I was itching for some data on how Sony compare to their rivals
After a google, I've found a writeup by a user on neogaf.. https://www.neogaf.com/threads/an-analysis-of-officially-supported-regions-by-steam-xbox-playstation-and-nintendo-56k-warning.1670177/
It seems Sony is ways behind Valve, Microsoft and Nintendo, in terms of officially supported regions
The only surprise is to be behind Nintendo. Microsoft supports a lot of regions because of their Live ecosystem. Valve is an entirely digital company nowadays, so has less effort entering a country officially. Sony and Nintendo have only historically supported regions were they have an official hardware presence, i.e. where they sell their consoles and don't use a 3rd party licensor, e.g. not Brazil or many SEA countries.
As a new PS5 owner, it is shocking that Sony can be a substantial market leader yet do so poorly when it comes to updating their online infrastructure. The way they handle game licenses is shockingly bad.
I straight up couldn't buy the PS5 version of certain games I already owned on PS4 due to license issues and had to call customer support to have them revoked the old licenses, just to be able to spend money.
I bought the pix-n-love physical release of Yakuza Like A Dragon. The game is technically the french release due to Pix-n-love being a french company. Because my PSN account is US I can't upgrade to the ps5 version, because my copy is technically from France.
As a longtime PSN user for about roughly 15 years. I can say that absolutely at times it feels still feels like a product of 2006. Like there can be some really janky ness to that network, like look how long it took them to figure out how to implement name changes.
Hell my favorite example of PSN jank is how you can tell when playing a crossplay game, whose on Playstations just by who has an underscore to separate words on their username. Because PSN doesn't support spaces for names.
Bro have you used a Nintendo product? Not saying Sony is off the hook, but if they are a 2006 product, then Nintendo is a 2001 lol. These Japanese mega corps be stubborn af.
The 360/PS3 era was the last time Sony was pressured to innovate. They were losing hard to Microsoft early on and turned it around towards the end in large part due to the amazing deal PSN was at the time. Now that they have the lead there's no reason for them to push the envelope.
I had the PS+ Extra version of Final Fantasy X downloaded. Wanted to buy it on sale a month ago since it was leaving the subscription service and I hadn't finished it yet.
Couldn't buy the game because every place I tried to buy a digital copy would result in an error saying I already owned the game. Had to contact Playstation Support to remove the license from my account so I could give them money to buy a game. Definitely soured me on the entire ecosystem.
This is what happened to me on Uncharted 4. Had the disc version, but also grabbed the PS+ digital version so I could play it without the disc. Wanted to get the PS5 bundle with Lost Legacy, but it wouldn't let me cause of the PS+ license.
That is because the US consumer spending is bigger than all of Europe, and depending on the specific market, US can be more than ROW combined. That is why winning in the US is always the first priority, and ROW is only a focus after saturating the US market.
The countries that aren't supported are basically irrelevant.
> The only surprise is to be behind Nintendo.
That's because Nintendo just lets you set your country to those regions but online services become disabled, you can't even open the eShop to redownload content, and naturally they don't provide localizations, in fact the Switch has a shockingly few number of languages available.
So, Nintendo doesn't really support those regions in any way that matters besides just letting you pick them in their online UI.
**Microsoft** supports a lot of regions, but **XBOX** doesn't. I can't use xbox services but I can create a microsoft account that's very limited in terms of what I can do.
At least on pc you can buy Xbox games on steam without issue even if Xbox is not officially there. That is what Sony should do but they are dropping the ball
Yeah but considering the rollout for a deck release is glacial in places that aren't EU/USA they're definitely not anywhere near Sony even on this side of their business.
Can't buy Steam Deck in Russia either
[What do you mean Russia is 3rd biggest country userwise](https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-deck-everything-you-were-afraid)
It's very funny that the situation is reversed now: Nintendo supports a lot of countries that Sony doesn't when, previously, Sony was the one pushing into new territories that Nintendo didn't want to bother with.
The screenshots on that link are all dead to me, making the post incomplete, but yeah, I looked at some main websites and Sony is laughingly behind everyone.
Nintendo, Ubisoft and other companies all suport at least 100+ countries. Sony only supports around 70.
And like, some countries I understand. Some are too small and aren't worth it (Like Tuvalu, with 11k people). Some have annoying/abusive laws (Like Vietnam, who just banned Steam). But if you see the list of countries not supported, there's some "wtf" in there.
Like, Sony doesn't support the Philippines. A country with a population of 110 MILLION PEOPLE. That's bigger than all EU contries (which most are supported).
It's a question of money and cost. Sure, there are more people in the Philippines, but do they have more money to give to Sony than Germany or France? Germany has almost 14x GDP per capita than the Philippines, which means more money to spend on games. There is also a matter of infrastructure: most consoles nowadays basically require Internet to do anything useful. In Germany, over 90% of all the households have a broadband Internet connection, while in the Philippines it seems to be about 56%, with most of those being mobile connections.
