Helldivers 2 has now received 84,000 negative reviews in the past day.

Few days ago Sony announced through arrowhead (the developer) that you had to have a PSN (PlayStation Network) account linked to your steam account or you would not be able to play through steam. PSN is not available in certain regions that steam is, and so now a bunch of people who have bought the game and sank hours into it have no way of creating and linking a PSN account and will no longer be able to play a game they paid for. People are also throwing this on the “don’t take my info” bandwagon as well, but the real travesty is the people who paid for it that will no longer be able to play.

There are several camps here in the negative feedback side. The crux, is that Sony, who published the game, is making Arrowhead, the studio that developed it, to require players to login using a Playstation Network account to continue playing the game at the end of this month.

Communication about this requirement was murky at best, with Sony never really saying anything on behalf or about Helldivers at all, in a PR way at least, and Arrowhead never said anything about it until the new update on Thursday. This has lots of people pissed off, some for good reasons, some for slightly less.

Those rightly pissed off, are those who do not live in a country where PSN is not available. The game was sold globably for 3 months, with player data available to the public suggesting as many as people in 140 different countries playing the game somewhat consistently. The bulk of these players are in North America, Europe and Japan of course, but people observing the stats through SteamDB have suggested anywhere from a few thousand people, to 50,000 to potentially 100,000 paying customers will not have access to play a game they rightfully bought, come June 1st. If Sony's intention was for the PSN requirement to always be firm and realistic, the game should only have been allowed to be sold in the 69 countries PSN is available. Instead they sold it globally for 3 months and only yesterday did they de-list it for sale in the 177 countries who don't have PSN access. https://steamdb.info/sub/137730/history/?changeid=23416542 Which is pretty sleezy to do without even making some kind of announcement.

Others, are upset because Sony's history with being hacked and data protection, is sloppy at best. With 7 major leaks or hacks in the last 14 years, People are not exactly thrilled at the idea to put their info in the hands of a company with a subpar security, especially if some of that info could be linked to a credit card or other personal info that could be used to steal their identity. If you take privacy and personal data security seriously, this is could be a big deal.

And then there is those, who are mostly just mad Sony is trying to put their service overtop of steam, as the game clearly works without that extra layer and login already, so it's presence really isn't needed for anything gameplay wise, and just some method for sony to add people to their internal metrics or potentially use it as a backdoor way to throw more adverts for other sony products onto users who don't already own a playstation. The late entry of such a service and not even making it a requirement to at least register it to a PSN account even if the login feature wasn't working as intended at the time could have at least cushioned the blow here.

Ultimately, this entire thing is a PR nightmare where the publisher basically did nothing and sold in regions they should have known were ineligible for PSN access, made no serious comments on the game or their intentions, and expected a small studio to handle everything on their end with seemingly no support aside from the start up investment in return for the studio pushing out premium warbonds once a month to keep the income flowing.

The game had a requirement to link your PlayStation Network account to your steam account but it has been disabled due to server issues. Now Sony wants the dev to enforce that and people feel like they have been bait and switched. Another issue is that many people who have already bought the game live in areas of the world where Playstation Network is unsupported so they couldn’t link an account if they wanted to.

They are forcing you to create/link a PSN account to continue playing.

There are other rootkits you can download without paying anything you know? No sale required