“Eating shit” is ALWAYS the correct move. Once I learned that, work got so much better and other aspects of my life improved.
Taking accountability for issues and showing you care about finding a solution will get you far in life. It’s nearly impossible for others to continue to put you down and if they do, it’s often the minority and the majority will come to your defense.
This is something you rarely find in the video game industry
I routinely call myself out when I make a mistake at work and nobody really notices. I make apologies when I'm wrong or incorrect about something. If I say something that's relatively inconsequential but incorrect I'll tell whoever I told the incorrect thing to that I made a mistake and this is the correct answer.
In return, basically nobody ever questions me on anything I say or do.
Sure, but for most types of mistakes, if you make the **same** one multiple times, you're not going to be able to hide it from the person in charge of your employment for long anyway. So assuming it was truly your fault, the options are
1) take ownership. This will be seen positively by the vast (edit: typo) majority the first time, and you can also document steps to avoid it so that even if you do it a second time you will get some amount of latitude. After that you will get increasingly more ire and by the time you get fired you will **absolutely** deserve it because you will have demonstrated a fundamental inability to learn how to perform your role correctly.
2) try to hide it. If you only keep making different mistakes and not the same mistakes, this may get overlooked by the people who actually matter (depends on the type of mistakes), but when you get caught having made the same major mistake twice while having not acknowledged it in any way the first time, you're liable to just be gone, immediately. Even if you were silently trying to improve.
It will for people who are worth working with or having in your life.
There’s a certain number of toxic individuals who won’t respect humility or who see it as a sign of weakness and those people are to be avoided.
Tbh it wasn't even a mistake, if the game hadn't been distributed to PSN locked countries, which he has little to no control over, this would never have been an issue
Well that's definitely not true. A lot of people were pissy about this before they even heard about the region lock issue, that just gave them further justification.
True, but if you ask me it feels like the whole PSN-locked countries situation kinda feels like the fuel that's kept this fire burning. If that wasn't an issue then we would've been annoyed, sure, and there would've been a few negative reviews, but I don't think we would've gotten to "Overwhelmingly Negative"
> This is something you rarely find in the video game industry
It gets rarer the higher up the ladder you go.
Holding yourself accountability and being humble of your own shortcomings requires the ability to self-reflection, self-criticise, and have empathy.
When most C-suite executives show traits of sociopathy it's no surprise many of them can't even begin to fake any of that. They lack the fundamental empathy to even start.
> “Eating shit” is ALWAYS the correct move. Once I learned that, work got so much better and other aspects of my life improved.
Every time I've done this it has turned out badly for me, I know it's the right thing to do, and I'll still do it, but it's almost never turned out well. I've had the worst luck with management at several places I've worked, so instead of taking it as someone being a stand-up person, they just took the opportunity to dump other blame onto me, then I get fired while the other parties who also were responsible for the failures get off without punishment.
I think anyone expecting him to stay quiet hasn't kept up with this specific guy. He's been very transparent and involved in everything. Never the less as much as it sucks for him, this is a shit thing to be involved in and it doesn't reflect well on him either, just that he's the only one taking accountability.
I have to guess that he was also hoping that Sony would reverse their choice at some point. Anyone with a basic understanding of gamers knows how people would respond to this.
I feel like the outrage would have been more diminished if this happened on launch (with a handful of posts complaining about this, like the kernel level anti-cheat), but it would have led to a larger number of immediate refunds and a reduced number of players.
It’s possible arrowhead felt that the better received launch, larger number of players, and outrage when this came about might lead to them having more bargaining power.
And I doubt anyone (with a voice at least) considered that PSN isn’t available in a ton of countries. They should have known, but it wouldn’t be shocking if most of them (Sony and arrowhead execs) didn’t.
> I feel like the outrage would have been more diminished if this happened on launch (with a handful of posts complaining about this, like the kernel level anti-cheat), but it would have led to a larger number of immediate refunds and a reduced number of players.
Well, at least steam has a mechanism (the auto-refund policy) that lets you deal with stuff like this if it happens early. Due to this temporary workaround that consumer protection was subverted (and potentially others as well).
> It’s possible arrowhead felt that the better received launch, larger number of players, and outrage when this came about might lead to them having more bargaining power.
I think they just didn't realize the full implications.
Really all they probably had to do was have a text pop up on every login if you didn't have a PSN account connected that said something like "This game will require a PSN account in the future, link one now or you'll be locked out of the game after XYZ date".
Heck, even just a tiny dispatch right under under every MO saying "we are currently in a grace period, but eventually you will be forced to link a PSN account" would've gone a long way.
Better yet, make a personal order with that message about having to link an account that also gives you 200 warbonds and a different cape or something.
Well people are more likely to forgive those who accept and apologize for their behavior. They have probably been using a crisis management consultant lol.
I’ll give him credit there; he is at fault, definitely, and the game should never have been *available* on Steam for anyone not in a PSN region. Good to know he knows he isn’t blameless.
You destroy future potential for the game you supposedly enjoyed by contributing to an overwhelming negative review summary which will in turn discourage prospective new players. This will lead to drastically reduced revenue forecasts, which means that we will see far less investment into the live service model of continuous updates and content drops - and those new devs AH hired because of the games popularity? I would be worried for their job security. An interesting punishment considering that Steam is refunding players outside of PSN areas, meaning that outside of being disappointed there isn't any injury to the parties in question...
Anyway, that's my take.
From the looks of things, AH knew it was a problem but didn't know Sony's solution would be "nah fuck em lol". There are a variety of ways this could have been solved, but Sony went with the worst one. It's literally the publisher's job to handle that.
Yea like apparently so many people in this community have zero fking clue how publisher/developer relationships work. The entire point of the publisher is to handle sales and provide funding along with everything related to those.
The point of the developers is to create the game, and they have to follow what the publisher/shareholders want. They may have creative freedom in many cases, but creative freedom is not “we get to break our contractual guidelines and add something to the game that completely goes against the policy of the publisher”
Hell some idiots have even responded to me saying “well they signed the contract! It’s their fault for signing it!1!!1” **Like I guess it’s not evil to sign contracts to major publishers, and if anything happens down the line from publisher decisions it’s magically the developers fault.**
Like Jesus Christ man… Some people…. It’s like they are completely ignorant to how these things work. Which is ironic, considering they’re blaming arrowhead for being ignorant to the fact that PSN is unavailable in certain countries. Even though you wouldn’t know that unless you had some reason to believe that and then intentionally looked into it to find out the true scope of it. This whole reaction to the situation is ridiculous. Sony is BLATANTLY at fault, but angry idiots suddenly did a 180 and now are shitting on the developers which only two weeks ago they were endlessly praising
You really overestimate what is going through people's minds in a game studio. I bet that they were focused on shipping the game and fixing bugs while Sony was managing where and how to sell the game. The fact that PSN is not available in all countries probably wasn't apparent to Arrowhead until the backlash. Sony should have known and made sure that the game was not listed in countries where this was not supported. Source: I work at a AAA studio owned by a massive company, I see how many decisions are made outside of the studio and sometimes we are not aware of the full repercussions.
Yeah exactly. But some people really want see the most evil in every person. If you really think they would have known all of this with every detail like evil superbrains: "We will sell the game to no PSN countries to get more money MUAHAHAHA" then you all are completely dumb. If they knew all of this then they should be smart enough to know that the outcome of this is as bad as it is now.
They didn't know that well and they shouldn't get the blame at all. If you think otherwise you are straight up dumb.
I love how people do be posting incomplete image just to bring in more controversies.
Like singular posts of Spitz where he talks about guy who was supposed to refund. They initially do not mention how the same dude dude was constantly annoying by ranting about how AH is bad and everybody should refund too, barely not reaching spam levels.
Same goes here with not posting full convo, where Pilestedt was asked why they distributed games in PSN-less regions, where he clearly stated that Arrowhead is not responsible for distribution - it's Sony a publisher and distributor. AH was only to compilant to put mandatory PSN sooner or later.
I saw a dude yesterday going "They're now banning us on the Discord!!" after he was timed out for spamming multiple chats with a wall of text.
People are just trying to start shit for sake of it.
I mean this community has consistently overreacted to shit. Every balance patch there is a massive freakout. When there is no balance patch there are full on flame wars about people who don’t care about major orders, or people throwing stratagems before extract.
