Remember the people suggesting to change the Hell Divers negative reviews because Sony listened?
They have learned nothing
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Sounds like they will be bringing the PSN requirement back for future games maybe. The only thing they probably learned was to announce the requirement for account linking from the start and make it more vissible
Is that worth the loss of sales from those 177 or whatever it was extra countries? That’s the part that confuses me.
Sony has written off those countries for years of PS sales, its been a resounding yes for them since long before they started inching into the PC market
It seems the answer is yes.
I think for the executives the only reason to release old games on pc is to bring more players to their console, and if they can’t have a psn account that means they will nvr buy a PlayStation. That’s my guess
Definitely the third option. They’re going to wait until Helldivers hype dies down then quietly reimplement the requirement when much less people are tuned in. Guaranteed.
Probably bullshui but there’s a 3rd option that they have legal reasons not to operate servers in some of those regions and helldivers was violating those restrictions. It takes more than a week to review the legal code in 180 countries, review the internal policies in place and audit the game for any violations all with the added complexity that arrowhead and sony are independent entities.
Yeah I’m sure changing negative reviews is a factor here and totally wouldn’t have been an incentive for future good behavior
Their incentive is money. All this is teaching them is that they need to find a different approach to do the same thing.
The AAA outfits are trash and should die.
Bad reviews tend to lead to worse sales…
Sorry, the argument is they should have zero consequences for trying something reviled because they abandoned it later? And that will make them not try similar things later, because of reasons?
The “argument” is that a few people said people should reward them doing the right thing eventually but others somehow think that’s evil or some weird ass shit.
It’s not complicated, as much as Internet weirdos want it to be
They are being rewarded for doing the right thing simply by people not continuing to refund.
Ok it’s just weird to me that people like you have some moral objection to a slightly different attitude applied to reviews. It’s not something worth talking about.
Steam is like the only company that I actually somewhat trust
How is GOG?
Better than Steam I’d argue. Unlike Steam, games you buy on GOG are yours to keep forever. No DRM like steam that
forces you to log on after a few days offline. You also get better version control.Edit: the offline limit was a bug. Offline restrictions would be dependent on the DRM solution for each individual game.
There are DRM free games on steam. If you can launch the game directly from the exe while steam is off, then the game is DRM free.
I’m aware, however it’s not as transparent and Steam does not provide the same guarantees that GOG do.
I don’t want to have to open the game page to figure that out. Also if there was a filter I could find and choose not to see DRM games at all, that would be very cool.
The DRM layers are added by game publishers, not by Steam, but yeah it is a little annoying that games on steam have to be launched through steam. There are some fake Steam overheads floating around to bypass that for use of running games on multiple local machines simultaneously.
How long is a few days and what happens if you don’t?
There is no DRM on GOG. You can just download the offline installer, then install it even without an internet connection. It will never ask you to go online because it doesn’t need to check anything.
I believe they meant what happens on the steam side, not the gog side.
After digging into it, it seems like the 2 week limit was a bug that has been fixed by steam. So there is no Steam enforced limit, it’s up to each game’s DRM to enforce restrictions. Steam can function as DRM with a simple command during upload, but it’s rather basic and Valve recommends publishers to use additional DRM for more serious protection.
GOG on the other hand is DRM free as a core policy so you’re guaranteed no restrictions.
I liked it until CD Project Red showed they care about the shareholders more than the users with Cyberpunk. It’s clear that GOG will flip to be anti-consumer as soon as the shareholders change the company leadership. Enshittification comes for all companies because business majors don’t understand people.
Steam is private and Gaben is benevolent so that worry is distant. I also have no illusions that should Steam ever go public or change hands then the inevitable end of good, customer needs focused storefronts. But for now, Gave has proven he knows how to make a place consumers like myself want to use.
Gave Newell is 60+ years old and haven’t exactly taken the most care for his own health. We don’t know what will happen once he is gone.
With GOG there is nothing a change of leadership can do to your existing game library.
He’s lost a ton of weight so far recently - https://metro.co.uk/2024/04/09/new-photo-gabe-newell-fans-amazed-weight-loss-20612171/
Also, CD Project had one of the worst stores and biased “media” in Poland. They region locked my games and told me “no one from abroad buys games :)” when I wrote to them that I can no longer Access my account or games.
GoG might be good now, but that still hurts me when I was a teenager and moved abroad. It was the only thing I had and they took it away from me. Fuck their DRM of old. Funny how they had the worst drm known to mankind and now have drm free store…
If true, you should share your story on the GOG forums. But because the games are DRM-free, they cannot region lock your games. Only exclude people from buying certain games because of applicable countries’ laws like Germany and Australia.
