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While government intervention is undesirable and messy, it may be necessary. I'm reminded of the workplace. Rules in the workplace are created in response to someone causing an issue in a way that was unforseen until them, it's more desirable for employees to just be mature and smart enough not to cause the issues, but... Well, you know how it is.
I think it's just common sense that if some online service is required to make the physical product you bought work, than that service, or some workaround for said service, should always be available even if the company behind said product shuts down. It's important for historical preservation, and it's responsible for us to keep things out of landfills whenever possible.

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How well does Mono actually work these days? I remember when an awful lot of people were of the opinion that it was basically pointless--that it would, much like Wine, find it impossible to really approach parity or real compatibility with that Microsoft thing it was imitating and would be forever chasing taillights. And, like with Wine, back when there were not a lot of resources put into it there was a lot of truth to the idea. But with Wine + Proton that is now pretty much not the case for games, basically because certain parties found it worthwhile to pour quite a bit more resources into it, so that Wine could improve faster than the taillights could recede. So did that ever happen with Mono? Is it good now?

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Quoting: 14I don't participate in review bombing games, but if Sony does not look at Discord, do they look at the Steam forum? So, I can sympathize that it may be the only effective way to get attention unfortunately, even though the gameplay does not deserve bad reviews.

There comes a point where even if the gameplay does not deserve bad reviews, the game does.

Certainly for people in regions that can't have PSN accounts, if they bought the game and then retroactively get hit with a requirement to have a PSN account, that they can't have, in order to play it . . . then for them the game has no gameplay. I think a game that cannot be played at all is worth a bad review. The fact that it's an evil corporate decision causing it, rather than say poor design that makes it crash automatically, does not make the game any more playable.

If it's just that you have to pointlessly do an annoying thing to play the game . . . well, arguably that still makes the overall experience worse. I'd say if it was a result of technical problems people would still give bad reviews until the thing causing it got fixed.

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There IS an easy answer for this. REQUIRE that ALL SOFTWARE be open sourced ten years from date of first sale. Then the community can take it from there.

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Quoteand clearly the team at Arrowhead are rather unhappy about it too

Are they? There's a thread on reddit showing how another community manager was pretty happy about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cjvw1s/arrowhead_community_manager_misty_admits_that_the/

I think it's the typical good cop + bad cop PR for damage control and effectively going through their common decision, or a public stunt to increase the game's exposure even more and then stepping down by making the mandatory requirement "optional" again, followed by comments of the type "Thank you AH and Sony for listening to your fans, I'm going to buy 4 more copies now because you guys rock".

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Think I said before, but the PSN account requirement was clearly marked on the site page. Yes, they should have enforced it from day one, but it's been there since March, when I bought the game.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: LanzI have brought out the arm chair philosophers.

Says a guy drive-by citing Socrates, Plato, Hegel, Gnosticism and on and on. Whatever.

Quoting: LanzMarx is talking about seizing the means of production of man via seizing the means of production of culture. Culture makes man and man makes culture, and the snake eats its own tail. Marxism is in fact just the most currently relevant gnostic religion. It's a theosophy, not a philosophy. To understand this, read Socrates and Plato, then the Torah (particularly Genesis with its warning against gnosis), then the Corpus Hermeticum, then Hegel, then Marx, and then keep going to Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Gale Rubin, and Kimberle Crenshaw. Starting with Plato in contrast to Socrates position of forms of knowledge, everything afterward except Genesis is gnostic.

Wow, that's all amazingly pretentious. And incredibly wrong. To squash all that stuff together like that takes a stubborn refusal to grapple with the specifics of what any of them are actually talking about.

I can already tell that you're dug in on the issue and there's no point in trying to change your mind. You're being deliberately obtuse and trying to confuse the lineage, likely because you know what I've said is true, but you believe in the ideology nonetheless. Ideology is nothing more than secular religion. It's time for you to be agnostic. I don't have any interest in debating someone who does not want to understand.

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Well, I'd say NOT requiring server connection for single player is actually _less_ effort that implementing that requirement, so companies should be delighted to have _less_ work...