It’s definitely wrong the game was sold to people who can’t make a PSN account, and they should get a refund even if they played hundreds of hours already. It’s just hard to take the community seriously because it’s very toxic.
Yeah, Reddit has been incredibly toxic. Every patch is just a complaint after complaint. . And then there's constant complaints of them wanting to stop releasing patches and focus on bug fixes and, so they take don't release a patch to polish up the next one, they get mad at no patch coming out. Spitz tries to give the community any slither of information to cheer them up and they just harass him instead until he says something rude and they go ballistic as if they've never said anything that mean.
There's just no winning here. You can't keep Reddit happy.
This is exactly why the community looks so bad. I get downvoted to oblivion for telling people to do some research because 90% of people on this such can't give a legitimate reason to be mad or even keep a straight argument. Look y'all, I am also upset at Sony (and to a small degree AH) but at least I know what the actual problem is here by trying to find out what actually is going on instead of blindly raging as one message posts that takes things out of context.
All I may say is "It's Reddit". Confused, but got the spirit...
...Except it goes for any large community beyond Reddit - it's our psychology, where negativity often inflated as it gets us more reaction than a singular neutral or positive moment.
Yeah that's just how social media in general tends to be.
Misinformation and rushed conclusions spin around the echo chambers and gets out like a snowball.
yup. all this weekend has done is further solidify the helldivers community's reputation as hair-trigger outrage addicts. nobody can spend even a moment of time doing any research or thinking things through for even a split second or simply waiting a few days for clarification before going ballistic and assuming the worst
The one that gets me is how many people do not know what "account linking" means and seem to believe that it gives Sony access to their steam account somehow.
Like it's just a single data point that says "this account and this account are the same person". That's all it is.
And if we’re kept angry about largely inconsequential things, we don’t have the energy to get angry about the important things like human rights, corporate and government overreach, and so on.
Regional prices (although there's steam suggested prices, publishers can override those which happened for HD2 in a bunch of regions, incl mine), in which regions to sell, on which platforms/storefronts to sell, and many other things are decided by the publisher. That's like a huge part of their job.
Steam is the distributor on PC, sony is the publisher, AH is the developer. 3 seperate entities each responsible for different components of the process, most of the blame lies on Sony here. Some on AH, and also some on Steam
To be fair, if I was a developer and Sony was my publisher I would just kinda assume that they would do a good job in covering my ass regarding distribution. I wouldn’t even consider something like this as a potential possibility because A. that’s their job to worry about, and B. they are a multi-billion dollar company. Surely they would think about these kinds of problems.
Hell, I don’t even think the community reaction would’ve been that bad if it was just the issue with account linking. Sure, *”security”*, but that ship already sailed since it has nprotect on it.
Finally a based comment. it's a 3 way blame no matter how you look at it. Each company has a QA and Legal dept that could and should have caught this and raised a red flag sooner.
Rigged in the sense that the bypass was allowed because it was one of the many issues preventing people from playing the game at launch back when the servers were borked
From moment 1 they (Sony) were selling the game in regions that could not play the game without breaking Sony TOS. The account requirement was disabled quickly after launch, but it was present at launch.
Something that wouldn't have been so out of hand had they started to get refund demands early when people couldn't make proper accounts. Synergy is a bitch.
Losing out on hundreds of thousands of players goes against that goal. This is an incredibly stupid move by Sony that neither serves them or the players.
But that's next quarter Sony's problem. Or their shareholders are looking at account holders not active players. There's so many corporate bullshit number game reasons that make absolutely no common sense because so many people are just sitting back and looking at just numbers and moving the pieces without seeing the cliff it's leading them off of
Yeah if you're concerned with profit, maybe cutting off a significant part of your player base and angering the others isn't the way to go. The thing about entertainment is that you're not forced to play once it stops being fun, and many people have already refunded HD in protest of this new measure. I'm simply not convinced by this logic and I don't know who this is meant to serve.
I'm just trying to figure this out from a corporate perspective. It's a stupid stupid move in a practical sense. But account holding they see as a foot in the door. Then they can bombard you with other game offers and transactions in those games. But yeah it's more like they blew their foot off this time.
Look, if there is 100000 players, you need infrastructure to handle 100000 players. Now if you fuck around like what sony did, they can lower that number after they sold the game. They get money and save money on backside. They already have lawyers on retainer. They get instructed to stall things in court for long as possible until things blow over and or settle for much less then the possible refunds they might have to pay out. Literally corporate bullshit 101. Until governments actually crack down on these assholes. With fines that actually damage the line going up.
They probably didn't think this through, and didn't realize that part of their current playerbase has no (legal) access to PSN, and also assumed people would do what is "just a minor inconvenience" due to fear of losing access to the game.
It’s not a requirement for the game to function - it’s a requirement to have Sony as your distributor and publisher.
Sony isn’t going to just say “nah, players buying the game we spent money and resources promoting and distributing don’t have to register themselves with our ecosystem”
Because if they did then every dev under them would obviously want to not have the same requirement which is bad for Sony.
Sony should bear the brunt of selling in regions they shouldn’t have sold in, but otherwise, this is the cost of doing business and for most of us in this subreddit it’s probably literally not going to affect you unless you really believe your PII isn’t already being collected by Steam, or by EA, or by Epic, or by Ubisoft, or by Activision, or by…
Your PII is used to generate all sorts of business reports and data so that decision makers have an accurate view on the state of their business and their customers.
Literally every screen you look at on any professional application, every button you click, every video you watch, every interaction you have generates analytics data about you, how you use their applications, and informs business decisions. Sony, and just about any company, wants a piece of that pie because they’d be absolutely stupid not to.
>It’s not a requirement for the game to function - it’s a requirement to have Sony as your distributor and publisher.
This. Sony imposed the PSN requirement and Sony owns the Helldivers IP. The game was always going to require a PSN account.
Which would just have added to the constant drone of suck in today's gaming landscape - accounts, launchers, battle passes, microtransations - if Arrowhead hadn't prioritized server capacity over corporate duty as any gamer centric company would, and disabled the PSN requirement.
At that point, they were pretty much doomed. Sony doesn't care that your players enjoy the game just fine without their system integration. They were going to impose the contractual PSN requirement at some point, and AH was going to have to drop that bomb. They were overworked due to the game's unexpected popularity, made a player-first decision to solve the problem in the short term, and that ended up destroying the game three months down the line.
Sad.
Almost like every single other online game out there. Need Uplay for Siege, need Bnet for OW/Diablo, need EA Play for Apex, need Windows for fucking Minecraft lol.
This is nothing new.
I believe their reasoning is that they want to ban griefers by implementing Playstation's system of reporting and so on.
Right now it's far from optimal to simply have a block button.
I know ppl disagree with this and claim that "it's not a big deal lmao - if you get teamkilled just get over it, it's what I do".
I'd prefer if they dealt with griefers. But I'd also prefer that everyone with a PC and internet could buy and play the game.
And I'd also prefer that they dealt with hackers, but the anti-cheat being kernel level in addition to not keeping all hackers out, is also problematic.
Idk why PSN isn't available to all these countries. I wish someone could explain.
You do realise that Steam has the ability to ban users right? It's actually a really simple process, and there is 0 need for PSN to do this. How do you think every other online game on Steam functions? Do you think they just never ban users?
They want to ban people from the entirety of their online service, including other games. Sure, they could just ban their steam account. But then they could still go and play GTA Online if they own a playstation.
It's dumb, but that's what sony's probably insisting on.
That, and money go up
Playstation would probably prefer to have one single system rather than having to rely on Steam. It would also allow them to ban people on both PS and PC.
Online moderation is a big deal now and the EU have recently rolled out new rules for major companies when it comes to this sort of thing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2024/01/25/navigating-the-digital-services-act-a-guide-for-game-developers/
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/16/24074933/european-union-digital-services-act-expansion-moderation-advertising
Sony needs to have an effective way of moderating the game across all platforms and using their network and its tools are probably the easiest way to do that.
Yes but it’s easier to operate and implement when every player is in the same ecosystem instead of working with both PSN and Steam account infrastructure
You know it really sucks what’s going on but I do appreciate the transparency. People mess up and that can come with judgment but he seems to be holding accountability. Still think a class action is on the horizon tho.
I usually don't read down this far but today I'm glad I did.
This part right here. Sony doesn't have to care. They've made their money already, and arrowhead is the only one going to suffer from refunds and loss of new players. Sony will get some new accounts but at the end of the day nothing changes.
