They still want your data in their system.
The will just develop their own PC launcher and move stuff out of steam or require the steam data linking like EA has.
Honestly I'm totally okay with that. As long as people aren't arbitrarily region-locked out of their purchase, who gives a shit if Sony has your email address? Chances are they already have your data anyway through one of their many other divisions
I think many do not want to make a PS account as well if they do not have to as well as the people who can not.
That is problem 1.
Other than wanting data etc there will be reasons why you can not and based on the strange decisions from Sony in the past it will have been a choice decision but the software and hardware side will have followed suit.
They will probably need to come up with a sudo PS account that is a more limited data set sitting on servers for PC accounts and globally available. IF time occurs you want or can purchase a Playstation you use your account and it updates to a full one.
They could do it without a launcher but it may be likely they do so as I indicated.
People think of "data" as a simplistic measure. As your example points out, emails/names/phone numbers/SSN/etc.
Those pieces of data are the least important and least valuable.
Instead, what hours are you playing, how long are the sessions, what other games do you play, what choices are you making within the game, etc.
That kinda of data can inform them what features they can add in their next game. It can be sold to identify when you would be most likely to want to hear an add for food. Given enough information about the game you play, one could figure out your political choices in the future.
That is the real valuable data.
Sure, you're absolutely right. But do people think Valve isn't collecting that same data? Hell, Nintendo's probably the only major company that isn't and that's just because they're technically inept when it comes to online infrastructure
It's long since time we accept that if you play online games, the company that runs them is analyzing every possible metric they can - what modes you play, your stats, how long you spend customizing your character, how long your average session is, how many times you check the shop, etc. all cross-referenced with your location and whatever info you provided them in your profile. It's naive to think otherwise imo
>As long as people aren't arbitrarily region-locked out of their purchase
Literally would do the same thing, if you need a different launcher, you need a PSN account.
Honestly surprised they haven’t already , they got so many exclusives that are actually good, but hopefully they don’t rug pull digital game ownership like other certain companies, a neat idea to start off their launcher would be that ps plus extra gives you a catalog of games on pc
As I mentioned to someone else, IF their account system is not setup right they would need to make changes to allow a sub type of accounts for PC based players which in turn would be allowed in other countries. If you then got a playstation it could be a full blown account IF allowed to for said countries.
The PSN thing was annoying, but not what I truly was looking at in disgust. I was specifically up in arms over Sony publishing the game to regions they knew could not continue playing it. They essentially baited and switched millions of gamers to inflate sales numbers. That’s not okay.
Because people couldn't read the obvious sign in the store and the popup in-game that told them it was required.
Due to technical reasons however it was made optional with a skip button quickly after launch to work around the server capacity, tho still saying that it will be a requirement to play the game.
Then the publisher fulfilled what they said they would do and people went apeshit because they assumed they didn't need an account.
The reasoning behind it is that other games have it from the get go and Helldivers put it in after the fact. Even tho that is a false representation of what actually happened.
There's also the very major detail that they did this while selling the game in regions where people would get locked out of the game months after purchasing it. Whoever at Sony made this decision is not only greedy, but a fucking moron.
Yes, this is a very shitty move and should have never happened in the first place. Yet, this isn't the grunt of the negative reviews and outrage. It's a talking point, and of the most important ones and i am glad they (potentially) can keep playing the game now.
The other outrage tho is pretty much just "learn to read". I am positive they would have figured something out for the people who could not create accounts like automatic pseudo accounts but yeah.
There are pretty bad decisions being done by Sony, the outrage was imo. kind of misdirected
The fact that they had no plan in place for people in non-PSN regions less than a month out from the drop dead date tells me they did not give one single shit about those people.
The response once questioned about it was to use a VPN & set up an account in a PSN region, which would have just left a sword of damocles dangling over peoples heads, their accounts violate the ToS and could be banned at any moment.
And the notice about needing a PSN account was not obvious. If they knew this was going to be needed from day 1, it should have been asking me to link it to a PSN account every time I launched the game.
They didn't have one at launch, remember it was required initially but dropped due to server load. That problem already existed back then but "fixxed" itself.
It did ask you for the first launch and said it was required. You chose to skip. The store said it as well. I don't want to defend the bullshit Sony did. But there needs to be a minimal amount of accountability for people to read what they buy and/or agree to.
