Sony backpedals Helldivers 2 PSN account linking plans after 3 days of hell

Three days and over 260,000 overwhelmingly negative recent reviews on Steam later, Sony announced on Twitter that the May 30 update scheduled for Helldivers 2 that would require Steam and PlayStation Network accounts to be linked for all new and current players will not be moving forward. According to the tweet, PlayStation is still learning what is best for PC players and the feedback has been invaluable in helping them reach this conclusion. After three days of hell for players and Helldivers 2 developers, the only question remaining is: how did Sony expect this to go any other way?

Well, that was unnecessary

The originally planned update would force Helldivers 2 players on PC to create and link a PlayStation Network account to their Steam account in order to play the game at all. Sony claimed this was the intent since launch, but a plague of launch issues resulted in the linking requirement being dropped temporarily. Now that servers are much more stable, the plan was to once again require the account linking.

Fans were obviously upset by this move for many reasons. First off, some regions don’t even have the option to create a PlayStation Network account, which would have made it literally impossible for them to play post-update. According to PCMag.com, this led to Valve pulling Helldivers 2 from the Steam store for certain countries as well as offering refunds for players in those regions regardless of previous play time.

Also, why was this even necessary in the first place? Players are playing on PC after all, not PlayStation. So why require them to have a PlayStation Network account? The whole thing seemed out of touch from the get-go, and even though Sony has done the right thing and backpedaled on its plans, it does feel like it left at least somewhat of a mark on player trust in Sony. As a PlayStation fan, but overall a PC gamer first, I’m thrilled that Sony is starting to bring games to PC. But hopefully this whole ordeal was a lesson well learned, not a sign of things to come.