CDP management board owns like 33% of the shares and aren’t as beholden to them compared to other companies with less shares. And GOG is a sister company to CDPR and > 99% of their their new releases are still DRM-free to this day.
I haven’t had any issues with them. Their older games are fixed up to work on modern systems with few issues. The only thing I wish they’d improve on is to make a Linux launcher similar to how Steam’s works.
Fantastic if you’re a patient gamer. It’s the only place I get my games from. The only bad thing is the selection of games (lack of AA/AAA games) and a bad client compared to Steam because they’re not a multi-billion dollar company like Valve is. We had to wait 12 years for Skyrim to finally come out for example.
For now. They still cave to Nintendo’s pressure
Yeah that whole Dolphin thing was weird. Seemed like valve just didn’t want to deal with the legal headaches of fighting Nintendo in court over an application that didn’t really need to be on the steam store in the first place.
Can’t say I blame them really.
Personal opinion time: I don’t think emulators belong on a commercial store anyway. Keep them on their own websites or Github. Putting them on a store like steam is just asking for trouble.
My take: emulators and in platform competition should be fair game. An ecosystem monopoly is still a monopoly.
They are, but fighting against Nintendo in court will be a Pyrrhic victory in the absolute best case.
Steam has got to be considering blacklisting them as a publisher over this. This is so, so dumb.
I’m afraid they would just make yet another barely functioning launcher/storefront
We need to blacklist anti-libre software. They do this because we let them.
I wasnt considering buying any more snoy games after this whole debacle, and I certainly won’t if they make their own launcher. But unfortunately the average gamer just doesn’t care :(
‘Average gamer’, cope. That won’t stop me rejecting their abuse and helping those directly around me copy.
Of course not, change starts with yourself, but the reality is that lots of people willingly eat shit from corporations all the time
The thing is, we really dont need to care that AAA games are terminally fucked, there are shitloads of indies that come out every month. The “average gamer” shit doesnt show up in very many Indie games
I’ve heard it gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment
…that nobody with a functioning brain would use.
That’s still a lot of people, I’m afraid
Why would they? They still get a %30 cut of those $70 games. Blacklisting them would just be giving GoG and Epic a leg up in being the only stores you can play Sony blockbusters.
Just a reminder that the steam Refund policy in America is illegal everywhere else in the world. They aren’t this great company that’s consumer first. They are trying to make as much money as possible and have Allowed the likes of 2k games and EA to be as scummy as possible on their platform.
I’m genuinely very confused - why is the steam refund policy illegal everywhere except America?
I think he means Steam’s refund policy is not available to anyone outside the US because they only implemented it to comply with a US law, so like if you are in a country without similar consumer protection laws they don’t offer the refund policy. (its not just the US btw, places like Canada and the EU also have the Steam refund policy)
Because everywhere else has better consumer protections than America. 2 hour refund policy is some real anti consumer shit.
Don’t give your competitors a win
It’s the same reason sports leagues don’t punish good players
I hope they bill Sony ten times of what they are losing out on now. They need to set a precedent that no other publisher will want to repeat what Sony did.
Yeah, they’ve got to come up with some publisher-aimed punitive actions, because this is frankly indefensible.
Charge 30% of sales and 100% of refunds.
Sony got the “ you should be grateful it isn’t a play station exclusive”
These companies are obsessed with money. The money they lost on refunds forced by Steam is the punishment.
I’m just not sure if the refund goes all the way back to Sony, or if steam is fronting the loss. If the latter, I imagine punitive action would be figured out pretty quickly.
It seems that steam pulls refunds directly revenue in most cases which means that the publishers and studios feel an immediate impact in their numbers from them.
Valve may choose to absorb some of the refunds but I don’t see why they would. Sony made the games unplayable in certain regions while telling Steam they wanted the game sold in those exact regions beforehand. They misused the store and I’m sure they paid dearly for it with those refunds.
I’m not in an affected country, nor did I plan to play multiplayer, but I still removed it from my wishlist and decided to boycott all titles requiring a PSN account. If you want to have some option but annoying account service, fine. I can survive clicking the X on that. But if they push this hard then we know they’ll push this onto all games next.
Have you looked at the list of affected countries? Are you really that upset that these titles aren’t available (for purchase) in places like Haiti and Afghanistan?
Have you? Because it also contains countries like Baltics. But that’s not even the point. The point here is that Sony forces restrictions upon users for absolutely no reason or benefit for them, just so that Sony has some numbers to show to their shareholders. But thanks for proving my point about you people. You’re literally the reason why companies like Sony, EA, Ubisoft, etc. can ruin the gaming market without repercussions.