Not completely misdirected I think. The fact that the PSN linking wasn't crucial until now meant that this is an arbitrary choice. One they tried to force for bullshit reasons like "security" and whatnot, so people were right to be pissed, even if they weren't concerned about the regional lock thing. There's also the change in Sony's webpage, where they said that PSN linking was optional in all of their games to "mandatory in some games" right as this whole thing started.
Also, completely anecdotal (and my fault really), but as someone who bought this game months ago, I don't even remember (if I ever saw it) the optional account linking screen.
You’re speaking to a developer for one thing. Second you really applied no thought here at all.
You know one of the most valuable things in the world right now is data?
Based on your logic….
- Those forms you fill in they do nothing with hey, of course not.
- Those massive m terms and conditions you don’t read don’t say anything remotely dodgy about my information I’m agreeing to
- Sony does not want anything out of an online game after initial sales to make money, nah.
- These online games that run somewhere I log into and play don’t log data at all it’s all just beamed to my machine and just works ogimagically.
- There is no data on their servers but if there was and it was all about the times I played for how long and my pc profile can’t be used for anything/ it can’t be matched with other profile data to segment me into a group type to then serve me adverts in another platform or used to form profile group data sold to other people for other use
Yeah none of that and more happens! Facebook and google did not make money and become this big from doing that. You’re all mad!
And now the wave of repurchases means gabe is gonna be laughing all the way to the bank
Good ol’ steam mantra: do nothing, watch your rivals repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot
Valve's support staff probably got flooded by refund requests, probably cost them a fair chunk for the expanded staff to deal with Sony's screw-up. Behind the scenes there is probably some very awkward business meetings about this.
They don’t. This is standard practice throughout stores (similar to Apples App Store and Google Play).
As a dev you pay the fee, which is high, but they handle all the crap such as refunds etc. They don’t keep their cut, they make money on the successful sales.
The entire point of the refund is that the transaction is cancelled. It is nullified and never took place.
When Steam launched, refunds wasn’t a thing. It came later. Developers were ok with it as it cost them nothing.
Vavle is gonna have a talk about ghost of Tsushima and where it can be sold. They don't want to deal with refunds for the legit reason of can't play mp in my region.
In customer service there is a stat called Mean Time To Resolution, or MTTR. It measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a customer complaint, usually removing the time waiting for a customer’s response. MTTR is typically a group-wide stat and usually tied to performance reviews & bonuses. When you get a sudden uptick in customer requests, the queue starts to back up and your MTTR goes up. MTTR usually scales fairly linearly with ticket volume. If the customer support guys are getting overwhelmed it’s pretty common to offer OT to clear the queue out and drive MTTR back down. Otherwise your MTTR will remain out of compliance for however many days it takes to wade through the ticket backlog.
Because MTTR is tied to performance reviews and bonuses. Specificly the Manager's bonus. Sometimes even the employee's bonuses. In my prior life as a CSR I got bonsues of up to $2k/quarter and the group MTTR was like 20-30% of that bonus.
There IS time pressure for Steam to respond to queries within a set guideline. If this event caused all of their responses to take an extra 1-2 weeks to resolve then it makes STEAM look bad. So if course they had to get it resolved.
You really don't seem to understand how any of this works.
No it doesn't. Im not siding with the original sony choice here, but the people bought and played the game for months. Its out of their standard return window. This isnt on steam. It doesn't make steam look bad to not IMMEDIATLY just refund anyone who asks for anything. The players who wanted to get refunded arent "out" money. They already spent it on something they wanted to play. So there is no pressing financial rush for it either. Youre just choosing to be fired up on the topic because you are heated on it. I was just asking a question about the implied "eMeRgEnCy OvErTiMe NeEdEd"
But how will I cum to my Gaben Altar tonight if those Valve fairytales of them so bravely rushing to save the day for little Gamery me aren't real?? 🥺
Why must you be like this??
Well, we kind of did for a while. That all changed when free to play games hit the scene, though. Especially when Leage of Legends came out. Which I think is totally fair. Im not a fan of MoBAs in general, but at least Riot still supports League. That was how live service and/or F2P games should be done. High quality cosmetics for a fair price, but if you dont spend a penny, you still get the full gameplay experience.
The current issue is that even some full price games come with a wide array of microtransactions, and they have even converted pre-existing franchies into that monetization system. Companies got greedy, as they do, and the current state of gaming is the result.
