Sony forcing you to have a PlayStation Network account for all their recent PC releases hasn't been well liked, and they of course have no plans to back down on it.
During the latest Sony Group Corporation investors call in their Q&A session at about 45:40, a question came up about what lessons they will take away from Concord (which Sony shut down and then closed the game studio).
Hiroki Totoki (President, COO and CFO) replied with an English translation from a live interpreter, so the translation is a bit loose and rough, but this is what was said:
Regarding that matter we have learned a lot. The way to face the issues regarding PC for instance, the PlayStation accounts that we have offered, by offering them for instance, sometimes that tends to invite push-back. But for the live service games, so in order to maintain order of the gaming, so that anybody can enjoy the game safely, we need to create environment conducive to that, of course enjoying the game freely.
Having some restrictions, may not call it rule, but to ask the users and gamers to follow the manner, and those balances are very important and we have to continue to seek the best way to achieve this.
Clearly the PSN requirement isn't going anywhere, and will be in all their future games, even though it's unpopular and locks out a whole lot of regions from buying their games. Sony want that extra control over their games, especially when they're now releasing outside of their own PlayStation console.
In some ways, it makes sense for their online live-service games, and you do have to remember the context of the question was for Concord that was supposed to be live-service.
However, it really makes very little sense for their single-player games where it's also now forced like Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, Until Dawn, God of War Ragnarök and more to come. Forcing online accounts for single-player games is never going to go down well but it's here to stay for Sony's PC releases.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
nebadon2025 5 days ago
Eventually it's their loss because more and more people will not have any emotional connection (or only negative emotions) with their IPs.
soulsource 5 days ago
What Sony usually means when they talk about "safe" in a PSN context, is the option to blocklist or report people, to always know whom you are playing with, to make sure that kids can't access content they shouldn't, and a lot of other player-friendly features.
Sony have all that stuff set up for their consoles, so I'm not surprised that they are going the path of least resistance and try to use the same systems on PC too. Especially for games that already support all that via the PSN APIs on consoles it makes sense to use the same APIs on PC - but their online-features all assume that the player has a PSN account...
So, while I am not happy about it, I can see where they are coming from.
(For offline games it really doesn't make much sense though... As long as the games don't access any PSN APIs it doesn't make a difference...)
StalePopcorn 4 days ago
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