Bungie has cleared the air regarding Marathon and PSN.
As shared on Icon-Era by user GoombaGalaxy, Bungie made this clear statement on the Marathon Discord channel:
“Marathon will not require a PlayStation Account for players on PC and Xbox.”
This has become a particularly touchy subject in the fallout of Sony attempting to retroactively add a PSN requirement to their big live service success from last year, Helldivers 2. After a hugely successful launch, the move turned the community against Sony in a huge way, and they eventually changed their mind.
However, what Sony didn’t do was bring back Helldivers 2 to countries and regions where Sony did not make the effort to introduce PSN. This came to a surprise to many players, as they did assume that PSN services were available worldwide, with PlayStation consoles themselves being sold worldwide.
As it turns out, PlayStation gamers around the world had been taking for granted that they were playing games and using online services with US-based PSN accounts. While Sony didn’t explain this to consumers, there were regulatory and legal reasons that they couldn’t just offer US based PSN accounts on PC. For PlayStation consoles themselves, Sony had a legal loophole with allowing any of their consoles to make US PSN accounts around the world.
To this day, Helldivers 2 is not available in countries and regions without PSN, with most of the gamers who did buy those games losing access, and likely having to accept refunds from Steam. Now, what may interest you to know is that Sony did not do this to Bungie’s live service project, Destiny 2.
Once again, Sony did not elaborate on the finer details. But we do know that one of the conditions to Sony’s purchase of Bungie was that the studio would continue to make their games available outside PlayStation, for both current and future projects. So while this is certainly a huge boon to Bungie fans, it’s possible that there was never any plans to mandate PSN login at any point in development.
As of today, Sony has started region locking their PC games to countries and regions that have PSN, even if PSN logins are no longer mandatory and instead provide players with bonuses. This is all behavior that harms consumers, and in the case of live service games, can hamper those games and their potential for success as well.
At least we know that this won’t be the case for Marathon. With all the buzz now growing around this title, it’s well known that it will have its own struggles to draw in older fans, and to carve out its space in a competitive genre. We’ll be seeing more of this game this weekend, and maybe then, Bungie will be able to make its huge elevator pitch to fans.