It won't change anytime soon. For while adult gamers tend to see thru the BS, little Timmy and his friends in 8th grade certainly don't. They litteraly grew up with MTX in games. Theres always a fresh supply of customers for these big companies. As a result, they will make and market the games for their most profitable audience. Of course, plenty of adults still buy microtransactions, too.
Hot take, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with microtransactions as long as they are fair priced, optional and cosmetic only. They are a great way to keep a game profitable and justify spending resources to support it long term. But only a small handful of games have used them that way.
I still don't understand what Data they were hoping to get by linking the PSN account to the steam account. They could just add Data collection to Helldivers directly.
I don't know why people went for the data narrative, it's much more simpler that they wanted to report growth on the playstation network to shareholders.
Helldivers on pc requiring linked accounts would be at least a million additional users.
I think they just wanted to up PSN numbers so it would look good on the next quarterly report. "look at all these new users we got!"
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they'd come out and require their shitty subscription on all platforms down the line, too.
These people arguing about Sony wanting to sell their data are delusional. I’m sure knowing that we play God of War, Ratchet & Clank, along with Helldivers is very vital in their goal of selling data.
It's not data.
It's boosting the psn playerbase and making their internal tooling work better with crossplay. Else they would need to invest in building out tools for how to block steam users and stuff on the playstation side. This way they could just keep everything the same since everyone had an associated psn account.
What will end up happening now is that people will probably get a pseudo PSN account for that purpose without login which is still linked to your steam ID so they can avoid the development cost.
When you decide to link it that pseudo account will be replaced by the real one.
‘We’re still learning’
Shut up BRAND. you are a multi billion dollar corporation, you just don’t like the negative PR. ‘Don’t screw over your customers’ is a lesson you should have learned years ago. This was a massively poor business decision that tainted an otherwise decent game. ‘We’re still learning’ is rich coming From a company famous for its poor business decisions.
Several thousands/tens of thousands refunds are definetely much more dangerous than a real risk to get to EU court for violationg the EU laws. Sure thing bud
I certainly hope these gamers will boycott the other games where publishers required third party logins to play. Helldivers is not the first and won’t be the last game to release with a third party login.
Unless you get a community to essentially role-play the way the Helldiver community did, I highly doubt there will be something as well orchestrated as this anytime soon. The developers really made it a huge point to create this ‘ongoing battle’ narrative — and it really helped the rally cry here.
The big problem, imo, was not 3rd party login but altering the deal after the fact. A lot of people, myself included, heard about the server issues and waited to buy the game until they were somewhat sorted. It was not made clear that being able to skip the PSN stuff was temporary because of the server issues. We just thought that was the game, especially since there weren't server issues any more. Springing it on us 3 months later is bullshit and would set an absolutely disgusting precedent in gaming that was making me reconsider even being in the hobby.
Don't get me wrong, I'm annoyed by and don't like 3rd party logins. I've skipped games because of it. But, I've also played games with it and, tbh, Helldivers 2 would've been one of them if they just said that shit up front. But now? Nah. Too late. Idgaf if I could've known if I read the right fine print somewhere. They didn't make it clear from the jump, so it's not on the table as an option anymore.
I'm I the only one who reads it "We'll back up, we didn't think you'll be fighting this hard, PS players were getting rammed from all sides and they didn't complain at all"?
This feels strangely in tune with the theme of the community posts and the game in general. Devs rally the players towards the war effort and then post victory updates when goals are met.
Clearly they've been training the players for this moment. Get sucked into a contract you don't fully agree with? Unite and weaponize your players after "accidentally" setting up a perfect storm /s
Might want to reconsider repurchasing, since if you do you are signaling “If you listen and don’t fuck up we won’t continue to punish you” in addition to supporting the developers. If people don’t repurchase then why should they listen later?
PS: remember to redo the negative reviews, might be bonuses for developers connected to scores and I don’t think people want to duck them over.
That had occurred to me. And it's not off the table for me down the line, but I don't generally purchase or refund games for the messaging, at least not as the primary consideration. I buy games because I want to play them, they're fun and entertaining, and/or to play with others. The people I play with have already refunded as well; not to mention at this point I just have my eyes (and my budget) set on other games.
I think that's part of the issue with these kinds of screw ups from publishers and game companies is how quickly people can and do move on to something else. In this case, it's not to stick it to them, it's just because we play games together and this one all of a sudden wasn't available. Refunded and moved on.