I'm fine-ish with DRM but always online for single player just calls for regulation... oddly enough I would imagine EU dealing with it…

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Quoting: TheRiddickGovernments needs to force them to include a Offline and/or peer2peer connection mode that is independent of the always online component.

Hmm... Those would be extra "effort" to build. I would suggest at a minimum, when you shut down your forced online server, hand it out, so the community could host their own.

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I'm honestly shocked that the English government even acknowledged it. But of course it's just a bullshit response from them anyways. 🙄

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Quoting: Pengling

Quoting: Linux_RocksThen just do it on their website with the country most relevant then? Like one that speaks the same language, or go with a Japanese, UK, Singapore (Hong Kong for Nintendo), or US account? All of which are easy to get currency card codes for online.

All you need to do is just pick a random address anyways. My Japanese address according to my Japanese PSN, Nintendo, and XBL accounts is the Japanese Communist Party headquarters in Tokyo. While my address for my Singapore (Asian English) PSN and XBL accounts is the Cuban Embassy there, and the Cuban Consulate in Hong Kong is for my Hong Kong Nintendo account. Then my UK PSN, Nintendo, and XBL accounts all use Sega's UK address.

If it's such a problem for someone having to have a PSN account to play a "live service" online only game, then just treat it like a burner account, and only have it for shit like this when you need it.

Oh, I don't need it, it's not the sort of game I'd ever play - I'm just a curious observer.

What you suggest is against Sony's TOS, though, as I understand it.

There's no way they're gonna ban out of region accounts. You'd have to be doing something really stupid for it to happen. First, it's hard to prove that you're not who you claim, and second, they're not gonna wanna miss out on the money from importers. I've bought a decent amount of stuff off of the different stores that I couldn't get here.

You also get developers/publishers like Bandai Namco effectively supporting it for western fans with games like Super Robot Wars or even Gundam. Super Robot Wars 30 actually getting a western release in any form (on Steam) was a shock. The past several releases that have had English versions were region-free Asian English releases, with them suggesting western fans import due to licensing hell. Getting currency codes for the DLC is thankfully easy.

Also, sorry if I came off as rude. I'd never wanna be rude to you. I just can't stand entitled crybabies that exist in PC gaming, and this whole "ordeal" is just a great example of that to me.

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A single player game should require no internet connection to play single player. It's that simple.

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This is dumb and not something to be happy about. But for me, this doesn't even land in the same space as Riot adding kernel anti-cheat to League of Legends and making the game actually not playable, or even adding a 3rd party launcher to the game.

I'm sure this _IS_ that bad for some people who are now locked out of PSN because of the region, but most of the people getting super upset aren't upset about "I can't play anymore" and are more upset about "The account rule they had already said was mandatory but didn't enforce is now being enforced".

So I agree this is dumb for Sony to do and Sony sucks, this feels like one of the least egregious things happening in the games industry right now, and it is kinda shocking to me that it is getting such noise.

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The very beginning of their answer shows they already are biased, and probably people from the industry have explained them how thing should work according to their sole interest dismissing any purchaser's claim. I.e: complicated to maintain game that are not maintained, and then throw money and publishing a "patch" that solely stop old OS/platform to access the game and not fixing anything.

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PSN could have avoided this by just introducing a separate client for PC users that didn't have region restrictions. A place holder so to speak to bridge the gap until they can do it properly instead of forcing PC users to link to a PlayStation console exclusive service!!!!

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Governments needs to force them to include a Offline and/or peer2peer connection mode that is independent of the always online component.

And for those saying some games its impossible! Keep in mind World Of Warcraft got community made private servers! Yes THE COMMUNITY made that happen not Blizzard! So they can easily and quickly do it!

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Quoting: djibI have been waiting for years for Dragon Ball FighterZ to be fully compatible. The game works with Proton-GE, but you cannot play online because of Easy Anti Cheat which really is a bummer. I tried contacting Capcom about it, but it seems like they don’t care.

Have you tried downloading the Proton Easy Anti-cheat through Tools on Steam? I use that for a few games with that feature which allows me to play them.

