Arrowhead has revealed that they’re still trying to get Helldivers 2 relisted in the countries that lost access to the title.
Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt answered a question about this on Discord:
“Sorry no, I’m speaking to our partners at playstation and valve and pushing for it to be undone. Getting the account linking took a herculean effort – but I won’t rest in my desire to have it available everywhere.”
Over last weekend, Helldivers 2 went through the wringer when Sony revealed they would require PSN login to play the game on Steam. Because of the fan uproar, Sony reversed that decision, but something else happened in between. This was clearly something that American players would not have known about if everyone else made their voices heard.
In that same weekend, Sony received feedback that there were a lot of countries that did not have access to PSN. As it turned out, most PlayStation owners around the world had gotten used to making US accounts for years. That would allow gamers access to many regions on a console, but on a PC, different countries have harsher regional rules and laws. Sony needed to enter these different countries officially, and they just didn’t bother to do the legwork.
So, Sony’s response to those fans was to simply remove all the countries where they did not enter for localized PSN access. That amounts to over 170 countries, and the Helldivers 2 players that lost access to the game because of this, still didn’t get it back.
Now, remember that these players paid for the game, and may have also paid for DLC. Under these unusual circumstances, Steam approved giving out refunds to players, even past the two hour playtime rule.
But with these countries still delisted, there is more than a PR issue for Arrowhead to deal with. That’s a substantial amount of the Helldivers 2 player base that is not playing the game right now, and that affects Arrowhead’s metrics, the same metrics that Sony supposedly cared about so much when they planned this change.
Of course, truthfully Arrowhead should have been more mindful about the PSN login plans, and chose to never list the game in those countries to begin with. It would have been possible that they could negotiate something with Sony after the fact. But the way things played out, there will certainly be people in Sony, and maybe even Arrowhead, that believe the studio, and specifically their management, is to blame.
But Sony’s inaction on this suggests that they really don’t intend to do this now. We’ll simply have to wait and see if they make an official announcement on the issue.