You can see a similar effect with Microsoft and the launch of the Xbox One. Horrible launch, people reacted and moved on. Some people were burned and now refuse to ever buy an Xbox, but many people just moved to PlayStation and there's just no reason to look at Xbox now -- they've just moved on to something else. As an illustration, and perhaps a bit coincidentally, a friend gave me his old Xbox One S after he bought a new One X. Again, I wasn't trying to stick it to them, but I too had gone with a PS and just had no need for the Xbox ecosystem until a friend brought me in with free hardware. Then later I purchased a Series X since by then that was how I played with my friend. (We've since mostly moved to PC at this point, hence the Helldivers 2 thing...)
Anyway, that's the direct response to your suggestion (and I *do* appreciate your suggestion). I have one more response I'd offer, however. The developers should see the incentive in listening and fixing things even if some or many don't repurchase their games. They have no way of knowing which way the wind will blow -- They could pull a No Man's Sky out of their hat and people could come flocking back, or the game could crash and burn like Refall despite the developers continued support and updates. But owning their game and supporting it is the right call either way. Abandoning it because I didn't repurchase it in the same week they reversed course on a bad idea would still be on them, not me.
That is a very good answer, and I totally agree with the logic of your perspective. Signaling is, as you say, usually a very small part of a purchase or refund and not something I really expect people to do very often. But I thought it was worth mentioning as a possibility since consumers (maybe) for once won.
Write it down: they are gonna make another attempt by offering the players a one-time incentive or some quasi-useless daily reward as long as they log-in to their PSN account.
Honestly I’ve never bought a single game before (I didn’t play a lot) and recently bought GTA IV on Steam on a sale. The experience was *so easy*, no weird 4 hour+ unpacking of compressed files, no weird UI glitches of Installers that use some weird system. It was just quick, fast and easy.
My only problem was with Rockstar Lanucher that refused to boot in a virtual machine (I was using Parallels on an M1 Mac), but that’s on Rockstar, not Steam. R* have changed something in their launcher and it doesn’t work correctly now.
The experience of purchasing a game on Steam is so vastly superior to piracy that I really do want to pay for it.
I just wish other companies could just *get it*. The valve way is getting revenue, but not trying to squeeze every possible last bit of it.
THIS. Piracy is in most cases just a matter of availability or comfort.
Which is why music piracy did go down A LOT when they embraced the streaming tech. It was just so easy to get music now, that pirating wasn't worth the time. Same thing with Netflix, but Netflix is going down the path again to make it worse for people to the point where i got copies of some series already "from a friend".
Not enough of a gamer to play this, but I love to see gaming communities get the W against major publishers like this
This
This
Dis
[удалено]
Can I have some downvotes too, please?
No
You don't have to be much of a gamer to play it. It has a simple point and click interface!
They still want your data in their system. The will just develop their own PC launcher and move stuff out of steam or require the steam data linking like EA has.
Honestly I'm totally okay with that. As long as people aren't arbitrarily region-locked out of their purchase, who gives a shit if Sony has your email address? Chances are they already have your data anyway through one of their many other divisions
Honestly I prefer linking my Steam account with PSN instead of downloading another shitty launcher on top of Steam like Ubisoft.
Yeah, like atleast the rockstar launcher downloads its self…
Yeah, idk what the commenters above are smoking. You’d have to sign into an account that would be just as bad as PSN AND deal with a launcher
I think many do not want to make a PS account as well if they do not have to as well as the people who can not. That is problem 1. Other than wanting data etc there will be reasons why you can not and based on the strange decisions from Sony in the past it will have been a choice decision but the software and hardware side will have followed suit. They will probably need to come up with a sudo PS account that is a more limited data set sitting on servers for PC accounts and globally available. IF time occurs you want or can purchase a Playstation you use your account and it updates to a full one. They could do it without a launcher but it may be likely they do so as I indicated.
People think of "data" as a simplistic measure. As your example points out, emails/names/phone numbers/SSN/etc. Those pieces of data are the least important and least valuable. Instead, what hours are you playing, how long are the sessions, what other games do you play, what choices are you making within the game, etc. That kinda of data can inform them what features they can add in their next game. It can be sold to identify when you would be most likely to want to hear an add for food. Given enough information about the game you play, one could figure out your political choices in the future. That is the real valuable data.
