Discussion Helldivers 2 has been removed from 177 countries following PSN linking requirement Edit: Walked back PSN linking

As Helldiver 2's reviews continue to collapse on Steam, Arrowhead's best-selling action game has been pulled from around 177 countries in the wake of the new PSN account linking requirement that has turned its fanbase upside down.



Egypt, Georgia, Jamaica, and Morocco are some of the notable countries where Helldivers 2 can no longer be purchased due PSN not being available, sparking confusion among fans. Japan is also among the countries listed, but according to SteamDB it has a separate package and is still available, though users can't buy the "global version."

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In the meantime, Helldivers 2's recent reviews on Steam are now "Overwhelmingly Negative" amid continued review bombing by fans. On Friday, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilstedt apologized for the requirement in a statement posted to X/Twitter, writing, "Ouch, right in the review score. Well, I guess it's warranted. Sorry everyone for how this all transpired. I hope we will make it up and regain the trust by providing a continued great game experience. I just want to make great games!”

The controversy kicked off on Friday when Sony Interactive Entertainment announced that the "grace period" in which Helldivers 2 did not need to be connected to a PSN account was ending. Starting May 6, all new Helldivers 2 players on Steam will be required to connect their Steam account to PSN. Existing Steam players will begin seeing a mandatory login on May 30.

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At first I thought the drama was overblown but...this is bad yeah. Game is getting review bombed like I have never seen before too

yea this is just bad all around. What seemed like a weird requirement to begin is beginning to get worse and worse.

so weird to me how Sony took massive heat when they first announced their GaaS direction, bought Bungie who seemingly immediately imploded on them while other projects like TLOU Factions 2 died before they could even get off the ground, finally got that ever-elusive GaaS win with Helldivers 2, and now are I guess willing to throw away a ton of that good will for ... user date? An artificially-inflated MAU stat for PSN?

I'm not really sure why, if the plan was always to require linking/making a PSN account, they wouldn't have just implemented that from Day 1, or offered some free cosmetics to help the medicine go down smoother. Or at least, y'know, not sell it in regions were PSN is unavailable in the first place

As someone without a real dog in this fight (never owned a Playstation, could not be less interested in Helldivers), it's been a bit wild to watch this whole thing unfold from the sidelines

I’ve been following this over the weekend, what a massive own goal from Sony. If they couldn’t get the account link to work at launch, they should have either delayed the game, abandoned the requirement, or given a firm known deadline and still restricted only multiplayer behind the account. Doing it like this is just… so bad it’s going to be studied for years to come.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a promising franchise kneecapped so quickly.

CEO has been talking ALOT on Twitter, dunno how good it is to throw the publisher under the bus though.

Lugia667 said:

CEO has been talking ALOT on Twitter, dunno how good it is to throw the publisher under the bus though.

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He's between a rock and a hard place because his studio's most successful game ever was just obliterated by Sony's chain of fuck-ups.

Jbone916 said:

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Hang on, Puerto Rico and Guam can't get this game? Those are US territories so surely they can just use the US store, right?

EvilChameleon said:

Hang on, Puerto Rico and Guam can't get this game? Those are US territories so surely they can just use the US store, right?

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apparently it's all islands (Excluding Hawaii). French Guiana is also excluded despite literally being a part of France

EvilChameleon said:

Hang on, Puerto Rico and Guam can't get this game? Those are US territories so surely they can just use the US store, right?

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U.S. territories are apparently not treated as part of the U.S. by Sony's PSN management.

Sony doing what Sony does best: Fucking shit up in stupidest way possible.

What an absolutely legendary fumble. Actually unbelievable they managed to tank the biggest hit of the year so far and instantly kill their one GAAS success.

I've never seen a successful game get killed this quickly before.

You'd think there would at least have been some attempt to communicate ahead of time that an account would eventually be required, but they seemingly obfuscated that. Really bizarre chain of decisions from Sony.

Pokemaniac said:

You'd think there would at least have been some attempt to communicate ahead of time that an account would eventually be required, but they seemingly obfuscated that. Really bizarre chain of decisions from Sony.

