God Of War Ragnarok and Until Dawn are region locked on PC.
As shared by Wario64, both games now have listings up on Steam and Epic Game Store, and these listings indicate that a PSN account is required to play these games. As it turns out, both Wario64 and I don’t live in regions which have PSN, because he only has screenshots and he also can’t actually access the Steam pages for these games.
Both the open world action adventure and interactive horror game are single player titles, and don’t have any features that would require having a PSN account. In contrast, the recently released Ghost of Tsushima did have a multiplayer mode, and Sony opted to keep that running on their own servers, even if you bought the game on PC.
If there were any doubts on Sony’s PSN requirement for their PC ports, there is no longer any question about them anymore. Sony wants their PC games to have PSN logins, and it doesn’t matter if they would need that for multiplayer, trophies, or other features that would use Sony’s services.
Sony seems to have made calculations, based on how financially successful Ghost of Tsushima was on PC. They don’t need to placate gamers this time, since they got enough gamers, mostly in the US, to buy the game, and help recoup costs for the title.
One could argue that this strategy is counterproductive. Not only is it bad PR, it limits the number of consumers who can buy the game. But whatever well-crafted arguments fans would like to make would fall flat on Sony’s own determinations.
Sony now knows that they will still get most of their PC game sales from the West. They also know that they can dismiss criticism and any potential outrage campaigns over region locking their PC games. The gamers and media who did speak up were not able to demonstrate that they could affect the profitability of their PC ports.
And, as some fans may say in defense of Sony, any fans who would really want to play these games could still buy them on PlayStation 5. But of course, that’s missing the point of why Sony is porting their games to PC in the first place.
For what it’s worth, every title that Sony had released to PC up until Days Gone is now available DRM-free on GOG.com. Most gamers will say they prefer getting their games on Steam, but our point here is that Sony was willing to make completely clean DRM-free versions of their games.
Some fans speculate that the PSN requirement is about data collection, and that may be the case. But Sony will always have the choice to make these ports without any DRM or region locks if they wanted.