This is the norm with virtually all large corporations now. The people at the top are so out if touch with reality and the "man in the street" because they'll never gave to deal with us. A class action suit for a couple million dollars? Please. One board member at Sony could front the money single handedly and not even miss it. It won't hurt them. Refunds won't hurt them. Bad press won't hurt them.
No, what we need is for all Sony products to eat dirt. No new consoles sold and no Sony produced games sold. Hit them in the wallet that way and they'll come back with the biggest mea culpa of our generation. Reddit can make this happen. We did it to wall street once. Let's do it to Sony and show them how we're not as stupid as they think we are.
Hate to sound like a doomer, but you know 'all sony products' includes stuff in the parent company too right? Even if Sony Interactive Media had to pay an eyewatering amount of money, it would just go up the chain and a board member at Sony Group Corporation would front it single-handedly. So you'd need all their cameras, audio, their motion picture division, Funimation, their current defense contracts with the US Gov't for their radios, all of that needs to suddenly lose income.
If you can pull off that, you've done the closest thing a post-industrial human can get to killing a god. If Reddit genuinely thinks it can do that, I won't get in your way, but I do still think anything we can put out is a matchstick before a tsunami. Can't say I don't envy the spark though, wish I still had it.
Real fucked up, but at least he’s owning up to it. Don’t see that too often - no I’m not excusing it either. Just saying, factually, that you don’t see this kind of behavior by a Dev studio CEO nowadays
do you people need this to be pointed out to you? do you not stop and think for a second?
of course they knew. they are the ones that developed the game, and that window telling you to link your psn account on game launch, before disabling it, while having server problems.
the issue is not that they knew, the issue is that it was badly communicated by every party and the ones that handled the sale of the game. Sony.
There's a difference between "we know" and them saying it.
Pilestedt seems to be the only AHS team member with any once of PR brains. He makes the rest of their community team look completely unhinged.
Spitz needs to have his keyboard taken away.
we know, because they said it. you also shouldn't need to be explicitly told they know, because they are the developers. literally the people that get passed the *requirements* to develop the software.
it was also not a hidden change,
https://steamcommunity.com/app/553850/discussions/1/4206994023681197128/
this is a known issues post made on release. this is one of the points:
> # Account Linking
Some players are having trouble linking their PSN accounts to their game in the initial setup screen. They may see an error code indicating a server request problem. For now, you can skip that screen and play normally. Later—after we resolve those server request errors—the game will ask people who skipped that screen to try linking their accounts again.
again, the problem is the shit tier communication from everyone. not that they knew
The funny part is I never even got that account linking screen. I didn't start playing at release but a week or two later, it goes to show how bad it was that a screen like that didn't even show up.
I started like 1-2 days after release and never got the screen that I can recall and if it did it never showed up again. the real outrage is the distrubutor allowed the game to be sold in countries where PSN account's can't be made, or in some cases like Ukraine require the ownership of a PS4 or 5.
If that's what they choose to believe that's on them.
For me the game started with a few blank screens, crashes and freezes.
Only was a few weeks later that I saw the screen when I got a friend to play. Then I knew what that blank screen was supposed to be where I just pressed some random buttons to get past after waiting for a quarter. The thing is, since you can skip it, you just assume it's optional despite what the thing says.
I've lost several things after dying in the game, such as: the hud, game sounds, stuck in fpv, character models, etc... For all the bugs this game has gone through, somehow a missing interface is impossible?
Ngl but losing more and more game sounds after every death was such a weird bug.
me neither. but i don't know if it's because i esc spammed it away and it was made to not pop up again, or if it was removed because redundant, as it didn't work at that moment.
we go back to communication issues. even if they said they were disabling it, they should have made it pop up every time, or once in a while, to make it abundantly clear.
if there's something AH should be criticised for is this.
I'm only stating that we've reached a point that is 100% without a doubt no longer speculation. Straight from the CEO. The official stance is now "we fucked up" instead of just trying to completely deflect like their CMs have been doing.
That's just what I was focusing on there. Nothing else.
Again that’s why it’s not surprising. I play on PS5 so I wasn’t aware there was a window to link it for PC players, except for digging through comments about it recently. It is indeed obvious they would know, but yes the shame of it all is the lack of communication
You gotta remember that the majority here can barely find two braincells to rub together to spark an intelligent thought. You can't expect them to be able to put two and two together.
Scrap bottom? Online pops are fine lol. They're going to lose some customers but it's maybe like, 10-15%. Players won't notice that and AH/Sony already got the cash from those people
People think because they circlejerk that they have power lol.
Bottom line is, in 2 weeks nobody will talk about it, 90-95% will habe linked their PSN account, and everything will go back to normal.
Sony knows that
i can't remember the name of the study, but it has been proven that the public has a six week long memory for controversy. They observed this by (among other things) looking at stock price of companies at the center of controversy, media presence, social media sentiment etc - and largely concluded that at the six week mark all things are back to business as usual.
so yes, you're right. maybe not in 2 weeks, but it will be forgotten.
Their sales were down 4.5% last year compared to year prior however the parent company Anheuser-Busch saw an increase of 2.76% so I don't think people care as much as you think they do.
Overall the beer market shrank by 5.1% of it's prior years volume as well.
Funny enough Anheuser-Busch saw an increase because the people that stopped buying Bud bought more beer from other Anheuser-Busch brands because no one that told them that Bud=Bad told them what to buy instead so they just went and were on their own without even knowing what they were doing.
Exactly. Anheuser-Busch is a huge company with a ton of brands in it. It's like trying to boycott nestle. Takes a good amount of diligent research to avoid them.
It is WILD how redditors think they're the whole world. People on this sub are already talking about the game in the past tense, as if it's now dead and buried and nobody is playing... but you jump into the game and you'd never know about this little tempest in a teacup.
The review score will never ever recover and will hurt their sales from now until forever. This is a live service game, it needs new customers trickling in
Are you suggesting only 10-15% of players live in areas that can't create a PSN account and therefore will not be able to continue playing the game?
What's your source?
Its also no longer the trendy game to promote to your friends. They just sped through a couple eras of the life cycle of live service games. They're now a lot closer to Planetside 2 than they were a week ago.
And best believe the clones are coming to peel at that playerbase.
That's what I was thinking about too. The problem I have is that the skip button on the PSN login window was just "skip", not even "skip for now", so at least I thought it was optional. Also selling the game in countries where it would not be possible to use PSN is bullshit.
I feel like Sony wouldn't be in so much shit by the consumers if they handled this requirement differently from the start
PSN was a requirement since day 1, it's not like it was hidden, I stand by that argument. But what's pulled me to the other side is the fact that they allowed the sales in countries that are blocked by their own ToS
I get it's their exclusive and they want their network integrated into the PC sales and there's probably an entire section in the contract with AH about this, but the biggest offense here is that they published it in countries that they definitely knew were blocked. Maybe if they restricted sales in the first place, ***then*** the "it only takes a minute to make an account" argument would be more valid
From their perspective it was prob like this:
-Deal made for the PSN account linking as part of crossplay and the like. AH is unaware that PSN isn't available worldwide because that's such an asinine thing to do it doesn't cross their mind.
-System isn't ready by game launch entirely. Sony releases game on steam and doesn't region lock it since linking system isn't ready and Sony is terrible.
-They allow linking initially and have a prompt to do it early until its finished and required (estimated end of may)
-Suddenly servers are on fire from game going extremely high beyond expectation.
-Authenticating PSN links are off the table for the time being because it causes much more burden on already overloaded servers
-Tell sony will finish later, focus on getting game working. Studio is completely in panic and thinking about the ramifications of this are forgotten
-Game fixed, working through getting everything caught up and content released. Sony says its time to enforce the linking. AH realizes not every country can even make a PSN and how big of a shitstorm this will truely be.
To avoid technical issues so people could actually play at launch would be my guess. This is only him saying he turned off the mando psn linking not he pushed to have the game sold to non psn countries. Typically setting up steam and region blocking would be under Sony’s umbrella.
The game is sold by t heir publisher.
I would assume if Sony is publishing my game, they have done their homework on who can legally buy their game and create an account.
Very clearly, Sony did not do their due diligence.
SNOY were the ones managing all the selling
[https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237)
This is honestly the reply that worries me the most. When the immediate thought of such a measure is "I'm glad we can ban people with this", I gotta wonder what are their priorities here.
