Like I get your sentiment, and I agree…but waiting for a game like this to die and then going see it wasn’t worth it good thing I waited doesn’t make any sense in a general way. Like imagine waiting for destiny servers to shut down in the future and say good thing I didn’t waste my time. Like yeah of course it does when the player base moves on. The point was to play it before that happened.
Like…youre right…but whats the point of saying anything. You don’t like live service games because of the risk of stuff like this happening. It’s not like a no man’s sky thing where you wait for them to patch and offer discounts
Yes I would say so. If game doesn’t show itself able to stay around for years and shuts down early like other live services games then I’d personally have considered it a waste of money due to it becoming unplayable compared to non live service games.
Most successful live services games are free too, so that’s an additional uphill battle for paid live service games. It depends on if someone is willing to spend full retail money on what may be a temporary experience. I’m not one of those.
For paid online only games I don’t rush in. If it seems like it will stick around after steep discounts that’s when I’d be fine with spending money. If it dies before then I’m glad I didn’t waste money on it. No need to be offended that I take the same approach to paid live service games as I do regular games. You can choose to pay for early access if the experience is worth it too you, and if it is worth it you should.
Oh I’m not offended, I don’t play hell divers. I just associate patient gamers mentality with discounts and all dlcs and patches included. So I wanted to know what you said that for
Personally, I think the best way to protest this is to continue to play and use the servers to the point of overload, but no one buy anymore super credits. Make Sony continue to pour money into the servers but get no return as no one buys war bonds anymore. Would take ENORMOUS coordination, but Sony not getting paid by this cash cow yet having to still put money into their servers would hit them where it hurts, line go down.
Pipe dream, but if everyone just didn’t buy in game content for a little bit, I think they would see the effect. As of right now though, they don’t care, because “consumers will pay for anything”
Do you know what Sony and its stakeholders would see? High player counts and growing active PSN userbase.
The best way to protest is to stop playing, request a refund, and rate the game negatively everywhere. Arrowhead is now talking to Sony about dropping the mandatory linked account, showing them that they’ve fucked the golden goose will get their attention better than trying to strain the infrastructure.
Arrowhead also knowingly sold a game in markets where it wouldn’t be possible to play the game, even at launch with the restrictions in place you could buy the game in these markets. Steam also allowed these games to be sold in markets where they knew the restrictions wouldn’t allow them to play the game.
They fucked up and are now trying to deflect blame from themselves, yeah Sony is shitty, but arrowhead and steam both saw dollar bills and tried taking them.
Edit, if anything, Sony can turn this around that Arrowhead and Steam strong armed their way out of the contract requirements. Steam and arrowhead should take the fall and costs in this one if that’s the case.
Or, Arrowhead didn’t know that only certain regions of the world can make PSN accounts and Steam isn’t directly involved in the creation of any individual store page unless they have reason to be - like limiting the regions Helldivers 2 is sold in after the fact.
You and I both have no way of knowing whether or not Arrowhead knew that they were selling their game in regions where people wouldn’t be able to play it, but I could totally see it being the case where Sony didn’t tell them and it just never occurred to them that that was a possibility because it’s not an issue where the company is located. The PSN account requirement was in the game and listed on the store page from day one; it was only temporarily made optional due to how overloaded the servers were at launch. Arrowhead themselves said they expected an active userbase of around 10k people.
And if Steam is anything like Etsy, then the most involvement they have with setting up any individual store page is their automated systems like the profanity filter. I run a business on Etsy and they have no direct involvement with any of my store besides providing the hosting platform and systems to create the storefront and listings (as well as backend systems like tracking pageviews and such). The only time that they’d get involved personally would be if something like this happened.
Regardless of where the blame lies, I think Arrowhead are the only ones who will suffer unless Sony relents on the PSN account requirement. The money for refunds isn’t gonna come out of Valve’s pockets, and I can’t imagine Sony forking over the cash now that they’ve taken their cut.
Arrowhead didn’t know that only certain regions of the world can make PSN accounts
Ignorance? Really?
It would go without saying that they would be informed of returns, so after the first return of the game in one of those markets that defense would no longer be valid.
Arrowhead has no excuse for not educating themselves before agreeing to a contract, and for continuing to sell it after obviously knowing about the issue for months.
