@bigsocrates said:
PC players don't want to have to join the console peasant network.
Hah. You're right about that. The whole "PC Master Race" thing. "We don't want to be in any way affiliated with those console peasants!" Pardon me while I roll my eyes so hard that I need to retrieve them from off the floor.
@bigsocrates said:
I think Sony's claimed reasoning was completely bogus.
I don't. And here I speak from personal experience as a consumer.
Whenever there's a multiplatform, cross-play game, the most rampant cheaters are always on PC, because as an unregulated platform it's just way easier to do. It's why PS5 suddenly no longer allowed offloading saves to USB, because that made it all the easier to move a save over to your PC and edit it for purposes of cheating. Yes, there are various PC anti-cheat services that everyone hates, but as an added bonus, they never seem to actually work.
In Helldivers 2 specifically, from the beginning there were players cheating, and it was affecting other random users. E.g., they'd end a mission and be rewarded with the max number of resources because there was a cheater in their group, and then their account is sort of ruined because they wanted to play the game legitimately, not just give themselves 9,999 of everything (let alone open themselves to a ban for something that wasn't their fault). I can name half a dozen multiplayer games off the top of my head where I've stuck to the console version because I didn't want to be in a pool with so many people with hacked saves. And I typically turn off crossplay for just this reason in any games that have it.
So when Sony says: "We're implementing this to protect our players," I don't immediately jump to the conclusion that they're lying, because as a general rule, I have personally found the closed console environment to be more secure from these kind of hijinks. Now, does that mean that Sony doesn't also want that sweet, sweet personal data? Of course not! Both can be true. And yet you're telling me that you're completely certain they're lying about the intended reason, when you simply have no way of knowing that. It is almost always a safe bet that the reality is more complicated that a single reason, particularly a nefarious one.
EDIT: I should probably also clarify that I don't necessarily think Sony would have done a better job at *actually* stopping cheating; these players are still on PC and it's not clear to me how exactly tying them to a PSN account would help with regulation. But that doesn't mean I automatically dismiss the stated *intent*. After all, I don't actually know how any of this stuff works.
@bigsocrates said:
But to sell a game that's always online and require an account after months of sales or you totally lose access to the game (without any refund offered, at least at first) is some grade A bullshit regardless of the reason.
You shouldn't be allowed to sell something and then revoke access unilaterally after the fact unless someone does something you want. And yes I know that the Steam page warned about it in the fine print, but I think fine print is generally bullshit (and hasn't been tested in court very often.) Unless there was a separate splash page prior to purchase alerting people you're going to get lots of buyers who don't know about it.
So you take their money and then you change the deal and I think that's a trash thing to do, regardless of what company it is and whether it's malicious or because you're too incompetent to get it working on launch.
Yes, we completely agree on this and have from the beginning. I never said otherwise.
@bigsocrates said:
I just think that there are legitimate reasons for people not to want this additional requirement...
There are, but my feeling is that that the ratio of entitled whining to legitimate grievance is somewhat higher that you apparently think it is. There are legitimate reasons, but those are so often not the real reasons. As @nodima already said, "I found the data warrior angle pretty embarrassing, considering these were Steam/Twitter/Reddit blatherers taking a so-called stand for data privacy." And you yourself speculated that "the vast majority of Steam sales are in territories that have PSN." My feeling is that a whole lot of people got fairly irrationally angry and then sought more legitimate reasons to justify it.
Doesn't mean Sony didn't royally fuck up! They did! It was a dumb decision and now they've paid the PR price and reversed it, and will hopefully stop to think a little more next time. This whole thing resembles an extremely miniaturized version of Microsoft with their epically disastrous Xbox One Launch; they assumed that since people already accepted most of their proposed DRM stuff from Valve/Steam, they would accept it from a MS console. Boy were they wrong; the console loyalists were used to physical games and weren't ready to make that switch, and now it's a decade later and MS is the perpetual underdog because of it. Somewhat ironically, this time it is the Steam users complaining from the other side for being asked to do something that is, as you say, getting more and more common these days anyway.
Anyway, this is still a win for consumers, and I think that we ultimately agree on a lot, with the proviso that I am slightly less cynical about Sony and more cynical about the userbase. But as I've said, aside from people in those territories which actually can't create PSN accounts, EHS. And certainly this will be a candidate on @allthedinos' "Hottest Mess" list for our due consideration. It blew up so much that, who knows, it might actually end up being one of the winners...
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