Firewalk Studios has gone on record to defend the PSN account requirement for their upcoming hero shooter, Concord.
As reported by Eurogamer, Firewalk director of IP Kim Kreines talked about Concord‘s PSN requirement. Kim said:
“That allows us to have cross play, that cross progression, that’s that’s an important piece of it.”
Jon Weisnewski, who is Concord‘s lead character designer, then stepped in to share their take:
“The goal is for players to come together. And so for us to have PC players and PlayStation 5 players together, for that cross-play and cross-progression to work, that’s a layer that needs to be there – just on a technical level. So the goal is we want to get players together, to have fun and play together, this is part of that experience.”
We can understand the appeal of crossplay between PC and PlayStation 5 players, especially for a team hero shooter like Concord. These games are popular because friends team up to square off with other teams, who are likely made of people who know each other too.
But if you only listened to Sony employees, you wouldn’t know about all the other issues this requirement brings in. As Sony started to implement the PSN requirement to all their video games on Steam, it’s meant that their games cannot be purchased on that platform in countries and regions that do not have PSN.
As we had noted before, if you did live in one of those regions but you had a PlayStation 5, Sony would allow you to make a US account, so you would be able to play. It’s obvious now that this was always a backdoor solution, and Sony has to reckon with an issue of their own making – selling to a smaller PC player base, who don’t own PS5s.
This is a self-inflicted wound for Sony, as they have already limited the potential player base for Concord. To put this in contrast, Epic Games – who was willing to go to litigation with Sony to make it happen – enabled cross platform and cross progression for Fortnite on PlayStation and every other platform. It is now, indisputably, the biggest live service game in the planet.
To compare this strategy to Microsoft, Xbox was willing to test their trust with their own fanbase to bring Sea of Thieves to PlayStation 5. By their own account, that risky strategy has paid off for them, as the growth in the Sea of Thieves player base on PlayStation 5 led to increased players – and profit – on Xbox and Steam as well.
It certainly does not hurt for Microsoft that Sea of Thieves on Steam requires logging in to an Xbox Live Account. You may wonder, why is that? The reason is Microsoft put the work in to bring Xbox accounts to more regions around the world.
In fact, what will likely shock everyone is that Nintendo’s account system is supported in more countries than PlayStation’s system is. A NeoGAF user who did some datamining on how different platforms handled this issue found that Nintendo’s accounts are supported in three times as many countries and regions as Sony.
This is primarily because Nintendo set up the same account system for the Switch as for their mobile games. It also means, in the hypothetical scenario where Splatoon 4 comes to Steam and Nintendo’s next platform, they can require Nintendo Accounts for Steam players, and still have a bigger potential user base than Sony has.
Really, the solution to this issue is simple to see, but not one that they may not easily implement. With Sony looking for ways to catch up to other companies and the ways they make money, are they finally going to invest in bringing PSN to more regions? Even if they decide to start now, it’ll take them months, possibly years, to get cleared by all the regulators across the world.
Here and now, Sony has to sell Concord to a potentially smaller player base than they could have. Of course, Sony could still find success, but they have proverbially already shot themselves in the foot, and they may find themselves always wondering how much bigger Concord could be.