Except that people didn’t realize that the account was mandatory until this announcement because they didn’t read the store page nor the message you get the first time you launch the game, and Steam probably doesn’t tell devs why a game was refunded.
The PSN account was mandatory when you first logged in on day one, but was made optional later that day due to server load while Sony rolled out extra infrastructure. Why would they knowingly sell a game in 20 countries that would just refund it 10 minutes after first launching it?
Why would they knowingly sell a game in 20 countries that would just refund it 10 minutes after first launching it?
Because the refunds stopped after the first day as you said, why would they stop a cash flow coming in knowing it would now no longer be refunded anymore?
And yes of course steam passes that information along, why would you claim they don’t?
Since posting, I’ve learned some extra context that may or may not be true but would be very relevant here. Supposedly, Sony are the ones in charge of the actual store page. Which would mean that it was their decision to have it listed in countries where you can’t make PSN accounts.
Meaning that there are two mistakes here: Sony knowingly listing it, and Arrowhead not making it clear that the optional account linking was temporary. The second of which the CEO of Arrowhead has already taken the blame for on Twitter.
Why would they knowingly sell a game in 20 countries that would just refund it 10 minutes after first launching it?
Simple answer greed. Sony is the most greedy and bullshit company ever. Proprietary ports, storage media, software. Never following open standards. They know of all the people they have screwed over won’t ask for refund. Even if a big chunk do ask majority of thise demands will be rejected. All companies are willing to take that small a risk.
I don’t disagree there, I was talking about Arrowhead specifically. I’ve now seen people saying that Sony is the one in charge of the Steam store page, and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Sony had done it knowingly.
Sony responsible for selling the game where there is no PSN and arrowhead’s responsible for making it optional when they knew it was a requirement for 6 months before the launch. They made it optional so that people would play it making refunds difficult. It also seems they were aware that if it would have been compulsory from beginning people wouldn’t have played it or bought.
I don’t see Sony caring about reviews and refunds, they are the publisher, they will let the developer be the fall guy, walk away smelling like roses and go on to the next method of fleecing gamers. Bottom line is all that matters. They made their money off on Helldivers, they could hit the kill switch right now and be up. I just don’t see this ending well for arrowhead, and I see this blowing over for Sony, not even a footnote. I hope I’m wrong, I really do.
I work in IT. I can pretty much guarantee that server load for a game like this is nonexistent from a cost perspective. They’re not going to be using cloud services, they’re going to privately host because it’s way cheaper. Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution. Whatever cost they had for servers is already paid. Electricity and facilities costs are whatever because they are paying it anyway. They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks compared to the money spent building this thing or marketing it.
Gaming protests of popular games never work unless the objective doesn’t alter the bottom line.
I completely understand where you are coming from. Not being knowledgeable about IT infrastructure and how to host game servers, I was making assumptions based on how publishers are shutting down games that have low play count. Assuming it was a nominal amount of money to house and maintain servers for a game that generates no revenue, multiple servers for 100s of thousands of players that generates zero revenue would be noticeable. But if it’s just pennies, then it really would just be a drop in the bucket.
Sony should hurt in the bottom line for this, and I don’t see them caring about reviews and refunds, they will just move on to the next fleecing method.
Job listing for back-end engineer at Arrowhead says:
Cloud Engineering: Utilize Azure services to build and optimize cloud-based backend components and make use of monitoring tools to track live performance.
Early days playercount woes were before they added more nodes to their solution.
CEO said during the early day playercount woes:
It’s not a matter of money or buying more servers. It’s a matter of labour. We need to optimise the backend code. We are hitting some real limits.
They can’t just fire the people maintaining their solution either but that’s also baby bucks
A good back-end engineer is at least 100k. And a just-keep-the-lights-on crew is probably 3-4 of them.
FWIW: I also work in IT, on an IoT system that you might also assume has a “nonexistent” server cost. (I assure you, the cost exists.) I also used to work in game dev.
That said: Yeah, protesting by playing the game is a severely misguided notion.
That's why Spitz said to be angry in the Steam reviews instead of their Discord. People mistakenly took it as a dismissive whine, but that was actually a very important comment that I feel many people overlooked. Sony ain't gonna do anything differently unless there is actual, tangible damage to their brand. That damage doesn't come from chat rooms, that comes from storefront reviews.