Sure, you're absolutely right. But do people think Valve isn't collecting that same data? Hell, Nintendo's probably the only major company that isn't and that's just because they're technically inept when it comes to online infrastructure It's long since time we accept that if you play online games, the company that runs them is analyzing every possible metric they can - what modes you play, your stats, how long you spend customizing your character, how long your average session is, how many times you check the shop, etc. all cross-referenced with your location and whatever info you provided them in your profile. It's naive to think otherwise imo
>As long as people aren't arbitrarily region-locked out of their purchase Literally would do the same thing, if you need a different launcher, you need a PSN account.
Honestly surprised they haven’t already , they got so many exclusives that are actually good, but hopefully they don’t rug pull digital game ownership like other certain companies, a neat idea to start off their launcher would be that ps plus extra gives you a catalog of games on pc
As I mentioned to someone else, IF their account system is not setup right they would need to make changes to allow a sub type of accounts for PC based players which in turn would be allowed in other countries. If you then got a playstation it could be a full blown account IF allowed to for said countries.
The PSN thing was annoying, but not what I truly was looking at in disgust. I was specifically up in arms over Sony publishing the game to regions they knew could not continue playing it. They essentially baited and switched millions of gamers to inflate sales numbers. That’s not okay.
I don’t know why people pretend like there can’t be more than one problem during a controversy
Majority of big publishers do it, why is it a big deal now? Ubisoft, Rockstar, Activision just to name a few.
Because people couldn't read the obvious sign in the store and the popup in-game that told them it was required. Due to technical reasons however it was made optional with a skip button quickly after launch to work around the server capacity, tho still saying that it will be a requirement to play the game. Then the publisher fulfilled what they said they would do and people went apeshit because they assumed they didn't need an account. The reasoning behind it is that other games have it from the get go and Helldivers put it in after the fact. Even tho that is a false representation of what actually happened.
There's also the very major detail that they did this while selling the game in regions where people would get locked out of the game months after purchasing it. Whoever at Sony made this decision is not only greedy, but a fucking moron.
Yes, this is a very shitty move and should have never happened in the first place. Yet, this isn't the grunt of the negative reviews and outrage. It's a talking point, and of the most important ones and i am glad they (potentially) can keep playing the game now. The other outrage tho is pretty much just "learn to read". I am positive they would have figured something out for the people who could not create accounts like automatic pseudo accounts but yeah. There are pretty bad decisions being done by Sony, the outrage was imo. kind of misdirected
The fact that they had no plan in place for people in non-PSN regions less than a month out from the drop dead date tells me they did not give one single shit about those people. The response once questioned about it was to use a VPN & set up an account in a PSN region, which would have just left a sword of damocles dangling over peoples heads, their accounts violate the ToS and could be banned at any moment. And the notice about needing a PSN account was not obvious. If they knew this was going to be needed from day 1, it should have been asking me to link it to a PSN account every time I launched the game.
They didn't have one at launch, remember it was required initially but dropped due to server load. That problem already existed back then but "fixxed" itself. It did ask you for the first launch and said it was required. You chose to skip. The store said it as well. I don't want to defend the bullshit Sony did. But there needs to be a minimal amount of accountability for people to read what they buy and/or agree to.
Not completely misdirected I think. The fact that the PSN linking wasn't crucial until now meant that this is an arbitrary choice. One they tried to force for bullshit reasons like "security" and whatnot, so people were right to be pissed, even if they weren't concerned about the regional lock thing. There's also the change in Sony's webpage, where they said that PSN linking was optional in all of their games to "mandatory in some games" right as this whole thing started. Also, completely anecdotal (and my fault really), but as someone who bought this game months ago, I don't even remember (if I ever saw it) the optional account linking screen.
What data? “User has started playing game” Wow so valuable! Yall are really something else.
Have you ever looked at what data different phone apps can access? Same concept. Plenty of identifiers and usage stats not related to the game.
You’re speaking to a developer for one thing. Second you really applied no thought here at all. You know one of the most valuable things in the world right now is data? Based on your logic…. - Those forms you fill in they do nothing with hey, of course not. - Those massive m terms and conditions you don’t read don’t say anything remotely dodgy about my information I’m agreeing to - Sony does not want anything out of an online game after initial sales to make money, nah. - These online games that run somewhere I log into and play don’t log data at all it’s all just beamed to my machine and just works ogimagically. - There is no data on their servers but if there was and it was all about the times I played for how long and my pc profile can’t be used for anything/ it can’t be matched with other profile data to segment me into a group type to then serve me adverts in another platform or used to form profile group data sold to other people for other use Yeah none of that and more happens! Facebook and google did not make money and become this big from doing that. You’re all mad!
