Ngl, this was the last thing I thought Sony was going to do in handling a situation that they may not have accounted for.

Rather than looking for a way to resolve the situation, they decided to just outright pull Helldivers 2 off of Steam from all the countries that don’t support PSN.

Steam is now allowing refunds for the game. Some cases of players having over 200 hours of playtime and their refunds still being approved.

This is a pretty surprising turn of events, especially considering how much of an impact PC had on the game.

Here’s to hoping Sony eventually does allow the game to be resold in these countries again. Definitely a huge loss of good will for what turned about to one of the biggest surprises of the year. Even more upsetting when Arrowhead had nothing to do with the decisions that are being made, yet are collateral damage in all this.

Arrowhead are encouraging players to express their frustrations and even request refunds so Sony can take the issue seriously.

Wow, it's getting review bombed "bigly" and sales on Steam are crashing.

Guess Arrowhead will not be part or ever working with Sony again after this.

Sony must have thought "Well the game has been way more successful than we budgeted for, so who cares if we F-it up".

Am really sorry for Arrowhead though. They should copy paste the game in Helldivers3 and release it themselves without the PS BS.

Requiring PSN is a fairly logical move. Requiring it in countries that don't officially support PSN sounds stupid af and self harming. But as usual, gamers are overreacting, and the majority of overreactions come from drama queens who are hardly affected by this. Helldivers 2 exists because of Sony's support, and the IP itself is owned by Sony. The damage here is probably fixable as long as the game remains of high quality and gets updated with fresh content that keep people engaged for a long time.

This seems counterproductive to the idea of making money. Do they know this? Do their board/shareholders?

Prelude to the inclusion of a PSN layer on Steam, perhaps?

How hard is it to make a foreign PSN account?
How do people in those countries play on Playstation?
How do other games on Steam that require Microsoft/PSN/Publisher accounts get sold?

I've had a US Amazon account since the 90s, as well as a UK one as it wasn't available in my country. And I've tons of 'useless' accounts nowadays, EA, Origin, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Square Enix, Capcom, Epic, Bethesda, Roblox, and PSN accounts. Heck in GT Sport many people also had EU and Asian PSN accounts to race on other servers.

It would be nice not to have to make all those accounts, yet kinda baffling why HD2 is suddenly the hill to die on?

Heck my Password 'file' has over 200 different passwords for all different kinds of accounts.

That’s no longer what the problem is. No one in any of these non-PSN supported countries can now buy Helldivers 2 on Steam and by extension by those who have already purchased the game to be defacto banned. And trying to circumvent this by VPN breaks Sony’s TOS and can risk being permanently banned. 

It was already an unrealistic request to ask an unknown number of thousands, if not millions, of people to “just change your region” but this process has now become infinitely more difficult.

If you change your region on Steam, you need access to the local currency and a verifiable billing address to authenticate the purchase. Not only that but Steam can begin to question you as to why you have games in your library where the versions are from different regions.

Most other companies typically just don’t sell their games in regions their services aren’t currently in.