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Quoting: artixbtwConfusing title. "Steam PC"? I'd personally use something like "Steam Client Beta & Deck Beta" to describe it.

Steam PC immediately fired off my bull$#!t detector thinking it was a new product, but it did take me a second to realise what the article was actually about. :p

Steam...on a PC. It's pretty normal compact wording.

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Unfortunately, I can't download any more updates on my Deck. Every time I do, I get an Update Error, saying that an error was encountered during the update process. Apparently this has something to do with the 5 GHz band, but I disabled that and it still didn't work. I also tried modifying the UEFI BIOS time and that didn't work either. :(

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Added some updates to the bottom from the Arrowhead CEO.

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Quoting: hardpenguin

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: d10sfanI personally won't since it'll have 100+ DLCs

So, just like The Sims then :P

Yeah lol it would be great if a high quality Sims competitor offered more for less. That would be some value. Otherwise, why should I play it over The Sims 4 or The Sims 3 for which I recently bought all the DLCs during a -50% sale?

I am going to hope and expect that Paradox's content strategy will be more appealing, with their free updates alongside paid DLC (SnowRunner does the same). Also, we might get real Linux support. Also, don't have to use EA Origin launcher. Also, don't have to use EA's DRM.

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SteamDB says the 24-hour player peak was ~45K, which is a far cry from the 2M a few months ago. 45K is still a very good amount of people, but methinks this game loses luster pretty quickly. A couple of my friends who got sucked into the hype played it for about two weeks I think.

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There is a problem with the CEO making more money after cutting all those people. But guess what, it's exactly how CEO pay incentivizes them to make decisions. Say your base salary is $1M with the potential to make $2M when the company meets certain annual profit goals. Guess what you're going to do when the profit numbers don't look good.

Yes, there is a problem with the model. And yes, there are other business models that share more of the wealth, so solutions already exist to CEO caps. But why don't those other companies hold much market share? I'm guessing one of the reasons is start-up money. Investors aren't going to give money to an entertainment company for charity -- they want something back for letting a company "borrow" their money and taking the risk that the company may never be capable of paying it back. And then you get CEO's driven with a profit purpose.

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Sony is insanely malicious and one of the most well known bad actors in the industry, they can go f--- themselves with a barbwire-wrapped cactus dipped in lemon juice and piss. It's a shame the devs take the hit, they don't deserve it.

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Quoting: mphuZ

Quoting: _wojtekWhat I don't understand is why even require psn account in the first place? what's the "benefit"?

To inform at the next shareholders' meeting, "look how our numbers have grown!"

A more practical guess is cross-platform play.

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Yes, well-done article with very important details.

I will say that I personally knew it required a PSN account and performed the linking right at the beginning, and also informed friends they'd have to do the same.

Keeping people happy is all about setting expectations, so I'll repeat the first sentiment from Ehvis: whose fault was it to allow purchase in countries where a PSN account is not legitimately possible? That's the "bad guy" or at best, the person who made the major judgment call failure.

Imagine if you were blocked from the game all of a sudden and given a refund, for a game that you've possibly put in 20-60 hours and are still playing. The refund would not be good enough. You would be outraged.

I don't participate in review bombing games, but if Sony does not look at Discord, do they look at the Steam forum? So, I can sympathize that it may be the only effective way to get attention unfortunately, even though the gameplay does not deserve bad reviews.

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Quoting: _wojtekWhat I don't understand is why even require psn account in the first place? what's the "benefit"?

To inform at the next shareholders' meeting, "look how our numbers have grown!"

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What I don't understand is why even require psn account in the first place? what's the "benefit"?

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Thanks for the very comprehensive article, everything I could gather from Steam Discussions as well as other sources appears to be here.

And yeah, well-deserved outrage. I knew it was going to happen eventually; Sony doing a 180 after building a solid "PlayStation PC" collection of ports with no special DRM included (yes, HELLDIVERS 2 does come with invasive anticheat which is disappointing, but this feels like the beginning to an end as games begin requiring more of PlayStation Network stuff).

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