I got up at 7am on a bank holiday and all I got was this coherent well-formed argument about something that happened in gaming
It’s a tale as old as time: publisher clearly states account linking requirement on game store page at launch, makes it temporarily optional due to technical issues, then announces that it will, in fact, be following up on this. Cue capital-G gamer rage, typically from adult baby Americans yet to acknowledge that they live in the land of the free market.
Yes, it’s the Helldivers 2 news we were all waiting for: linking a Playstation Network (PSN) account requirement will no longer be necessary for PC users. There’s one good reason to be thankful for this, but the mild inconvenience of having to use an external service login to access a product isn’t it.
We’ll get to that reason in a moment, but, for now, consider that every Steam user, by virtue of being a Steam user, already uses an account, a form of digital rights management no less, to access products.
Games which require additional accounts are also nothing new, with behemoths like Ubisoft and EA gating off many of their titles on Steam unless users log into Ubisoft Connect or EA Launcher accounts at the same time. Having to do this is not ideal and, on some level, anti-consumer, but that cat is out of the bag.
Even Steam users have come to accept this: as I write, the live-services Apex Legends and Call of Duty Modern Warfare III are listed as two of the platforms top-selling games, which is to say nothing of games with substantive single-player components that require account linking.
In the case of Helldivers 2, because the PSN requirement was disclosed heavily from the outset, users in territories where those external services in question are available deserve no sympathy and have two options: continue to use the product while grumbling, or exercise some willpower and stop using the product.
Enter the complication. As the deferment of Helldivers’ account requirement came to an end this weekend, so did the game’s Steam store listings in territories where PSN is not available: 177, according to PCGamesN.
Sure, new players from those countries won’t be allowed in, which is disappointing, but spare a thought for existing ones who, despite the PSN warning, were allowed to purchase the game in the first place, and who Steam developer Valve have now started providing unconditional refunds for.
This is a good thing for Valve to do, but I’m not sure how much of a choice they had. Three of those delisted countries are member states of that perennial consumer rights titan, the European Union, and it is objectively a bit rum for a company to sell a product in a territory that it has already implied will be locked out of in the future. Something had to give.
Meanwhile, Playstation’s tweet announcing the end of the Helldivers issue - also, probably, issued in haste following a chat with Legal - tells users they’ll be ‘updated on future plans’, which could be as innocuous as it is ominous.
Gamers are unlikely to appreciate the likely mechanisms behind the reversal, as they’ve already failed, despite Helldivers 2’s setting literally being a managed democracy, to recognise the one playing out in front of them.
True, they have shouted loud enough - they have ‘voted’, but Sony isn’t going to forget about the concept of account linking - it’s in the company’s self-interest to require it. Sony have already announced that access to Ghost of Tsushima’s online Legends mode will require a PSN account on PC.
I feel confident, given this, to say that all Sony will feel it has to do with its next always-online live service is be more organised about where it sells the thing. This comes with the obligatory disclaimer that I am not a soothsayer, so Playstation’s PC strategy will just have to be something to keep an eye on for now.
It’s worth referring you again, though, to those two choices from earlier: buy in and deal with it, or truly ‘vote with your wallet’, and give the practice no oxygen. And - just for the sake of variety - you could bother to read the small print next time.
This is difficult to suggest when the ability to read at all is optional for participation in the online infinity war. This is the saga that featured an American Reddit user try to launch an American class action lawsuit over those 177 delistings in regions that were not America.
The CEO of Helldivers franchise developer Arrowhead tweeting about the ‘willpower of the community’, then, feels unbelievably hollow when the real issue at hand has nothing to do with substantial portions of Helldivers 2’s player base being truly as thick as mince, leading to the game being bludgeoned to pulp in a negative Steam review campaign.
In all, Reading the words ‘We are Helldivers’ in that Reddit post will never not make the spirit of Groucho Marx kick just as violently in my stomach as it did the first time. Grassroots discourse and the games press will be back here again, I’m sure, as the only people learning from ‘community backlash’ are the publishers figuring out how to implement measures like account linking with less of it the next time out.