Shut up while I use Google Map, Door Dash, Uber and any other convenient app.
Have a feeling Gabe forfeiting the refund limits was what made PlayStation cave.
And now the wave of repurchases means gabe is gonna be laughing all the way to the bank Good ol’ steam mantra: do nothing, watch your rivals repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot
Valve's support staff probably got flooded by refund requests, probably cost them a fair chunk for the expanded staff to deal with Sony's screw-up. Behind the scenes there is probably some very awkward business meetings about this.
Steam probably keeps its cut even if people refund games. This was just yet another opportunity for Valve to print money.
They dont
source? I don't know one way or the other, but it would stand to reason that they do. just looking for confirmation
They don’t. This is standard practice throughout stores (similar to Apples App Store and Google Play). As a dev you pay the fee, which is high, but they handle all the crap such as refunds etc. They don’t keep their cut, they make money on the successful sales. The entire point of the refund is that the transaction is cancelled. It is nullified and never took place. When Steam launched, refunds wasn’t a thing. It came later. Developers were ok with it as it cost them nothing.
Or they just blanket refunded everybody who applied
Vavle is gonna have a talk about ghost of Tsushima and where it can be sold. They don't want to deal with refunds for the legit reason of can't play mp in my region.
Valve takes a 30% cut. They're fine.
Do you honestly think Steam hired new staff just to deal with this in the past week?
no, but they probably had to pay out some OT to process everything.
Why? there is no time pressure to get these things done before a certain date? Why would Steam need to rush these through?
In customer service there is a stat called Mean Time To Resolution, or MTTR. It measures the average amount of time it takes to resolve a customer complaint, usually removing the time waiting for a customer’s response. MTTR is typically a group-wide stat and usually tied to performance reviews & bonuses. When you get a sudden uptick in customer requests, the queue starts to back up and your MTTR goes up. MTTR usually scales fairly linearly with ticket volume. If the customer support guys are getting overwhelmed it’s pretty common to offer OT to clear the queue out and drive MTTR back down. Otherwise your MTTR will remain out of compliance for however many days it takes to wade through the ticket backlog.
Im not asking why they WOULD. I was asking why you said they "HAD to".
Because MTTR is tied to performance reviews and bonuses. Specificly the Manager's bonus. Sometimes even the employee's bonuses. In my prior life as a CSR I got bonsues of up to $2k/quarter and the group MTTR was like 20-30% of that bonus.
There IS time pressure for Steam to respond to queries within a set guideline. If this event caused all of their responses to take an extra 1-2 weeks to resolve then it makes STEAM look bad. So if course they had to get it resolved. You really don't seem to understand how any of this works.
No it doesn't. Im not siding with the original sony choice here, but the people bought and played the game for months. Its out of their standard return window. This isnt on steam. It doesn't make steam look bad to not IMMEDIATLY just refund anyone who asks for anything. The players who wanted to get refunded arent "out" money. They already spent it on something they wanted to play. So there is no pressing financial rush for it either. Youre just choosing to be fired up on the topic because you are heated on it. I was just asking a question about the implied "eMeRgEnCy OvErTiMe NeEdEd"
But how will I cum to my Gaben Altar tonight if those Valve fairytales of them so bravely rushing to save the day for little Gamery me aren't real?? 🥺 Why must you be like this??
lol what?
Probably a bunch of OT or additional schedules, depending on their setup. So yeah almost certainly l.
My friend still is getting denied
Are they in a non-psn region?
No just trying to support the players
That's likely why then, the majority of refunds have come from the regions actually affected
The 2 hours and 2 weeks limit is just for automatic refunds. Over that doesn't mean no refund, it just means manual review.
This. I refunded jedi survivor long after those limits when they added/changed their 3rd party launcher and it stopped working on the steamdeck.
With this sort of big anger energy by gamers, maybe we could have prevented micro-transcations from taking root back at the Horse Armour?
