ShiftUp has made an announcement about the sudden revelation that Stellar Blade is region locked on PC.
Stellar Blade will be available on both Steam and Epic Game Store this coming June 11. However, when ShiftUp made the official announcement for this PC version, they didn’t announce that the game would be region locked. The fans had to find out for themselves that the game is unavailable in their country, of course by checking on Steam.
And as you may expect, Stellar Blade is unavailable on PC on the same countries and regions that other PlayStation games are unavailable. And this happened in the same countries and regions where Sony still has not taken the effort to introduce PSN services.
ShiftUp acknowledged this issue on Twitter. In a recent tweet from the official Stellar Blade account, they said this:
- We are closely discussing the region lock issue with the publisher and are doing our BEST to resolve most of it as soon as possible.
- As shown in the test chart below, the DRM has been hard tuned to maintain the same average frame rate, with even higher minimum frames in some cases. Mods are fully supported without any restrictions.
- PSN connecting entirely optional and NEVER required.
- Both the PC and PS5 versions offer the same content. We will make sure that early buyers are never at a disadvantage through future updates.
We’ll keep you updated as soon as we have more to share.
While they didn’t name them directly, Stellar Blade’s publisher on PC is, of course, still Sony, and their DRM is Denuvo. There’s a possibility that they will remove Denuvo shortly after launch, but ShiftUp is at least aware enough to convince gamers that Denuvo will not affect their title’s performance.
ShiftUp’s communication makes it sound like they didn’t anticipate that their game would face a region lock because of Sony. While we don’t want to assume the worst in companies, it’s possible that this is just PR management and they actually did know the whole time. We did wonder why ShiftUp didn’t take on publishing duties themselves, but it’s possible that the publishing deal they made with Sony didn’t make this possible.
This creates an awkward situation for ShiftUp, who clearly made a lot more compromises than other companies who made deals with Sony and Microsoft. For example, Leenzee Games received so much money from their Game Pass deal for Wuchang: Fallen Feathers that they’re now making their next game. On the flip side, Wukong: Black Myth didn’t make an actual publishing deal with Sony. They saw their reputation buoyed by just publishing on PlayStation 5 before Xbox Series X|S. But then again, Game Science made most of their Wukong: Black Myth sales on PC from Chinese gamers, so their PlayStation association may have been misleading.
If you’re the game company who made a deal with Sony, you’d have to worry about this too. We assume ShiftUp and Ultizero didn’t expect Stellar Blade and Lost Soul Aside to come to Xbox, but they’re also facing a more limited PC release than if they found a different publisher. Ironically, Microsoft is letting their partners publish on PlayStation 5, as well as go to PC with no region locks of any kind.
Based on PlayStation’s track record after the Helldivers 2 controversy, we don’t expect these games to come to PC in regions that don’t have PSN at all. While we’d love to be different here, working with Sony is now a proven way to limit the reach of your games.
