Helldivers 2 CEO: Well that's depressing

Devs (and players) getting majorly shafted by Sony. Make no mistake, Arrowhead doesn't want this either, but their hands are tied. Fucking Sony...
- Arrowhead kind of messed up by not just implementing the PSN requirement from the start, and avoiding this confusion. It’s not like Sony suddenly made this requirement, it has been there all along.
  
  Arrowhead and/or Sony also messed up by not having the country restrictions setup on the Steam store. Arrowhead knew they were going to be reliant on PSN to handle support tickets well ahead of launch.
  
  They literally did do that. My account is old enough that linking it was already required when I started playing. It was off temporarily.
  
  Bare minimum idea: have a sticky post on all the forums reminding people that PSN accounts will be required in 6 months. Maybe a little sticky note after you load up the game that goes away after you link.
  Leaving it till now was kinda not the best possible choice.
- To be fair, they're the ones who signed the deal. Hopefully this is something they can learn from for future games.
  
  They are pulling the reverse Hello Games. Sony's contract with Hello Games (No Man's Sky) forced them to ship an unfinished game, met with hundreds of thousands of bad reviews, but they turned it around by not only delivering what was originally promised, but continuously adding huge DLC level free updates to the game, effectively nulling the effects of their contract with Sony. Arrowhead Studios shipped an incredible game, but ignored Sony's contractual requirements to ride the wave of sales, and is now being hit with the effects after finally enforcing what they signed up for.
  
  And apparently they knew about the requirement, and ignored it.
  ESH
- They signed the contract

The summer winds came blowing in from across the sea...
- Haha one of my favorite endings ever, thank you

Well that exchange is fucking poetry

the hilarious thing is that he actually doesn't know it

Is it even possible to boycott Sony? Or are they like some other entities: tentacles wrapped around so many things that we can’t avoid them?
- The only thing I've not been able to divest myself from Sony is HDMI. If I could buy a TV with a decent amount of DisplayPort and no HDMI, I'd be so happy. My level of distrust goes back to their rootkit on music CD scandal.
  
  Seriously, fuck HDMI. I just recently learned they've blocked AMD's open source driver from being able to implement HDMI 2.1 meaning AMD GPUs are currently limited to 4K@60Hz over HDMI on Linux.
  
  I don't get how HDMI got so popular. DP had much better features earlier on. And no licensing fees.
  Iirc the main reason for HDMI was its copy protection and Sony BluRay players only having HDMI. I could be wrong though.
  
  Yeah, that was the end of major-publisher CDs for me. I’ve been very happy with only indie music for a very long time.
- Sony pictures is one of the "big 5" Hollywood studios (11% market share)
  Sony music group the second largest music company in the world (22% market share)
  Its usually easy to avoid using their hardware directly but they have a pretty big slice of media.
  
  I dropped crunchyroll as soon as Sony bought them and i have watched and listened to plenty of Sony content with out giving them anything. Been that way since early 2000s.
  
  There’s the problem. It’s fairly easy for me to avoid those slices since I don’t care for their movies or any of their artists. But some of their tech has become de facto standard, so that’s harder.
- All game consoles and game companies are run by corporations. There are no ethical ones. If you really don't like all this bullshit they pull, all you can do is stop gaming
  
  You could only play games by indie developers. Or only buy games from GOG.

Can Sony implement PSN accounts in more countries? Seems like this would fix it lol.
- They won't just for this game
  
  Ya, probably not. But it's a shame to see so many people enjoy this game and now not be able to enjoy it. And I haven't even played it, I've just been thinking about it and seeing these posts on Lemmy.
- It wouldn't. Half the outrage is that a game you bought on steam to play on pc forces you to create and link a psn account in the first place

Play a different game, Weej.

- Completely different scenario with Bethesda. You can stay play any Bethsoft game you own.
- I think it’s more because Microsoft isn’t as restrictive regionally and doesn’t have a terrible record with security. Those two things seem to be the main drivers of people’s anger in regards to this.
- I def think Arrowhead had some shared responsibility for it. Going into a contract with Sony, they must have known the PSN account was a requirement but no one on either side mentioned it until it was going to be implemented.
  If PSN was required from beginning, it should have been enforced/limited to specific countries. If it had "technical issues", maybe they should have fixed it much sooner than 6 months.

I mean, don't be owned and don't be publicly traded and you won't have these problems, although you won't have a lot of other problems either, like tax bracket concerns due to revenue.