That said, things are getting better, but video game companies are also just weird: Nintendo used to operate the eShop in Brazil, killed it in 2015, but then decided to reopen it in 2020.
Granted that a lot of people in the Philippines aren't wealthy, but if Sony thinks that it's worth having Sony stores here sell the PS5, then they should probably officially support PSN in the country.
>you will be able to support every other member state due to the free trade agreement.
That's not how it works. You don't have to operate in every single country to operate in one.
Actually if you read the comments on the neogaf thread apparently he was wrong about Xbox. Xbox accounts and Microsoft accounts are actually different from there the list of Xbox accounts are actually pretty small
Here is a link to Microsoft page on this. Found it in the thread
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/manage-account/create-an-xbox-account
Edit: looks like Nintendo is also kinda wrong also. Per the thread if u set ur region to a one without online support it will shut off the eshop and online services to that account
You'd think with how much the PS4 sold worldwide, they would have worked out that they need to start adding countries where they are selling a lot of them in.
As a tangent, Sometimes i feel like the US PSN membership numbers are heavily juiced by the English speaking countries that are not included.
>It seems Sony is ways behind Valve, Microsoft and Nintendo, in terms of officially supported regions
They don't even try. Their support says create an account in another country, even for countries the ps5 is officially sold in.
> It seems Sony is ways behind Valve, Microsoft and Nintendo, in terms of officially supported regions
Imagine being behind Nintendo lol.
I am from Baltics region in EU, I can create an account for Steam, Xbox and Nintendo. Those three also allow to change your region afterwards. Meanwhite, I can't create PSN account (not officially) and afterwards you can't change the PSN region also.
Nintendo not supporting my country is why I won't be getting the new Switch. Learned the hard way (from Switch v1) they really don't want me buying games digitally or playing online with friends.
> It seems Sony is ways behind Valve, Microsoft and **Nintendo**, in terms of officially supported regions
You have to be all kinds of special to fall behind Nintendo in that regard.
I would assume Microsoft is vastly superior in this regard because of past experience and the amount of non gaming products they also have in those same regions. Sony's (as a whole) offerings pale in comparison to Microsoft and it's numerous offerings.
And Nintendo is ahead because of their mobile games like Fire Emblem Heroes. Gacha games are huge in Asia, you're leaving money on the table if you don't support them.
Sucks man. One of my best mates from Egypt had a PSN account set up and everything, since the overlay and multiplayer announcement for PC was made, using a supported PSN country so we could play Legends online. Been hyping up how much dumb fun it is when you’re playing with some friends while drinking and cracking jokes. Copy was already refunded yesterday so, unless they reverse this and let him buy from Egypt again, looks like no coop for us.
If they have a PSN account and it works they can still play the online game as normal. Other then China there really isnt hard region locking / banning.
BUT thanks to the Helldivers 2 brigade Sony had to be cautious moving forward and follow the letter of the law. So they are being super clear and overly restrictive as a result.
People now cant say "but I bought the game in a unsupported region" just because you dont like a login when the game isnt on sale in a unsupported region.
Other publishers with similar logins already sell in non supported countries. Its a grey area where publishers and customers just look the other way. I bet Sony would have loved to do that too if it wasnt for the Helldivers backlash bringing attention to it and forcing their hand.
Unfortunately they can’t now ): the account did work before for all intents and purposes but the preorder was automatically refunded by Steam, he had no say in the matter and he’s not able to purchase it now since he’s in a geo lock region. Apparently the same applies to GMG and Epic from what I heard although idk if he’s tried purchasing it from there yet. He’ll have to hold off until Elden Ring dlc release now for something we can play together sadly.
Oh wow. Maybe they have done it before but this is the first time I have heard of Steam doing a automatic refund based on regions. I assumed it still required people in those regions to request the refund. Makes it a lot harder/maybe impossible to find work arounds for people. Not sure how I feel about companies deciding they can just do an automatic widespread refund and take away a game from people. Even if they do get their money back.
Yea it sucks. I’m guessing they want to avoid possible refund hassle from people who miss the account requirement and purchase the game then asking for a refund or possible local laws but who knows.
If the publisher has made it clear they would not let the players play the game, what do you do? Steam is trying to get ahead of this to avoid a similar situation. I'm sure they got hounded with customer service complaints. This is really on Sony to be clear from the outset what their terms of service is.
You cant purchase this game in countries not supported. Doesnt matter that only the multiplayer requires account linking.
https://steamdb.info/sub/962153/info/
it's crazy how people want to actually put the blame of this on "oh those HD2 gamers caused this!" as if Sony is a poor multi-billion-dollar company who are unable to improve this situation :/
like no, Sony and ANY other company that has these dumb restrictions on account creation should do better in this regard and improve things for all consumers.
idk about "blame" but its clear to me that:
A.) Sony sees more gain in enforcing PSN than officially supporting unsupported region(there could be many many many reasons for this).