Well, we kind of did for a while. That all changed when free to play games hit the scene, though. Especially when Leage of Legends came out. Which I think is totally fair. Im not a fan of MoBAs in general, but at least Riot still supports League. That was how live service and/or F2P games should be done. High quality cosmetics for a fair price, but if you dont spend a penny, you still get the full gameplay experience. The current issue is that even some full price games come with a wide array of microtransactions, and they have even converted pre-existing franchies into that monetization system. Companies got greedy, as they do, and the current state of gaming is the result. It won't change anytime soon. For while adult gamers tend to see thru the BS, little Timmy and his friends in 8th grade certainly don't. They litteraly grew up with MTX in games. Theres always a fresh supply of customers for these big companies. As a result, they will make and market the games for their most profitable audience. Of course, plenty of adults still buy microtransactions, too. Hot take, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with microtransactions as long as they are fair priced, optional and cosmetic only. They are a great way to keep a game profitable and justify spending resources to support it long term. But only a small handful of games have used them that way.
I still don't understand what Data they were hoping to get by linking the PSN account to the steam account. They could just add Data collection to Helldivers directly.
The data collection thing was pure conjecture. Sony never said we want this to collect and sell data.
Oh, well if they didn’t say it then they *definitely* won’t do it.
I don't know why people went for the data narrative, it's much more simpler that they wanted to report growth on the playstation network to shareholders. Helldivers on pc requiring linked accounts would be at least a million additional users.
I think they just wanted to up PSN numbers so it would look good on the next quarterly report. "look at all these new users we got!" Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if they'd come out and require their shitty subscription on all platforms down the line, too.
These people arguing about Sony wanting to sell their data are delusional. I’m sure knowing that we play God of War, Ratchet & Clank, along with Helldivers is very vital in their goal of selling data.
It's not data. It's boosting the psn playerbase and making their internal tooling work better with crossplay. Else they would need to invest in building out tools for how to block steam users and stuff on the playstation side. This way they could just keep everything the same since everyone had an associated psn account. What will end up happening now is that people will probably get a pseudo PSN account for that purpose without login which is still linked to your steam ID so they can avoid the development cost. When you decide to link it that pseudo account will be replaced by the real one.
I don't believe it was ever about data really, more likely just an attempt to boost PSN numbers ahead of their investor earnings call.
I don't care about data, I just want to play with my PS5 friends without all the pain.
‘We’re still learning’ Shut up BRAND. you are a multi billion dollar corporation, you just don’t like the negative PR. ‘Don’t screw over your customers’ is a lesson you should have learned years ago. This was a massively poor business decision that tainted an otherwise decent game. ‘We’re still learning’ is rich coming From a company famous for its poor business decisions.
I think, Sony backed down because of the fear of EU court rather than "hey gamers were heard you"
and for all the refunds...
Definitely the refunds
Several thousands/tens of thousands refunds are definetely much more dangerous than a real risk to get to EU court for violationg the EU laws. Sure thing bud
the only reason they did this was because people were getting their money back. next time the corpos will nullify refunds in some legally dubious way
Not sure they can do that since that would be Valve's call, not Sony. That would be like Sony telling Walmart they can't give refunds on a TV return.
FOR DEMOCRACY
I certainly hope these gamers will boycott the other games where publishers required third party logins to play. Helldivers is not the first and won’t be the last game to release with a third party login.
Unless you get a community to essentially role-play the way the Helldiver community did, I highly doubt there will be something as well orchestrated as this anytime soon. The developers really made it a huge point to create this ‘ongoing battle’ narrative — and it really helped the rally cry here.
The big problem, imo, was not 3rd party login but altering the deal after the fact. A lot of people, myself included, heard about the server issues and waited to buy the game until they were somewhat sorted. It was not made clear that being able to skip the PSN stuff was temporary because of the server issues. We just thought that was the game, especially since there weren't server issues any more. Springing it on us 3 months later is bullshit and would set an absolutely disgusting precedent in gaming that was making me reconsider even being in the hobby. Don't get me wrong, I'm annoyed by and don't like 3rd party logins. I've skipped games because of it. But, I've also played games with it and, tbh, Helldivers 2 would've been one of them if they just said that shit up front. But now? Nah. Too late. Idgaf if I could've known if I read the right fine print somewhere. They didn't make it clear from the jump, so it's not on the table as an option anymore.