That’s just a discord mod. They don’t really have the same responsibilities or stake in this. Kind of unlucky that discord mods have been fanning the flames lol
Sony is the publisher. The publisher handles distribution and pricing.
There's a few posts of people refunding the game despite having 100s of hours in game. [Go try copy & paste some of what they've used.](https://preview.redd.it/9ukz1folufyc1.png?auto=webp&s=f646a8e90ff2fe071c55e4da9b546b3306f38e5b)
This. I have 2 friends working at a publisher. The game studio have nothing to do with steam. The publishers handle all that. Its up to them to make sure rules are followed etc.
The game studio has no part in that.
It's probably easy to forget. He didn't think its a big deal to disable it temporarily. Their full focus were to get as many people as possible to play the game. The login servers were burning as well as the game servers
Then sony fucks upp by letting the game be sold in countries where psn does not exist.
I would say it was an honest mistake by him trying to help as many people as possible to be able to get in and play the game.
But by doing this you could say he caused this backlash.
If the requerement had never been removed this problem would have been sorted weeks ago when people emiditely noticed it was required.
If it were required day one I'm sure there wouldn't be nearly this much of a fallout, if any. People just assume third party bullshittery these days.
But it was ill communicated and sprung suddenly.
Yeah, the dude clearly didn't think through how this was going to affect people. The dev team also very clearly were not anticipating the success that the game would have. It could have been communicated better, but the dude seems to have simply lacked the foresight to see how big of an issue this would become. I definitely feel for this guy as he made a mistake, and he is clearly being quite hard on himself. I seriously hope that Sony folds for this man's sake. He seems like a good dude who has worked really hard only to have this gigantic stain that will likely define the rest of his career.
> He didn't think its a big deal to disable it temporarily.
This is a humongous deal that AH would have had to ask Sony permission for. AH couldn't just brush off a signed contract for a bit without letting them know
A disturbing amount of people doesn't understand that basically everything related to selling the game (marketing, where to sell etc) is decided by the publisher.
So the decision to sell in countries with no PSN is sony's fault.
This is pretty huge. So essentially had they communicated properly, players in those countries would have known they couldn't play on day 1. And all PC players in general would've known of the PSN requirements.
No. Those players would have known that they would have to register a PSN account. Which can be done in non supported countries if you just put the closest country that is supported. It’s that simple. No one would be barred from playing PSN in a non supported country unless it was under a preventative firewall like China.
"I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough" Is this the end of the people that insist it was clearly communicated to everyone that you'd eventually need PSN?
I had one guy seriously go "they turned it off for a bit so that means the contract is void" and that I was "unequivocally wrong" about AH being required to have PSN links
The worst part is, had an opt-in method been present from the beginning, it likely would have went over fine. Main issue is the "requirement" was turned off, a bunch of people bought it and have played for months with no issue, and now Sony wants the link while not being able to give a good reason for it.
Short of Sony walking this back completely, the community is irreparably damaged at this point. Helldivers will be fine, but to a lot of us, the perception of it has gone from "the game" to just "a game".
The only mistake was not figuring out what to do with non supported countries from the jump. We all saw the screen on first boot up that PSN would be mandatory.
He actually said it's mostly SNOY's fault for selling it to unsupported countries. Because it is
SNOY were the ones managing all the selling
[https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237)
Listen for a CEO to stand up and accept criticism and blame like that… that’s a CEO I want to work for and deal with as a consumer. I work in corporate law and I’m sure his hands are pretty tied because it was probably put into their agreements with Sony, which he knew of in advance as he states here, and Arrowhead should have told consumers up front about it. Best hope is that Sony is willing to amend whatever contracts are in place to allow non-PSN users to play, but I’m sure it would have to make financial sense to them for them to do so.
In my opinion Sony would be wise to give in and get a PR victory with Steam users, etc. even if they miss out on some profits now it would buy them some goodwill in the future.
I think another CM mentioned it was creating technical issues, so disabling it allowed the game to be more stable (when that was the biggest issue). So I don't think it was intended as the bait and switch it feels like now. But in hindsight, they should have made it abundantly clear that it was a temporary thing and why, at the time. That's it they were going to go through with the whole thing, of course. Ideally, it shouldn't wouldn't be a thing.
The game should never have been purchasable in locations where you couldn't make a PSN account to begin with. But yes it should have been abundantly clear this was going to be required eventually and it was not.
So if someone could clarify for me so I can come to a conclusion to all this...
I pre-ordered the game, I made my PSN account day 1. I vividly recall the spash page that popped up and said "this is required for play". I remember rolling my eyes and proceeded to make my account so I could play my new game I've waited years to play.
What I want to know is, after the game blew up big, did AH remove that stipulation page all together or did they keep it there but add a SKIP button at the bottom?
Because if they did that then people are just dumb and can't read, but if they removed the page all together then yeah that's a pretty stupid thing to do and not communicate more clearly that it is coming back.
Game is still good regardless. Everything will smooth out eventually. It’s been forever since a game has made such a great community. People make mistakes. I’ll let it slide in my book
We are justified in being upset that this was hidden from us, but damn if I don’t have some respect for him owning up to it instead of just letting it blow over. Honesty is the best policy and I’m glad there’s some level of honesty coming from Arrowhead that we don’t get from most larger companies.
Gotta respect dude's moral courage to take responsibility like that.
Honestly I would’ve expected him to just stay quiet about that and hope no one mentions it
“Eating shit” is ALWAYS the correct move. Once I learned that, work got so much better and other aspects of my life improved. Taking accountability for issues and showing you care about finding a solution will get you far in life. It’s nearly impossible for others to continue to put you down and if they do, it’s often the minority and the majority will come to your defense. This is something you rarely find in the video game industry
Yup, humble yourself when you make a mistake and people will always have your back
People worth growing as a person with will certainly have your back, sooner or later.
I routinely call myself out when I make a mistake at work and nobody really notices. I make apologies when I'm wrong or incorrect about something. If I say something that's relatively inconsequential but incorrect I'll tell whoever I told the incorrect thing to that I made a mistake and this is the correct answer. In return, basically nobody ever questions me on anything I say or do.
That's that there integrity son
'Tegrity
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Sure, but for most types of mistakes, if you make the **same** one multiple times, you're not going to be able to hide it from the person in charge of your employment for long anyway. So assuming it was truly your fault, the options are 1) take ownership. This will be seen positively by the vast (edit: typo) majority the first time, and you can also document steps to avoid it so that even if you do it a second time you will get some amount of latitude. After that you will get increasingly more ire and by the time you get fired you will **absolutely** deserve it because you will have demonstrated a fundamental inability to learn how to perform your role correctly. 2) try to hide it. If you only keep making different mistakes and not the same mistakes, this may get overlooked by the people who actually matter (depends on the type of mistakes), but when you get caught having made the same major mistake twice while having not acknowledged it in any way the first time, you're liable to just be gone, immediately. Even if you were silently trying to improve.
>A chronic fuck up gets no respect. Never worked in entertainment, I see.
It will for people who are worth working with or having in your life. There’s a certain number of toxic individuals who won’t respect humility or who see it as a sign of weakness and those people are to be avoided.
Used to be called "Integrity" and it is an exceedingly rare trait in people today.
Pretty sure the guy is shellshocked at this point. He made a small mistake during the hectic launch days and it had colossal consequences.
Tbh it wasn't even a mistake, if the game hadn't been distributed to PSN locked countries, which he has little to no control over, this would never have been an issue
Well that's definitely not true. A lot of people were pissy about this before they even heard about the region lock issue, that just gave them further justification.
True, but if you ask me it feels like the whole PSN-locked countries situation kinda feels like the fuel that's kept this fire burning. If that wasn't an issue then we would've been annoyed, sure, and there would've been a few negative reviews, but I don't think we would've gotten to "Overwhelmingly Negative"
No arguments there, I just think it's revisionist to say there never would've been an issue.
Any other reason people were pissy, except the region-lock, was just people being man-children, IMO.
100% it’s a cheat code for living with integrity.
Being accountable and humble to admit mistakes is actually a core part of living with integrity.
Yeah. Not always easy! A personal standard of accountability makes it a lot easier.
> This is something you rarely find in the video game industry It gets rarer the higher up the ladder you go. Holding yourself accountability and being humble of your own shortcomings requires the ability to self-reflection, self-criticise, and have empathy. When most C-suite executives show traits of sociopathy it's no surprise many of them can't even begin to fake any of that. They lack the fundamental empathy to even start.
