Helldivers 2 kicked off the year as one of the biggest surprise hits of 2024, and even a few months out from release it’s still making sales headlines.
The gravy train was never meant to last unfortunately, and it seems like the game has hit its first major issue that has drawn the ire of players, who’ve gone on to massively review-bomb the game on Steam.
It was announced on Friday that all Helldivers 2 players on Steam from June 4, 2024 onwards will be required to link their Steam account to a PlayStation Network Account.
“Due to technical issues at the launch of Helldivers 2, we allowed the linking requirements for Steam accounts to a PlayStation network account to be temporarily option. That grace period will now expire,” said Sony, which continued to say that this is being done as part of “protecting our players and upholding the values of safety and security provided on PlayStation.”
This did not garner a great response from players, and the aforementioned review-bombing has been acknowledged by Arrowhead Studios chief executive officer Johan Pilestedt on Twitter, who even apologized to players for “how this all transpired.”
“Ouch, right in the review score,” began Pilestedt in his post, which had an image attached showing that the recent influx of negative reviews has brought the game’s rating down to “Mixed” on Steam.
“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!”
https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1786454659256758447
Now, you might be asking yourself why this is an issue at all. Account linking between platforms is a common practice, and often is a key step for features like cross-play and cross-progression to be supported.
The issue partly is the fact that you can have a Steam account in more countries than you can have a PSN account in, so post-June 4, there will be players across the world who will no longer be able to play Helldivers 2, because of this restriction. These players could try using a VPN, but that would risk Sony taking action on their account should they be detected as doing so, resulting in that player being banned.
Players are also taking issue with Sony’s claim that it’s something to be mandated for security reasons, with some pointing to Sony’s history of security breaches over the last decade as their reasoning for not trusting Sony when it talks about security.
Others are lamenting a fatigue around needing to have publisher or developer-specific accounts for every game they play.
It’s important to note that this was a requirement originally intended to be in the game, it just wasn’t enforced due to Arrowhead and Sony focusing on increasing server capacity and dealing with other issues at launch.
It should also be clear that the blame for this being a requirement at all is on Sony, not on Arrowhead. However with the amount of backlash, it’s curious if Sony will walk the decision back.
Source – [Johan Pilestedt on Twitter]