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My understanding is that it was supposed to be a day 1 requirement, but they couldn't get it working in time, so just launched the game, with the ToS and some store notes indicating that it would be eventually required. But obviously, that's going to be ignored by 95% of people, and they really needed to give this like... months of lead time with benefits thrown in for linking early in order to have mitigated the backlash.

Pokemaniac said:

You'd think there would at least have been some attempt to communicate ahead of time that an account would eventually be required, but they seemingly obfuscated that. Really bizarre chain of decisions from Sony.

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Apparently, the PSN link requirement was supposed to be in place from the beginning. But to reduce the load on the servers, they (temporarily) removed the requirement. But now Sony intends to enforce it again that the servers are stable.

Isn't Helldivers II one of the best-selling games of the year? What are they thinking??

WestEgg said:

My understanding is that it was supposed to be a day 1 requirement, but they couldn't get it working in time, so just launched the game, with the ToS and some store notes indicating that it would be eventually required. But obviously, that's going to be ignored by 95% of people, and they really needed to give this like... months of lead time with benefits thrown in for linking early in order to have mitigated the backlash.

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Whatever communication did happen, it was clearly wildly insufficient going by the end result. This shouldn't be something people were caught off-guard by.

I haven't seen a franchise decide to completely destroy themselves this hard since Overwatch. Only difference that it took years for Overwatch, in this case, it took only a week.

You had a gem and then decide to kill it by sheer incompetency lmao.

ngpdrew said:

Isn't Helldivers II one of the best-selling games of the year? What are they thinking??

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To put in context just how well it's been doing, Helldivers 2 was already the 7th most successful Sony-published game ever in terms of lifetime US dollar sales after just 2 months

ngpdrew said:

Isn't Helldivers II one of the best-selling games of the year? What are they thinking??

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that's what kinda makes this so disappointing. It was such a positive moment in the industry when there really isn't. I loved seeing the videos on tiktok of people like trying to urge players where to attack. So many people were enjoying it and just having so much fun and now it's like...gone. And the developer suffers the consequences of an idiotic publisher.

I hope something happens that helps the game recover from this because I did enjoy seeing people be fucking positive about a game on social media. It doesn't happen very often unfortunately.

ZephyrPhoenix said:

I haven't seen a franchise decide to completely destroy themselves this hard since Overwatch. Only difference that it took years for Overwatch, in this case, it took only a week.

You had a gem and then decide to kill it by sheer incompetency lmao.

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Funny enough, Overwatch is doing pretty decently still. It's had a 50K concurrent user peak in the last 24 hours on Steam alone, and is more slanted towards Blizzard's own launcher and consoles.

Absolutely unreal. I thought this was going to be the usual Gamer Rage(tm) nonsense that'd blow over, but it's getting bigger and bigger. Hope people who've lost access to the game can get refunds promptly.

Amusingly, this's led to a bunch of my friends deciding to get EDF 6, sooo... good for indies??

Elementary said:

good for indies??

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I remember the days when Arrowhead was that indie developer that made that game with the mages and bathrobes and typing and friendly fire. Those were the days.

I wonder how much of an excuse Sony's reasoning for this is, apparently it's for "moderation" but what confuses me about this is that Steam has been the most popular online gaming platform for decades now, there has to be good moderation tools available for Steam accounts already right? VAC bans are famous! I tried to look it up and apparently Helldivers 2 on PC already does cheat bans, so I don't quite understand what specific tools Sony needs that they can only do wth a PSN account .....

It honestly just sounds like they want your data, or at the very least for more people to use their services.

Sony apparently felt the need to sabotage their actually successful live service game so it wouldn’t continue to embarrass all the others they’ve made

Kind of impressive in a truly baffling way how Sony has to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They get the successful GaaS they wanted, and then seemingly decide "Okay that's enough winning" because ??? Reasons ???

I do remember hearing this requirement was always planned, but that doesn't make this situation any less mismanaged, IMO. If the game crashes and burns it'll be on Sony.