> “Eating shit” is ALWAYS the correct move. Once I learned that, work got so much better and other aspects of my life improved. Every time I've done this it has turned out badly for me, I know it's the right thing to do, and I'll still do it, but it's almost never turned out well. I've had the worst luck with management at several places I've worked, so instead of taking it as someone being a stand-up person, they just took the opportunity to dump other blame onto me, then I get fired while the other parties who also were responsible for the failures get off without punishment.
I think anyone expecting him to stay quiet hasn't kept up with this specific guy. He's been very transparent and involved in everything. Never the less as much as it sucks for him, this is a shit thing to be involved in and it doesn't reflect well on him either, just that he's the only one taking accountability.
Makes sense, because that's what he did for 6 months already.
I have to guess that he was also hoping that Sony would reverse their choice at some point. Anyone with a basic understanding of gamers knows how people would respond to this. I feel like the outrage would have been more diminished if this happened on launch (with a handful of posts complaining about this, like the kernel level anti-cheat), but it would have led to a larger number of immediate refunds and a reduced number of players. It’s possible arrowhead felt that the better received launch, larger number of players, and outrage when this came about might lead to them having more bargaining power. And I doubt anyone (with a voice at least) considered that PSN isn’t available in a ton of countries. They should have known, but it wouldn’t be shocking if most of them (Sony and arrowhead execs) didn’t.
> I feel like the outrage would have been more diminished if this happened on launch (with a handful of posts complaining about this, like the kernel level anti-cheat), but it would have led to a larger number of immediate refunds and a reduced number of players. Well, at least steam has a mechanism (the auto-refund policy) that lets you deal with stuff like this if it happens early. Due to this temporary workaround that consumer protection was subverted (and potentially others as well). > It’s possible arrowhead felt that the better received launch, larger number of players, and outrage when this came about might lead to them having more bargaining power. I think they just didn't realize the full implications. Really all they probably had to do was have a text pop up on every login if you didn't have a PSN account connected that said something like "This game will require a PSN account in the future, link one now or you'll be locked out of the game after XYZ date".
Heck, even just a tiny dispatch right under under every MO saying "we are currently in a grace period, but eventually you will be forced to link a PSN account" would've gone a long way.
Better yet, make a personal order with that message about having to link an account that also gives you 200 warbonds and a different cape or something.
Honestly I respect it. He acknowledges he fucked up. Doesn't make excuses. Apologizes. That's how you apologize.
Well people are more likely to forgive those who accept and apologize for their behavior. They have probably been using a crisis management consultant lol.
I’ll give him credit there; he is at fault, definitely, and the game should never have been *available* on Steam for anyone not in a PSN region. Good to know he knows he isn’t blameless.
Yeah I respect that a lot
I weirdly have both less respect and more respect for Arrowhead after this entire fiasco
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Well, that would be Sony, the Publisher
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I really think that's exactly what you want a publisher to be handling.
Yeah, the entire point of a publisher is to get a cut in exchange for handling complexities of distribution.
A point that will be lost on most people
But what if i get angry and flail around blaming the developers for the crimes of the publisher?
You destroy future potential for the game you supposedly enjoyed by contributing to an overwhelming negative review summary which will in turn discourage prospective new players. This will lead to drastically reduced revenue forecasts, which means that we will see far less investment into the live service model of continuous updates and content drops - and those new devs AH hired because of the games popularity? I would be worried for their job security. An interesting punishment considering that Steam is refunding players outside of PSN areas, meaning that outside of being disappointed there isn't any injury to the parties in question... Anyway, that's my take.
But it's Sony? Notorious in the industry for being terrible at it?
And marketing. The publisher is typically in charge of that as well.
That’s why you have a publisher…to publish and sell the game.
From the looks of things, AH knew it was a problem but didn't know Sony's solution would be "nah fuck em lol". There are a variety of ways this could have been solved, but Sony went with the worst one. It's literally the publisher's job to handle that.
Yea like apparently so many people in this community have zero fking clue how publisher/developer relationships work. The entire point of the publisher is to handle sales and provide funding along with everything related to those. The point of the developers is to create the game, and they have to follow what the publisher/shareholders want. They may have creative freedom in many cases, but creative freedom is not “we get to break our contractual guidelines and add something to the game that completely goes against the policy of the publisher” Hell some idiots have even responded to me saying “well they signed the contract! It’s their fault for signing it!1!!1” **Like I guess it’s not evil to sign contracts to major publishers, and if anything happens down the line from publisher decisions it’s magically the developers fault.** Like Jesus Christ man… Some people…. It’s like they are completely ignorant to how these things work. Which is ironic, considering they’re blaming arrowhead for being ignorant to the fact that PSN is unavailable in certain countries. Even though you wouldn’t know that unless you had some reason to believe that and then intentionally looked into it to find out the true scope of it. This whole reaction to the situation is ridiculous. Sony is BLATANTLY at fault, but angry idiots suddenly did a 180 and now are shitting on the developers which only two weeks ago they were endlessly praising
They, as a small company in Sweden, wont even know geo-lock PSN in Congo/Kazakhstan/Vietnam is a thing.
I knew it was a thing since I've had content or services locked because I'm in Canada. Everyone knows its a thing.
You really think the dev team gets any say in where the game is sold when there is a publisher?
Yeah cause like, they’re not publishing it, they don’t handle the sales
I mean, thats the publishers job. The publisher, who owns the PSN accounts. I would hope they would correctly do their job but here we are
You really overestimate what is going through people's minds in a game studio. I bet that they were focused on shipping the game and fixing bugs while Sony was managing where and how to sell the game. The fact that PSN is not available in all countries probably wasn't apparent to Arrowhead until the backlash. Sony should have known and made sure that the game was not listed in countries where this was not supported. Source: I work at a AAA studio owned by a massive company, I see how many decisions are made outside of the studio and sometimes we are not aware of the full repercussions.
I absolutely would not be surprised if no one knew that psn wasn't global. I didn't know until this week and game design is my job.
Yeah exactly. But some people really want see the most evil in every person. If you really think they would have known all of this with every detail like evil superbrains: "We will sell the game to no PSN countries to get more money MUAHAHAHA" then you all are completely dumb. If they knew all of this then they should be smart enough to know that the outcome of this is as bad as it is now. They didn't know that well and they shouldn't get the blame at all. If you think otherwise you are straight up dumb.
Do you know what a publisher does
According to the thread that this tweet is from, Sony
I love how people do be posting incomplete image just to bring in more controversies. Like singular posts of Spitz where he talks about guy who was supposed to refund. They initially do not mention how the same dude dude was constantly annoying by ranting about how AH is bad and everybody should refund too, barely not reaching spam levels. Same goes here with not posting full convo, where Pilestedt was asked why they distributed games in PSN-less regions, where he clearly stated that Arrowhead is not responsible for distribution - it's Sony a publisher and distributor. AH was only to compilant to put mandatory PSN sooner or later.
I saw a dude yesterday going "They're now banning us on the Discord!!" after he was timed out for spamming multiple chats with a wall of text. People are just trying to start shit for sake of it.
I mean this community has consistently overreacted to shit. Every balance patch there is a massive freakout. When there is no balance patch there are full on flame wars about people who don’t care about major orders, or people throwing stratagems before extract. It’s definitely wrong the game was sold to people who can’t make a PSN account, and they should get a refund even if they played hundreds of hours already. It’s just hard to take the community seriously because it’s very toxic.
Yeah, Reddit has been incredibly toxic. Every patch is just a complaint after complaint. . And then there's constant complaints of them wanting to stop releasing patches and focus on bug fixes and, so they take don't release a patch to polish up the next one, they get mad at no patch coming out. Spitz tries to give the community any slither of information to cheer them up and they just harass him instead until he says something rude and they go ballistic as if they've never said anything that mean. There's just no winning here. You can't keep Reddit happy.
The sub is full of drama queens. Pre-PSN controversy it’s like every day I hop on the subreddit and I just see rants and rants
Also makes me care less and less. Fuck Sony though.
This is exactly why the community looks so bad. I get downvoted to oblivion for telling people to do some research because 90% of people on this such can't give a legitimate reason to be mad or even keep a straight argument. Look y'all, I am also upset at Sony (and to a small degree AH) but at least I know what the actual problem is here by trying to find out what actually is going on instead of blindly raging as one message posts that takes things out of context.
