This really sucks for some people, but the true impact may be overreported and is definitely blown out of proportion by the review bombing. While all this is hugely controversial on reddit, if you look at steam charts, the player count did not take any obvious hit. In fact it follows the natural trend after every content release. So at least on steam the delisting seems to have affected almost no active players. It's very possible that whoever is responsible looked at the data, saw the true player numbers from those 100 countries and decided it was worth taking the L in favour of tightening the online service to make future development easier. Especially since this "requirement" was in there already from the beginning, they just didn't enforce it (likely because they never thought the game would see this much success).
> on steam the delisting seems to have affected almost no active players
in most cases, if you bought a game on steam before it got delisted, you can still play it. even if you uninstalled it in between, you can re-download it.
the actual impact won't be fully visible until May 30th or June 4th since that's when they will start blocking access to the game for players who didn't link their accounts[1].
There is no business reason to cut down your own market unless it comes with additional expenses due to technical reasons. I'm pretty sure someone weighed these numbers again after the game's huge upgrades in infrastructure due to its unexpected success and decided differently this time.
How would removing players from steam push their numbers? Especially since it is obvious from the charts that the removed countries contributed almost nothing to the active playerbase?
Every Helldivers 2 player on Steam needs to create a Playstation Network account now, even if they don't own a Playstation. Without PSN account Steam users won't be able to play the game in a couple of days.
Yes, that is what is happening. But it is not an explanation for why, because by itself that action is going to reduce SIA's market and thereby revenue. There must be a technical/legal reason and other comments have already pointed out how the current system is both trashy for developers and legally risky.
Doesn't matter if different people are responsible for number of accounts and from revenue... One will push for this and other one likely have not even noticed...
> look at steam charts, the player count did not take any obvious hit
> the actual impact won't be fully visible until May 30th or June 4th since that's when they will start blocking access to the game for players who didn't link their accounts
There would be no impact if this game was some MMORPG or mostly singleplayer title.
Helldivers is PvE game-as-a-service and it's model works best when network effects are strong. Basically a lot of people are playing such games because their friends are playing it. And the most opinionated and active people are the ones who bring their friends into the game.
So even if relatively small percent of active playerbase will leave the game they'll likely to take some of their friends with them, etc.
Come on, they want this to be a PlayStation exclusive because it boosts ps5 sales and everyone wants to have the “hits” only on their platform. they just can’t easily get away with it.
Most of the reasons reported are around moderation. I think it's simply much easier for Sony to ban an account on their system (and revoke all of its content licenses as punishment) than it is to manage and wrangle steam account bans.
PSN accounts are subject to their own, malleable ToS whereas they are somewhat limited in their reprisals against a steam account, beyond simple bans.
There is a good technical reason behind that. As far as I can see crossplay doesn't work well at all in the game right now. Mostly issues where inviting friends to play is broken. This isn't surprising when you do not have a common identity system to fallback on for all players.
Why would the player count take a hit? The game is still playable, so people want to play the game until they can't anymore, assuming the decision isn't reversed.
The impact has not even happened yet, as the news was released a few days ago, just before the weekend; the majority of players are probably not even aware of it yet. After a week or two, we will see what the true impact really is.
Checked out of curiosity, at the time I started writing this comment, the Steam store page lists a total of 465,340 reviews for Helldivers 2, of which 137,264 are negative reviews left in the last three days. The game was released ~3 months ago, giving us the beautiful statistic that over 3 months, 1/3rd of all reviews were negative reviews left in the last 3 days.
Not if you consider the point of a review is to either alert people to an awesome game that could make them happier, or warn them that they shouldn't waste their time or money. The latter applies here.
The enforcement makes this game a waste of time and money for 170 countries.
If you are in the majority of the countries in the world, it's not a minor inconvenience; the game straight up will not work for you, because PSN is not supported in your country.
The devs have explicitly warned those users to not create an account in a different region to get around this, as it is an explicit ToS violation.