Honestly… That’s a fairly harsh response to someone with an opinion…
I kind of feel they don’t deserve that attack… It doesn’t mean they have any plans to buy it.
I wouldn’t, and I’m actually selling my ps5 and set up my old PC with steam and big picture mode… But, pointing out the disadvantages in a normal way is more effective than attacking people
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yeah fuck people from other countries and let the corporations fuck over people who aren’t me am I right?
it’s not whining people who fuck the gaming community. it’s the corporations who are making decisions that cause people to whine over them
Companies whinge about piracy yet they incentivise it with their shitty practices
Dang, why do they love to ruin the good will they collected.
People are paying a monthly fee for multiplayer on PlayStation. I assume that is Sony’s goal for their PC ports.
That, MAUs to brag about to investors, or data harvesting through linked accounts. Or all three.
Maybe it gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment
Good guy Steam.
Sony could resolve this by allowing any country to register an account, but they don’t lol
Or by making the PSN account an optional feature, the way these shitty integrations almost always were.
The better solution is to not force a third-party tie-in that doesn’t really do anything
There are often legal issues to be resolved for each individual country. It’s possible, but expensive. Ultimately, linking accounts at all is an unnecessary requirement that exists for Sony’s benefit, not yours.
Good guy Steam ensuring that people with peg legs, hook hands, and eyepatches get that 100% disability discount
Yarrrr.
i swear to fucking god if they do this with horizon
Sony: You people don’t have normal passports?
The single player game??
There goes the “we need PSN to effectively moderate the online playerbase” lie right out the window…
Maybe this is a hot take, but… I kinda understand not selling a product in a country where nobody in your org knows the laws or speaks the language.
3-person indie teams self-publishing can skate past, cuz they’ve got nothing to lose and can’t spend time triaging crashes due to unicode chars and weird keyboard layouts even if they wanted to. Big companies have to decide what’s worth the risk and the potential demands on their time.
Sucks, but it is what it is.
Except they’ve been selling in some of those countries for years? GoW, days gone, returnal, horizon series and Spiderman series are all available and some have been for years. It’s not about selling games in those countries, it’s about wanting to force PSN on the players. Can’t force PSN to people in countries where it’s not available so they’re not going to sell there.
I would not be surprised to hear that this was a disconnect inside the org.
One place I worked had both physical and digital products. We initially listed the digital stuff anywhere and everywhere. It stayed that way for years and years. It was only because of an incidental meeting about localization that folks from legal and customer support went “Wait, you what? You can’t do that. Can we stop that, like today?”
They assumed we were just gonna do the same markets that the physical products do. We assumed there was no reason to limit it.
I guess a good question is: Does Sony sell Horizon for PS5 in any of the countries they don’t sell it for PC?
I can verify that retailers are selling the console and games, including forbidden west and ghost of Tsushima.
Sorry, I meant digitally.
I realize the personal experience I shared was a mismatch between the physical and digital depts, but that was just to explain that these mistakes can go on for a long time before they get fixed.
The mismatch I could see happening at Sony would be that their PC dept was listing titles in regions that their Playstation digital dept doesn’t.
There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.
But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.
There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.
That makes sense. Users are probably signing up and accepting T&C’s for other regions. Thanks for investigating!
But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.
Yeah, I’ve got no benefit-of-the-doubt explanation for why it’s so piecemeal and staggered. It definitely reeks of some bigwig throwing down a technical mandate and letting everyone else deal with the consequences.
I wanna be clear, that I’m not saying Sony is on the right track here. Staying region-locked is not a good strategy long-term, for them or their player base — even if they set aside the PSN mandate permanently.
I’m just saying there are some perfectly legitimate organizational reasons why they might need to region-lock in the short term, because I’ve seen those reasons in my own experience.
FWIW, nobody involved in that decision particularly liked it either, but it was either region-lock or drastically change the international structure of the org over the course of a couple months, all just to potentially please a handful of consumers who might ultimately disproportionately experience bugs, adding to support costs, dev burden, and negative ratings.
Btw, thanks for the good conversation! It’s so rare to have a pleasant interaction on the socials, especially when it starts out as diametrically-opposed positions.
Thanks for the nice reading.
Surely hireing a person so they could sell it other countries would would make them more money than that person wages cost
You can’t just hire one person to manage that many countries. Even if they spoke all of the languages, and the incoming customer support workload was low enough, they would still be operating in countries with different laws and probably requiring their own corporate entities with their own accounting and legal experts, and any third-party software that you use to do all of this also has to be licensed for that country.
Big companies are just a mess, and they’re not gonna spend the time, money, and risk building out a thing in a new region for probably a few hundred K per year.