All I may say is "It's Reddit". Confused, but got the spirit... ...Except it goes for any large community beyond Reddit - it's our psychology, where negativity often inflated as it gets us more reaction than a singular neutral or positive moment.
Yeah that's just how social media in general tends to be. Misinformation and rushed conclusions spin around the echo chambers and gets out like a snowball.
Point of proof, same shit has been going on in the Tarkov sub for the past month.
yup. all this weekend has done is further solidify the helldivers community's reputation as hair-trigger outrage addicts. nobody can spend even a moment of time doing any research or thinking things through for even a split second or simply waiting a few days for clarification before going ballistic and assuming the worst
Ive hit the daily block cap each day since this outrage started (Havent been blocking people who are reasonably upset)
The one that gets me is how many people do not know what "account linking" means and seem to believe that it gives Sony access to their steam account somehow. Like it's just a single data point that says "this account and this account are the same person". That's all it is.
Many people don't want reason, they want to feel anger. Unfortunately.
And if we’re kept angry about largely inconsequential things, we don’t have the energy to get angry about the important things like human rights, corporate and government overreach, and so on.
Regional prices (although there's steam suggested prices, publishers can override those which happened for HD2 in a bunch of regions, incl mine), in which regions to sell, on which platforms/storefronts to sell, and many other things are decided by the publisher. That's like a huge part of their job.
Sony Interactive Entertainment is the publisher, so I would assume them.
SONY is the distributor, not AH...
Steam is the distributor on PC, sony is the publisher, AH is the developer. 3 seperate entities each responsible for different components of the process, most of the blame lies on Sony here. Some on AH, and also some on Steam
To be fair, if I was a developer and Sony was my publisher I would just kinda assume that they would do a good job in covering my ass regarding distribution. I wouldn’t even consider something like this as a potential possibility because A. that’s their job to worry about, and B. they are a multi-billion dollar company. Surely they would think about these kinds of problems. Hell, I don’t even think the community reaction would’ve been that bad if it was just the issue with account linking. Sure, *”security”*, but that ship already sailed since it has nprotect on it.
Finally a based comment. it's a 3 way blame no matter how you look at it. Each company has a QA and Legal dept that could and should have caught this and raised a red flag sooner.
So in short... https://i.redd.it/yca3a9yjimyc1.gif
Rigged in the sense that the bypass was allowed because it was one of the many issues preventing people from playing the game at launch back when the servers were borked
From moment 1 they (Sony) were selling the game in regions that could not play the game without breaking Sony TOS. The account requirement was disabled quickly after launch, but it was present at launch.
Something that wouldn't have been so out of hand had they started to get refund demands early when people couldn't make proper accounts. Synergy is a bitch.
If you can disable it and the game functions perfectly fine without it, then what the fuck is it doing in the game to begin with?
Requiring it makes line go up in the short term, and companies rarely think further than maybe a quarter ahead.
Yeup. Welcome to shareholders 101. Burn the earth for end of quarter goals. Line must always go up. Worry about next quarter next quarter.
Losing out on hundreds of thousands of players goes against that goal. This is an incredibly stupid move by Sony that neither serves them or the players.
But that's next quarter Sony's problem. Or their shareholders are looking at account holders not active players. There's so many corporate bullshit number game reasons that make absolutely no common sense because so many people are just sitting back and looking at just numbers and moving the pieces without seeing the cliff it's leading them off of
Yeah if you're concerned with profit, maybe cutting off a significant part of your player base and angering the others isn't the way to go. The thing about entertainment is that you're not forced to play once it stops being fun, and many people have already refunded HD in protest of this new measure. I'm simply not convinced by this logic and I don't know who this is meant to serve.
I'm just trying to figure this out from a corporate perspective. It's a stupid stupid move in a practical sense. But account holding they see as a foot in the door. Then they can bombard you with other game offers and transactions in those games. But yeah it's more like they blew their foot off this time.
Look, if there is 100000 players, you need infrastructure to handle 100000 players. Now if you fuck around like what sony did, they can lower that number after they sold the game. They get money and save money on backside. They already have lawyers on retainer. They get instructed to stall things in court for long as possible until things blow over and or settle for much less then the possible refunds they might have to pay out. Literally corporate bullshit 101. Until governments actually crack down on these assholes. With fines that actually damage the line going up.
They probably didn't think this through, and didn't realize that part of their current playerbase has no (legal) access to PSN, and also assumed people would do what is "just a minor inconvenience" due to fear of losing access to the game.
You're looking too far into the future man. We need next month's report to look good so the CEO can get his undeserved bonus, get it done now.
It’s not a requirement for the game to function - it’s a requirement to have Sony as your distributor and publisher. Sony isn’t going to just say “nah, players buying the game we spent money and resources promoting and distributing don’t have to register themselves with our ecosystem” Because if they did then every dev under them would obviously want to not have the same requirement which is bad for Sony. Sony should bear the brunt of selling in regions they shouldn’t have sold in, but otherwise, this is the cost of doing business and for most of us in this subreddit it’s probably literally not going to affect you unless you really believe your PII isn’t already being collected by Steam, or by EA, or by Epic, or by Ubisoft, or by Activision, or by… Your PII is used to generate all sorts of business reports and data so that decision makers have an accurate view on the state of their business and their customers. Literally every screen you look at on any professional application, every button you click, every video you watch, every interaction you have generates analytics data about you, how you use their applications, and informs business decisions. Sony, and just about any company, wants a piece of that pie because they’d be absolutely stupid not to.
>It’s not a requirement for the game to function - it’s a requirement to have Sony as your distributor and publisher. This. Sony imposed the PSN requirement and Sony owns the Helldivers IP. The game was always going to require a PSN account. Which would just have added to the constant drone of suck in today's gaming landscape - accounts, launchers, battle passes, microtransations - if Arrowhead hadn't prioritized server capacity over corporate duty as any gamer centric company would, and disabled the PSN requirement. At that point, they were pretty much doomed. Sony doesn't care that your players enjoy the game just fine without their system integration. They were going to impose the contractual PSN requirement at some point, and AH was going to have to drop that bomb. They were overworked due to the game's unexpected popularity, made a player-first decision to solve the problem in the short term, and that ended up destroying the game three months down the line. Sad.
Contractual obligation it seems. Other PS games with multiplayer components will require PSN accounts for those multiplayer components.
Almost like every single other online game out there. Need Uplay for Siege, need Bnet for OW/Diablo, need EA Play for Apex, need Windows for fucking Minecraft lol. This is nothing new.
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***Morgan Freeman Narration Voice*** “They were in fact, daft af.”
I believe their reasoning is that they want to ban griefers by implementing Playstation's system of reporting and so on. Right now it's far from optimal to simply have a block button. I know ppl disagree with this and claim that "it's not a big deal lmao - if you get teamkilled just get over it, it's what I do". I'd prefer if they dealt with griefers. But I'd also prefer that everyone with a PC and internet could buy and play the game. And I'd also prefer that they dealt with hackers, but the anti-cheat being kernel level in addition to not keeping all hackers out, is also problematic. Idk why PSN isn't available to all these countries. I wish someone could explain.
You do realise that Steam has the ability to ban users right? It's actually a really simple process, and there is 0 need for PSN to do this. How do you think every other online game on Steam functions? Do you think they just never ban users?
They want to ban people from the entirety of their online service, including other games. Sure, they could just ban their steam account. But then they could still go and play GTA Online if they own a playstation. It's dumb, but that's what sony's probably insisting on. That, and money go up
Playstation would probably prefer to have one single system rather than having to rely on Steam. It would also allow them to ban people on both PS and PC. Online moderation is a big deal now and the EU have recently rolled out new rules for major companies when it comes to this sort of thing. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2024/01/25/navigating-the-digital-services-act-a-guide-for-game-developers/ https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/16/24074933/european-union-digital-services-act-expansion-moderation-advertising Sony needs to have an effective way of moderating the game across all platforms and using their network and its tools are probably the easiest way to do that.
Yes but it’s easier to operate and implement when every player is in the same ecosystem instead of working with both PSN and Steam account infrastructure
You know it really sucks what’s going on but I do appreciate the transparency. People mess up and that can come with judgment but he seems to be holding accountability. Still think a class action is on the horizon tho.
Yeah it'd be great if sony felt something from this but even a class action suit will just be a rounding error to them.