Keep the bad reviews coming if you want any hope of Sony relenting.
You’re absolutely correct, how many of those reviews are pointing the blame correctly? I haven’t seen a single one yelling at Steam or arrowhead for selling the game in these markets that wouldn’t be able to play the game.
There’s no way Steam is 100% in charge of what regions a game is available in. The publisher absolutely has a say in where, and if it was available in all regions at the start that was on purpose.
The company that published the game likely updated the region it can be sold in. Steam just offers a platform.
Steam/valve is literally not to blame at all for any of this. Do you work for epic games or something?
I’m all for putting the blame where it needs to be, but you’re just shooting at all parties involved indiscriminately. Like blaming a rental company for a death in a traffic accident because they own the car.
It is also wholly possible that Steam changed the availability themselves, so you can’t take all the blame away from them, but like I said originally, this is Sony’s fault first and foremost as the publisher would have first say on regional availability.
Multiple being TWO at most, one nestled in the effectively credits section of the Steam page which almost never contains information pertainant to the purchase of the game, and another nestled in the “Skip over this usually optional content” settings after you have already installed the game. I didnt even know this game was linked to PlayStation in ANY WAY until this whole fiasco. Its only uneducated because it was HIDDEN.
Reminder that the hours played rule is only a limit for the automated refund system. You can request a refund for a game at any time for any reason. It just has to be manually reviewed and deemed justified by a person.
This isn’t about Sony “relenting”, Arrowhead needs Sony’s PSN support network to deal with support tickets: it’s the whole reason Arrowhead signed up with a publisher instead of self publishing and developing an international workforce of support agents. I hate Sony as much as the next person but let’s be honest, Arrowhead needs Sony and PSN, and it makes sense given they want to spend their time making games rather than getting into being a publisher and help desk.
Ultimately, Arrowhead should have made it a day one requirement and delisted the game on Steam for every country that lacks PSN support. Instead Arrowhead and Sony decided to let it ride and enjoy the sales and accompanying popularity.
And now because of that the PSN requirement is a poison pill. If that was a requirement from the get go, I likely would have reluctantly agreed to it. It now being retroactively enforced means if Sony doesnt relent, I and likely a lot of others will abandon the game and do what we can to get a refund, which will end up costing them a lot of money
It was a requirement from the beginning but it was not enforced due to the initial server issues. It was always there…
Not saying it’s a good thing but a lot of the discourse I see online seems to overlook that crucial detail and imply this was pulled out of the blue with no warning.
I can fully understand the agreement between the two parties was “also requires a psn account” while AH being completely unaware that getting a PSN account is so restrictive.
Sony likely didnt explicitly add that the game cannot be sold in regions where they can’t create an account.
Edit: or the didn’t explicitly state which regions a psn account CAN be created in.
It was a bit frightening for me to see how quickly the mob turned on AH during this fiasco and just how much vitriol and propaganda has been generated on the subreddit like this is any other ingame operation with the associated shitposting... except this time it could very well shape the futures of real people and fate of the company for years to come.
Unfortunately this is the only way to accomplish anything. If there wasn't an outcry like this both AH and sony would just ignore any criticism and move on until it gets buried and forgotten. It's a world of extremes and the scales could have easily tipped into the other side, with people rightfully complaining about these shitty practices but getting ridiculed for complaining about just another account or sth.
And that second option already happened with this exact game when people expressed concern over the DRM, which is designed like a rootkit, giving it essentially full control/access to your system while it’s running.
Can’t you make a free PSN account from any country? I know people in countries with no PSN using US PSN account, without any VPN or anything. You just set your country to US, or UK.
There are probably workarounds sure, but they shouldn’t be the default. Keep up the pressure on these suits so they know what their stupid decisions cause
I agree, but that doesn’t apply to multiplayer with server side verification and matchmaking. It’s notoriously difficult, near impossible to pirate exclusively multiplayer games.
Well, 3 data leaks in the last 10 years, at least one of which wasn’t their fault at all. This change is bad for several reasons but “data leaks” isn’t really one of them.
Ya ArrowHead knew what they were doing and what was going on. They signed up for it. There’s no way this wasn’t on their risk matrix ahead of time with the resolution already scoped out.
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