One other week, one other embarrassing gaming episode. Contemporary from Stellar Blade’s overblown “censorship” controversy, gamers on Steam have taken to assessment bombing one of many yr’s greatest breakout hits: Helldivers 2. As we’ve already reported, developer Arrowhead is implementing a PSN login requirement within the coming weeks, which was communicated previous to launch however wasn’t enforced attributable to technical points. Because it famous in a press release, that “grace interval will now expire”.
After all, this isn’t an unusual apply in any respect – particularly for crossplay titles. For instance, this creator needed to create a 2K Sports activities account to play TopSpin 2K25 just lately, whereas Microsoft requires you to login to its companies to play Minecraft. Whereas it might undoubtedly be an inconvenience – particularly when servers exit or web sites have poor person experiences – it usually solely takes 5 minutes at most to make an account. It’s price noting that no cash must exchanged right here: PSN accounts are free.
Sony clearly needs to learn from Helldivers 2’s extraordinary PC success by including these gamers to its month-to-month energetic customers, however there are additionally potential advantages right here: Ghost of Tsushima, for instance, will add a PSN overlay on PC, permitting gamers to earn Trophies and join with mates exterior of the PlayStation console ecosystem. We suspect one thing comparable could possibly be achieved with Helldivers 2.
However that hasn’t stopped the sport from attracting over 60,000 destructive evaluations in lower than 24 hours, plunging the title’s in any other case extraordinarily optimistic rating. The studio’s flustered CEO, clearly devastated by the backlash, merely stated on Twitter: “Sorry everybody for a way this all transpired. I hope we are going to make it up and regain the belief by offering a continued nice sport expertise. I simply need to make nice video games!”
From our perspective, this is likely one of the most overblown gaming controversies in fairly a while. Whereas there are some professional issues, like the truth that PSN isn’t out there in each nation around the globe, it actually doesn’t legislate for the inane, borderline unhinged blowback. We suppose it is a testomony to Helldivers 2’s total success that it’s attracted this degree of criticism – and, frankly, it must be famous that the title nonetheless peaked with over 100,000 gamers in a single day. A lot for the boycott, eh?