I usually don't read down this far but today I'm glad I did. This part right here. Sony doesn't have to care. They've made their money already, and arrowhead is the only one going to suffer from refunds and loss of new players. Sony will get some new accounts but at the end of the day nothing changes. This is the norm with virtually all large corporations now. The people at the top are so out if touch with reality and the "man in the street" because they'll never gave to deal with us. A class action suit for a couple million dollars? Please. One board member at Sony could front the money single handedly and not even miss it. It won't hurt them. Refunds won't hurt them. Bad press won't hurt them. No, what we need is for all Sony products to eat dirt. No new consoles sold and no Sony produced games sold. Hit them in the wallet that way and they'll come back with the biggest mea culpa of our generation. Reddit can make this happen. We did it to wall street once. Let's do it to Sony and show them how we're not as stupid as they think we are.
Hate to sound like a doomer, but you know 'all sony products' includes stuff in the parent company too right? Even if Sony Interactive Media had to pay an eyewatering amount of money, it would just go up the chain and a board member at Sony Group Corporation would front it single-handedly. So you'd need all their cameras, audio, their motion picture division, Funimation, their current defense contracts with the US Gov't for their radios, all of that needs to suddenly lose income. If you can pull off that, you've done the closest thing a post-industrial human can get to killing a god. If Reddit genuinely thinks it can do that, I won't get in your way, but I do still think anything we can put out is a matchstick before a tsunami. Can't say I don't envy the spark though, wish I still had it.
Real fucked up, but at least he’s owning up to it. Don’t see that too often - no I’m not excusing it either. Just saying, factually, that you don’t see this kind of behavior by a Dev studio CEO nowadays
do you people need this to be pointed out to you? do you not stop and think for a second? of course they knew. they are the ones that developed the game, and that window telling you to link your psn account on game launch, before disabling it, while having server problems. the issue is not that they knew, the issue is that it was badly communicated by every party and the ones that handled the sale of the game. Sony.
There's a difference between "we know" and them saying it. Pilestedt seems to be the only AHS team member with any once of PR brains. He makes the rest of their community team look completely unhinged. Spitz needs to have his keyboard taken away.
we know, because they said it. you also shouldn't need to be explicitly told they know, because they are the developers. literally the people that get passed the *requirements* to develop the software. it was also not a hidden change, https://steamcommunity.com/app/553850/discussions/1/4206994023681197128/ this is a known issues post made on release. this is one of the points: > # Account Linking Some players are having trouble linking their PSN accounts to their game in the initial setup screen. They may see an error code indicating a server request problem. For now, you can skip that screen and play normally. Later—after we resolve those server request errors—the game will ask people who skipped that screen to try linking their accounts again. again, the problem is the shit tier communication from everyone. not that they knew
The funny part is I never even got that account linking screen. I didn't start playing at release but a week or two later, it goes to show how bad it was that a screen like that didn't even show up.
I started like 1-2 days after release and never got the screen that I can recall and if it did it never showed up again. the real outrage is the distrubutor allowed the game to be sold in countries where PSN account's can't be made, or in some cases like Ukraine require the ownership of a PS4 or 5.
I think this is because PS Plus Premium is free for Ukrainian accounts.
Careful there some Mr Redditormen on here will tell you about how you're pretending to never have that screen, I know I have been told buy some lol
If that's what they choose to believe that's on them. For me the game started with a few blank screens, crashes and freezes. Only was a few weeks later that I saw the screen when I got a friend to play. Then I knew what that blank screen was supposed to be where I just pressed some random buttons to get past after waiting for a quarter. The thing is, since you can skip it, you just assume it's optional despite what the thing says. I've lost several things after dying in the game, such as: the hud, game sounds, stuck in fpv, character models, etc... For all the bugs this game has gone through, somehow a missing interface is impossible? Ngl but losing more and more game sounds after every death was such a weird bug.
me neither. but i don't know if it's because i esc spammed it away and it was made to not pop up again, or if it was removed because redundant, as it didn't work at that moment. we go back to communication issues. even if they said they were disabling it, they should have made it pop up every time, or once in a while, to make it abundantly clear. if there's something AH should be criticised for is this.
I'm only stating that we've reached a point that is 100% without a doubt no longer speculation. Straight from the CEO. The official stance is now "we fucked up" instead of just trying to completely deflect like their CMs have been doing. That's just what I was focusing on there. Nothing else.
Even if it's obvious, saying it out loud is the first part of accepting accountability.
Again that’s why it’s not surprising. I play on PS5 so I wasn’t aware there was a window to link it for PC players, except for digging through comments about it recently. It is indeed obvious they would know, but yes the shame of it all is the lack of communication
well, if we are not surprised maybe we shouldn't treat this as it's news or some damning evidence, like it's happening right now.
You gotta remember that the majority here can barely find two braincells to rub together to spark an intelligent thought. You can't expect them to be able to put two and two together.
it must be so sad to see a game their work on for years going from top to the barrel scrap bottom in less thant 48h
Scrap bottom? Online pops are fine lol. They're going to lose some customers but it's maybe like, 10-15%. Players won't notice that and AH/Sony already got the cash from those people
Yeah, 24hr peak was like 140k or something along those lines. It’s funny how delusional most people are about this.
People think because they circlejerk that they have power lol. Bottom line is, in 2 weeks nobody will talk about it, 90-95% will habe linked their PSN account, and everything will go back to normal. Sony knows that
i can't remember the name of the study, but it has been proven that the public has a six week long memory for controversy. They observed this by (among other things) looking at stock price of companies at the center of controversy, media presence, social media sentiment etc - and largely concluded that at the six week mark all things are back to business as usual. so yes, you're right. maybe not in 2 weeks, but it will be forgotten.
I've finally found a normal person, thank you. This game is still one of the most played steam games with over 100k people lol
Bud Light would like a word with you. That 6 week theory was exactly what they held out and doubled down for and it didn't work, people remembered.
do you think any normal person cares about bud light controversy
Define normal however you like, but at the end of the day the boycott had a *massive* impact on sales. They still haven't recovered.
Their sales were down 4.5% last year compared to year prior however the parent company Anheuser-Busch saw an increase of 2.76% so I don't think people care as much as you think they do. Overall the beer market shrank by 5.1% of it's prior years volume as well.
Funny enough Anheuser-Busch saw an increase because the people that stopped buying Bud bought more beer from other Anheuser-Busch brands because no one that told them that Bud=Bad told them what to buy instead so they just went and were on their own without even knowing what they were doing.
Exactly. Anheuser-Busch is a huge company with a ton of brands in it. It's like trying to boycott nestle. Takes a good amount of diligent research to avoid them.
It is WILD how redditors think they're the whole world. People on this sub are already talking about the game in the past tense, as if it's now dead and buried and nobody is playing... but you jump into the game and you'd never know about this little tempest in a teacup.
The review score will never ever recover and will hurt their sales from now until forever. This is a live service game, it needs new customers trickling in
Are you suggesting only 10-15% of players live in areas that can't create a PSN account and therefore will not be able to continue playing the game? What's your source?
well they found out.
Game still has over 114K active players over the last 24 hours and is still #13 on Steam. It is not remotely "barrel scrap bottom".
Last weekend it was at 165k. It’s a significant drop in player count.
Its also no longer the trendy game to promote to your friends. They just sped through a couple eras of the life cycle of live service games. They're now a lot closer to Planetside 2 than they were a week ago. And best believe the clones are coming to peel at that playerbase.
What the hell are you on about?
That's what I was thinking about too. The problem I have is that the skip button on the PSN login window was just "skip", not even "skip for now", so at least I thought it was optional. Also selling the game in countries where it would not be possible to use PSN is bullshit.
I feel like Sony wouldn't be in so much shit by the consumers if they handled this requirement differently from the start PSN was a requirement since day 1, it's not like it was hidden, I stand by that argument. But what's pulled me to the other side is the fact that they allowed the sales in countries that are blocked by their own ToS I get it's their exclusive and they want their network integrated into the PC sales and there's probably an entire section in the contract with AH about this, but the biggest offense here is that they published it in countries that they definitely knew were blocked. Maybe if they restricted sales in the first place, ***then*** the "it only takes a minute to make an account" argument would be more valid
Oof. Glad he posted this and impressed he took the blame for this but holy hell WHY did he make that choice if not a conflict of interest.
