What a weekend it was for Helldivers 2. Arrowhead’s Starship Troopers-inspired live-service shooter has been atop the world since its launch, attracting millions of players and crafting a success story that none of us could have seen coming. It’s a certified hit, and one of Sony’s biggest exclusives of the generation. So, of course, it had to go and screw it all up.

A few days ago, the official Helldivers 2 social media accounts confirmed that all players on PC would need to link their Steam accounts with the PlayStation Network before a certain date, or they would no longer be able to play the game they had purchased. Arrowhead stated that this requirement was originally going to be introduced at launch, but was delayed in order to deal with other technical problems in the wake of the game’s massive success.

Now it has finally come around, but what Sony failed to realise is that PSN is impossible to access in over 150 countries around the world, many of which contain thousands of avid Helldivers 2 fans. Unless those players fork out for a VPN or find a similar workaround, they would soon be forced to stop playing. Valve realised this too, as it began offering refunds to affected people even if they fell outside of its usual two-hour refund window. I’m unsure why Sony wanted to do this other than to link up accounts and steal some juicy data, but at its very heart it is anti-consumer and woefully short-sighted.

The response was predictable, as players flooded the Steam page with negative reviews as they demanded refunds, believing that their access to the game was doomed to be cut off in a matter of weeks, and there was little they could do to circumvent it. Arrowhead employees were surprisingly honest on Twitter that this decision wasn’t theirs, and it was abiding by the contractual whims of its publisher. It sucks, but in its position, nothing could really be done.

Fortunately for us, the blowback was so severe that Sony reversed the decision entirely with a tweet that tried to act like the corporation knew that the choice to force players into such a practice was wrong all along, and it would never make this mistake again. I don’t buy it.

I bet if we didn’t make a stink about this controversy it would have come to pass anyway. It’s set to be a requirement for Ghost of Tsushima, so there’s sufficient evidence that Sony can and will enforce this practice with first-party exclusives on PC going forward. It doesn’t have the library or pedigree to justify having its own PC launcher like Microsoft or Epic, so instead it wants to showcase its might in other, far more obtrusive ways.

Sony’s behaviour here is far from new. Companies have been engaging in this practice with their own bespoke launchers and logins for decades, making it harder to play games on Steam if you don’t jump through the correct hoops. It is anti-consumer at its core, regardless of how Games For Windows Live tried to spin itself as something cool, new, and worthwhile. It was just a nuisance.

But for a company like Sony which has otherwise had decent success on PC with a brilliant selection of worthwhile ports, it feels strange to immediately betray all of that trust by doing this. After the Helldivers 2 debacle, it will be hard to fully trust anything PlayStation related on PC without fearing there will be some sort of eventual caveat. What is to stop Sony from suddenly enforcing similar rules for games like Horizon, Days Gone, Spider-Man, and God of War on the PC? Nothing, and chances are we will need to make just as much noise to try and reverse these moves if they came about.

Sony might be ruling the console roost with narrative blockbuster first-party exclusives right now, but in the live service landscape, it’s still fragile and yet to prove itself. Not to mention the fact it bought Bungie to develop live service games only to lay off loads of its staff along with cancelling several projects, with Marathon reportedly going through a design overhaul as it responds to internal feedback. Factions 2 is no longer a thing, London Studio’s service effort was also shelved, and who knows what else has been shuffled around behind closed doors. The bubble is bursting, and here PlayStation is acting like it owns the place.

No major exclusives are on the horizon for 2024, and Helldivers 2 could have ridden this wave of momentum uninterrupted if Sony didn’t feel obligated to wave its digital schlong around. I have no doubt people will keep playing it, and Arrowhead has managed to please fans and keep its good will intact despite this debacle, but for Sony, the damage is done.

Imagine releasing a game to widespread critical and commercial acclaim only to throw it all away to implement a delayed feature that won’t make a difference anyway. It might be to link accounts, so information can eventually become more centralised, but it still feels like a step Sony didn’t really need to take, and a PR disaster that should have been avoided.

Live-service games are seemingly still the future that a lot of companies, Sony included, have placed their bets on, and if it wants to continue being successful, it needs to learn how to communicate with players across several different platforms and ecosystems. Helldivers 2 was its first test in securing this new future, and it failed. If anything, its success has only caught Sony by surprise, as it had little faith that a game of its ilk would last very long to begin with. A negative outlook to have considering you have several games like this well into development.

My hope is that Sony will learn from Helldivers 2, but if it doesn’t, we are in for one hell of a ride.

Helldivers 2

4.0/5

Helldivers 2 is the sequel to the third-person shooter from Arrowhead Game Studios. This time out, the Helldivers are deep in the Galactic War, and it's up to you to bring Managed Democracy to the masses.

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