Sony really managed to erase one of their best-selling games in less than 3 days, for literally no potential gain at all. All risk, no reward: what a fuckin' business strategy
Suits only think in green, and assume "consumers" do only that: consume.
I've been waiting 20 years for people to realize it, and that's only because I'm young compared to others who have realized what capitalism is: Institutionalized greed.
Everyone knows what PC gamers hate at this point; publishers still screw us all the time for monetary gain and subscriptions are the new hot thing to screw people over to make money right now. I wouldn't discount it as a possibility.
Of course Helldivers 3 will be an exclusive during at least the first years.
They might then release it on PC and earn even more money.
No one is buying a PS6 or whatever just because they made a free account.
I mean, Palworld suffered from the exact opposite problem, where the game received basically no post-launch content. So once players burned through the main game, there was very little reason to keep playing.
This just goes to show that support needs to both exist and be something players agree with.
Space Engineers also desperately needs some kind of goal.
I was doing 6 hour sessions on that game no problem until I got to the moon, at which point the game suddenly felt so pointless, and my ship hasn’t moved.
Although, there was some issues a couple days after launch and they paused the mandatory linking. They are just now reimplenting it after fixing the issue it seems.
I played it without psn account so my experience is different from what you say. If in the first 2 hours I would have walked into this as a hard block I would have stopped and refunded.
Same is true for people unable to make a psn account but cannot because their country is not supported.
So while they indicated a 3rd party account it was not a hard requirement. If they would have shown all users a message clearly explaining that a psn account linking will be a hard requirement at some point.. so better already do it.. they might have had a better chance.. but for me I disabled cross play in the first week also because the playstation players where insufferable mostly and it caused issues during gameplay.