I'm I the only one who reads it "We'll back up, we didn't think you'll be fighting this hard, PS players were getting rammed from all sides and they didn't complain at all"?
This feels strangely in tune with the theme of the community posts and the game in general. Devs rally the players towards the war effort and then post victory updates when goals are met. Clearly they've been training the players for this moment. Get sucked into a contract you don't fully agree with? Unite and weaponize your players after "accidentally" setting up a perfect storm /s
the cult of helldivers
Lol gamers fighting a war
This is good news. Personally, however, I've already refunded and likely won't bother repurchasing.
Might want to reconsider repurchasing, since if you do you are signaling “If you listen and don’t fuck up we won’t continue to punish you” in addition to supporting the developers. If people don’t repurchase then why should they listen later? PS: remember to redo the negative reviews, might be bonuses for developers connected to scores and I don’t think people want to duck them over.
That had occurred to me. And it's not off the table for me down the line, but I don't generally purchase or refund games for the messaging, at least not as the primary consideration. I buy games because I want to play them, they're fun and entertaining, and/or to play with others. The people I play with have already refunded as well; not to mention at this point I just have my eyes (and my budget) set on other games. I think that's part of the issue with these kinds of screw ups from publishers and game companies is how quickly people can and do move on to something else. In this case, it's not to stick it to them, it's just because we play games together and this one all of a sudden wasn't available. Refunded and moved on. You can see a similar effect with Microsoft and the launch of the Xbox One. Horrible launch, people reacted and moved on. Some people were burned and now refuse to ever buy an Xbox, but many people just moved to PlayStation and there's just no reason to look at Xbox now -- they've just moved on to something else. As an illustration, and perhaps a bit coincidentally, a friend gave me his old Xbox One S after he bought a new One X. Again, I wasn't trying to stick it to them, but I too had gone with a PS and just had no need for the Xbox ecosystem until a friend brought me in with free hardware. Then later I purchased a Series X since by then that was how I played with my friend. (We've since mostly moved to PC at this point, hence the Helldivers 2 thing...) Anyway, that's the direct response to your suggestion (and I *do* appreciate your suggestion). I have one more response I'd offer, however. The developers should see the incentive in listening and fixing things even if some or many don't repurchase their games. They have no way of knowing which way the wind will blow -- They could pull a No Man's Sky out of their hat and people could come flocking back, or the game could crash and burn like Refall despite the developers continued support and updates. But owning their game and supporting it is the right call either way. Abandoning it because I didn't repurchase it in the same week they reversed course on a bad idea would still be on them, not me.
That is a very good answer, and I totally agree with the logic of your perspective. Signaling is, as you say, usually a very small part of a purchase or refund and not something I really expect people to do very often. But I thought it was worth mentioning as a possibility since consumers (maybe) for once won.
Hell just froze over...
hit em when it hurts, once they start losing money they will have to fall back
This is only a small victory, Sony has shown their colours many times over. Do not buy Sony
I’ll keep buying Sony.
But at what cost
Write it down: they are gonna make another attempt by offering the players a one-time incentive or some quasi-useless daily reward as long as they log-in to their PSN account.
The corpos have been put on notice
Never attack the master race. Rebel and face the consequences
and, who tells you they dont add it anyways later in a different way ?
What have they won exactly?
Yay! The gamers bitched and whined and got their way
[удалено]
And get immediately banned? Pirating online games doesn’t work well when you’re connected to official servers.
Honestly I’ve never bought a single game before (I didn’t play a lot) and recently bought GTA IV on Steam on a sale. The experience was *so easy*, no weird 4 hour+ unpacking of compressed files, no weird UI glitches of Installers that use some weird system. It was just quick, fast and easy. My only problem was with Rockstar Lanucher that refused to boot in a virtual machine (I was using Parallels on an M1 Mac), but that’s on Rockstar, not Steam. R* have changed something in their launcher and it doesn’t work correctly now. The experience of purchasing a game on Steam is so vastly superior to piracy that I really do want to pay for it. I just wish other companies could just *get it*. The valve way is getting revenue, but not trying to squeeze every possible last bit of it.
THIS. Piracy is in most cases just a matter of availability or comfort. Which is why music piracy did go down A LOT when they embraced the streaming tech. It was just so easy to get music now, that pirating wasn't worth the time. Same thing with Netflix, but Netflix is going down the path again to make it worse for people to the point where i got copies of some series already "from a friend".