Having to make an extra account to play a game is always annoying but it's so common these days that it's just whatever, it takes two seconds. But releasing the game in these PSN-less countries in the first place should have definitely been handled way more responsibly by Sony knowing they were going to be selling this game on another platform.

Hopefully we start seeing some kind of resolution to this soon after the weekend given Sony and Arrowhead do seem to be talking. It's nice that the Arrowhead CEO is being so open about this all despite being partially at fault for this mess they didn't intend.



Between what TO do and what NOT to do regarding these simultaneous PS5/PC multiplayer game releases go in the future, hopefully Sony is learning a lot from HD2 especially with whatever tf Concord is coming out this year.

AngryAlchemist said:

I wonder how much of an excuse Sony's reasoning for this is, apparently it's for "moderation" but what confuses me about this is that Steam has been the most popular online gaming platform for decades now, there has to be good moderation tools available for Steam accounts already right? VAC bans are famous! I tried to look it up and apparently Helldivers 2 on PC already does cheat bans, so I don't quite understand what specific tools Sony needs that they can only do wth a PSN account .....

It honestly just sounds like they want your data, or at the very least for more people to use their services.

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There's probably truth to it on some level, but yeah the solutions already exist. They just want more people in that ecosystem to hopefully scoop money off them later, and to pump up the MUA count so they can report number go up.

Sony finally struck GaaS gold and in their greed blew the mine up with dynamite.

I was going to buy Helldivers II because a couple of my friends have been urging me to join them, and those friends were frustrated. Unfortunately they don't plan to return to the game because "who knows if they'll pull this shit again", and I imagine that's not an uncommon story.

This is for the Gamers.
Play has no limits.

metwars said:

looks like they aren't going through with it, which thank god.

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Good move. “Still learning PC,” is the most ridiculous excuse since this wasn’t a universal thing for other PS releases. But at least they listened to fans (and the refunds going out I’m sure helped change some minds).

We did it reddit.

I can now get into this game in a few weeks GUILT FREE

That was fast.

(Stellar Blade petition signers in shambles)

I was not expecting them to back down, wow. And "Still learning PC" is a hell of an excuse.

I'm not sure I'd trust them not to try this again, personally, but congrats to the playerbase.

Great move. I bet the wait until the weekend is over to post this was excruciating for them. They really should make a firm statement that required linking is never going to happen though. If I was Steam, I wouldn't take we will keep you updated as a good enough reason to put the game back up..

Barely Able said:

Good move. “Still learning PC,” is the most ridiculous excuse since this wasn’t a universal thing for other PS releases. But at least they listened to fans (and the refunds going out I’m sure helped change some minds).

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"Still learning what is best for PC players" is such blatant bullshit lol, they tried to greed something fierce and got hit where it hurts

y'know, it kinda does seem like Sony is king of stepping on rakes they put in front of themselves and then needing to apologize for stepping on it

As usual complaining works, reddit and twitter did it again. (/s but not really?)

Credit to them for walking back, hopefully the game can get back on its feet

Good on them for walking it back. Means I can keep playing it with my friends, with no annoyances on their end

Oh thank goodness.

“We’re still learning what we can get away with with you PC folks. Console babies? They’ll do anything you tell them to. They’ll even pay for online. But we’re still figuring you PC people out.”

metwars said:

looks like they aren't going through with it, which thank god.

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Good. Sony, stop being morons.

If I had $5 every time a gaming company put out a “we heard you” statement in the last 10 years, I would be a rich man.

Sometimes bullying companies online works I guess lol

Have never played this game but am always happy to see big corporations get bullied out of a bad idea lmao

I think the funniest thing about all this is Sony probably could have avoided this whole mess AND still gotten a boost to their PSN signups if they instead had Helldivers offer an incentive for linking accounts, like some free Super Credits or a cape or something.

Instead they just became the laughing stock of the industry for a week by forcing a big change on a bunch of PC players that turned the devs of Helldivers against them, and Valve allowed refunds past the 2 hour playtime limit to people affected by the move.