the game and the active players that remain!
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Can someone take box of matches away from Sony?