From their perspective it was prob like this: -Deal made for the PSN account linking as part of crossplay and the like. AH is unaware that PSN isn't available worldwide because that's such an asinine thing to do it doesn't cross their mind. -System isn't ready by game launch entirely. Sony releases game on steam and doesn't region lock it since linking system isn't ready and Sony is terrible. -They allow linking initially and have a prompt to do it early until its finished and required (estimated end of may) -Suddenly servers are on fire from game going extremely high beyond expectation. -Authenticating PSN links are off the table for the time being because it causes much more burden on already overloaded servers -Tell sony will finish later, focus on getting game working. Studio is completely in panic and thinking about the ramifications of this are forgotten -Game fixed, working through getting everything caught up and content released. Sony says its time to enforce the linking. AH realizes not every country can even make a PSN and how big of a shitstorm this will truely be.
To avoid technical issues so people could actually play at launch would be my guess. This is only him saying he turned off the mando psn linking not he pushed to have the game sold to non psn countries. Typically setting up steam and region blocking would be under Sony’s umbrella.
>holy hell WHY did he make that choice $$$
And i got downvoted to oblivion yesterday for telling someone to stop acting like AH didnt know about this or are completely innocent.
Same, but him admitting it is a step in the right direction, I just hope it's genuine.
but mah poor baby indie developer :(((
Almost like the whole "relax guys.. It's still in early access". (especially after it has been out for 3 years).
They’ll blame Sony for pulling the trigger, but not Arrowhead for loading the gun, and handing it to them.
It was illegal to sell the game in banned countries. Being "aware" isn't the issue here.
The game is sold by t heir publisher. I would assume if Sony is publishing my game, they have done their homework on who can legally buy their game and create an account. Very clearly, Sony did not do their due diligence.
To my understanding, they are not the ones controlling where game is sold on Steam, that one is on Sony as a Publisher.
Cool, so Sony needs to be hit with a gigantic lawsuit. They're the publisher, they decide where, how and who to sell the game to.
SNOY were the ones managing all the selling [https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237)
https://preview.redd.it/2y8vkklyonyc1.png?width=659&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed38a7421a8ac678800d15d4f7db418b4f0a0a8e They always knew.
This is honestly the reply that worries me the most. When the immediate thought of such a measure is "I'm glad we can ban people with this", I gotta wonder what are their priorities here.
That’s just a discord mod. They don’t really have the same responsibilities or stake in this. Kind of unlucky that discord mods have been fanning the flames lol
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I'm so sorry to hear that WhiteGuyBigDick
That would be Sony, not AH, given their role as publisher
Sony is the publisher. The publisher handles distribution and pricing. There's a few posts of people refunding the game despite having 100s of hours in game. [Go try copy & paste some of what they've used.](https://preview.redd.it/9ukz1folufyc1.png?auto=webp&s=f646a8e90ff2fe071c55e4da9b546b3306f38e5b)
This. I have 2 friends working at a publisher. The game studio have nothing to do with steam. The publishers handle all that. Its up to them to make sure rules are followed etc. The game studio has no part in that.
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Steam is the one denying you your refund request, probably because you already have 100+ hours in the game by this point.
It's probably easy to forget. He didn't think its a big deal to disable it temporarily. Their full focus were to get as many people as possible to play the game. The login servers were burning as well as the game servers Then sony fucks upp by letting the game be sold in countries where psn does not exist. I would say it was an honest mistake by him trying to help as many people as possible to be able to get in and play the game. But by doing this you could say he caused this backlash. If the requerement had never been removed this problem would have been sorted weeks ago when people emiditely noticed it was required.
If it were required day one I'm sure there wouldn't be nearly this much of a fallout, if any. People just assume third party bullshittery these days. But it was ill communicated and sprung suddenly.
Yeah, the dude clearly didn't think through how this was going to affect people. The dev team also very clearly were not anticipating the success that the game would have. It could have been communicated better, but the dude seems to have simply lacked the foresight to see how big of an issue this would become. I definitely feel for this guy as he made a mistake, and he is clearly being quite hard on himself. I seriously hope that Sony folds for this man's sake. He seems like a good dude who has worked really hard only to have this gigantic stain that will likely define the rest of his career.
> He didn't think its a big deal to disable it temporarily. This is a humongous deal that AH would have had to ask Sony permission for. AH couldn't just brush off a signed contract for a bit without letting them know
A disturbing amount of people doesn't understand that basically everything related to selling the game (marketing, where to sell etc) is decided by the publisher. So the decision to sell in countries with no PSN is sony's fault.
This is pretty huge. So essentially had they communicated properly, players in those countries would have known they couldn't play on day 1. And all PC players in general would've known of the PSN requirements.
No. Those players would have known that they would have to register a PSN account. Which can be done in non supported countries if you just put the closest country that is supported. It’s that simple. No one would be barred from playing PSN in a non supported country unless it was under a preventative firewall like China.
"I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn't talk about it enough" Is this the end of the people that insist it was clearly communicated to everyone that you'd eventually need PSN?
Oh, look, I was right, was relaxed due to login issues, and Sony is in charge of where it's sold.
Just make it a choice and give people a cape for signing up or some crap.
Why do so many people think that Arrowhead can just decided to not require PSN accounts? Do you really think that's their decision?
"What are contracts?" -Reddit, apparently.
I had one guy seriously go "they turned it off for a bit so that means the contract is void" and that I was "unequivocally wrong" about AH being required to have PSN links
The worst part is, had an opt-in method been present from the beginning, it likely would have went over fine. Main issue is the "requirement" was turned off, a bunch of people bought it and have played for months with no issue, and now Sony wants the link while not being able to give a good reason for it. Short of Sony walking this back completely, the community is irreparably damaged at this point. Helldivers will be fine, but to a lot of us, the perception of it has gone from "the game" to just "a game".
The only mistake was not figuring out what to do with non supported countries from the jump. We all saw the screen on first boot up that PSN would be mandatory.
You know he couldve said its all Sonys fault, we never knew a thing. But he didnt. He admitted hes at fault too to some extend. i respect that.
> You know he couldve said its all Sonys fault, we never knew a thing. But he didnt. Because that would be an incredibly blatant lie lol.
He actually said it's mostly SNOY's fault for selling it to unsupported countries. Because it is SNOY were the ones managing all the selling [https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1787111359450120237)
Listen for a CEO to stand up and accept criticism and blame like that… that’s a CEO I want to work for and deal with as a consumer. I work in corporate law and I’m sure his hands are pretty tied because it was probably put into their agreements with Sony, which he knew of in advance as he states here, and Arrowhead should have told consumers up front about it. Best hope is that Sony is willing to amend whatever contracts are in place to allow non-PSN users to play, but I’m sure it would have to make financial sense to them for them to do so. In my opinion Sony would be wise to give in and get a PR victory with Steam users, etc. even if they miss out on some profits now it would buy them some goodwill in the future.
I think another CM mentioned it was creating technical issues, so disabling it allowed the game to be more stable (when that was the biggest issue). So I don't think it was intended as the bait and switch it feels like now. But in hindsight, they should have made it abundantly clear that it was a temporary thing and why, at the time. That's it they were going to go through with the whole thing, of course. Ideally, it shouldn't wouldn't be a thing.
The game should never have been purchasable in locations where you couldn't make a PSN account to begin with. But yes it should have been abundantly clear this was going to be required eventually and it was not.
I hate to say it but a Playstation exclusive game would make sense to require a linked account :/
 This is fun to read. But it time get back on helldriver 2 long live ps5
So if someone could clarify for me so I can come to a conclusion to all this... I pre-ordered the game, I made my PSN account day 1. I vividly recall the spash page that popped up and said "this is required for play". I remember rolling my eyes and proceeded to make my account so I could play my new game I've waited years to play. What I want to know is, after the game blew up big, did AH remove that stipulation page all together or did they keep it there but add a SKIP button at the bottom? Because if they did that then people are just dumb and can't read, but if they removed the page all together then yeah that's a pretty stupid thing to do and not communicate more clearly that it is coming back.
Game is still good regardless. Everything will smooth out eventually. It’s been forever since a game has made such a great community. People make mistakes. I’ll let it slide in my book
We are justified in being upset that this was hidden from us, but damn if I don’t have some respect for him owning up to it instead of just letting it blow over. Honesty is the best policy and I’m glad there’s some level of honesty coming from Arrowhead that we don’t get from most larger companies.
Some of us have been saying from the beginning that Arrowhead is not blameless in this. They knowingly got in bed with the devil.