‘Helldivers 2’ PC Players Mad About PSN Account Linking, Arrowhead Responds

Helldivers 2 players have just been informed that if they’re playing on PC, which the majority of them are, they will now need to link a PSN account to Steam in order to keep playing on the platform as of June 4.

This both is or is not a big deal, depending on which side of this you come down on. Originally, players were indeed supposed to have a PSN linked to the game on PC when Helldivers 2 launched, but that was delayed for months due to technical issues during that window. The other argument is that many other games do this as well. Publishers like Ubisoft and EA make you have accounts there in order to play their games. Microsoft has players make an account to play Sea of Thieves on PC. So, PlayStation doing this is not wholly unique.

However, there’s another side of this with two main facets. One is that players simply…don’t want to make a PSN account. Some just because they don’t own a PlayStation or have any PlayStation games and it’s just another account to manage. Others cite outages or security breaches that have plagued PSN (security issues are one reason PlayStation says they need to do this).

But another subset of players don’t understand how they can keep playing at all, as dozens and dozens of countries the world do not even have access to PSN, so without some sort of workaround, and one has not been announced, it appears they would no longer be able to play Helldivers 2 on PC. We’ll see if that’s definitely true, but it’s what they’re logically assuming.

Helldivers 2 is now facing loads of negative reviews on Steam, dropping its positive percentage by a number of points already. Now, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has chimed in and is…less than enthused, by the sound of it.

In a tweet, Pilestedt simply says that all questions and comments should be directed toward PlayStation Support, and he provides a link to the “how-to” page for crosslinking:

However, on that page it has a section where it specifically says linking PSN to PC is optional:

Do I have to sign in to PSN to play a PlayStation game on PC?

Signing in to PSN is optional when playing a PlayStation game on PC.

The page pitches is as “benefit,” but not mandatory. But for Helldivers 2, it will soon be mandatory. Conversely, the Steam page does say a PSN account is required, and this was always stated as the plan.

I don’t know if this will have a meaningful impact on player population in the end, despite the anger, but it feels a bit out of step, as Helldivers 2 has been a massive success mainly because of its huge popularity on PC. That said, for players that do have access to PSN accounts, or the ability to make one, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, given how many other games do this. We’ll see if anything changes in the wake of this uproar.

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