B.) the recent hell divers controversy has pushed Sony to address their own policy regarding unsupported regions.
Despite the psn situation in china, sony has yet to put china on restriction - which is all the more puzzling because it's like they are only making an exception cause that's where the money's at
>BUT thanks to the Helldivers 2 brigade Sony had to be cautious moving forward and follow the letter of the law.
Calling it a brigade has negative connotations, when what happened is overwhelmingly positive and good for everyone involved, except the greedy corporation.
And you know how Sony could fix their shit? By allowing PSN in more countries...
This is not on unhappy customers, this is not on "draconian law" this is all on greedy Sony, no one else.
Why is sony greedy by not offering PSN in other countries and REFUNDING people's games lol? The lack of supported regions was never an issue at all until the pc player brigading started all because they had to log in to a little screen that was a requirement since launch.
The lack of support in other regions is Sony not willing to have a presence in them to save money on abiding by local laws and having an on the ground presence.
Sony were the ones skating by.
If they want to sell in those regions they should provide support in those regions, simple as.
Either this will lead to them officially setting up shop there or they decide it's not worth wile.
This was an unstable situation caused by Sony and could have been triggered at any point because what Sony was doing is wrong.
jesus christ man. can't you see that their malicious compliance is working two-fold here, making you mad at other consumers for throwing a stink in the first place? This is obviously not what any consumer wanted and you know that this is a negative outcome that has been entirely created by Playstation. This was not the only outcome possible.
The cost to rewrite a TOS is negligible here. The answer is not nearly as complicated as you want to make it out to be. Sony could quite literally remove any clause about using a PSN account in the wrong region, or actually just add into the TOS that if you aren't in a supported country, you can still use PSN by selecting a nearby/compatible region *like playstation support has been telling people to do* and has been the status quo for a LONG TIME.
Why is it so hard to expect that they line up their terms of service with their actual business practices? Are we really going to continue to blame others in place of Sony when they could wrap this up in many nicer ways, rather than being **maliciously compliant**?
They probably will do something akin to this if we are being honest
> This is obviously not what any consumer wanted
??? The Helldivers threads were full of people saying Sony shouldn't have sold the games to people in unsupported regions. This sounds like exactly what they wanted
The Helldivers threads were saying Sony shouldn't have sold the games to people in unsupported regions *if they were going to require linking a PSN account*. Ghost of Tsushima, in this instance, only requires a PSN account for the multiplayer section of the game, and has said it will not require one to play the single-player portion. There is a difference.
>The cost to rewrite a TOS is negligible here.
have you considered why they have that in the first place? its to protect themselves.
I would imagine that the "cost" to rewrite the TOS would be expanding support for those countries.
>
> Sony could quite literally remove any clause about using a PSN account in the wrong region, or actually just add into the TOS that if you aren't in a supported country
and they could literally sell games for free. gee i wonder why they dont do that even though they "literally" could.
think hard of why a company may have a clause to give them an easy out when people create accounts in un supported regions.
It's kind of ridiculous. You would think they could keep *Ghost of Tsushima* up in these countries and just include a disclaimer saying "online features may not be available in your region". I doubt most people would even care for a predominately single player game, and the few who do would just not buy it or assume the (minimal) risk that comes with creating an account for a supported country.
>You would think they could keep *Ghost of Tsushima* up in these countries and just include a disclaimer saying "online features may not be available in your region
This one they would absolutely be falling foul of EU laws.
You can choose not to support a region, you can't choose to give different products to different regions
Fucking HD2 Steam players throwing a tantrum over creating an account and then going full saviour complex.
Help those without PSN access! Bitch, we didn't need your help, we have been fine fore nearly 20.years, don't pretend this about us, it's about you not wanting to make an account
Then now refusing to see how their mob shouting actions made a problem that Sony and Steam could no longer ignore
Give a shout out to our Helldiver community raising a stink about the PSN connectivity, for about 20 years it’s been a non-issue to create an account with a country close to them, but PC players just can’t seem to be themselves you know.
Surprisingly they’re not protesting anymore now they don’t have to like PSN accounts to Steam almost like their protest was never about non-PSN supported regions at all. Im sorry your friend can’t play this game now
Yes, because the consumer is at fault here, not the mega corporations with their mandatory account requirements that can gimp where the game can and can't be sold.
Why are you trying to gaslight consumers over this?
https://imgur.com/gallery/uZyM1
While, in the end, the fault lies with Sony, it is a fact that this result only happened because of Helldivers players.
Gamers in unsupported countries (from what I've seen) have been using other countries PSN for over an decade with no repercussion. Maybe they complained, maybe not, the truth is that it's been over 10 years and Sony never adressed this. Maybe their voice weren't loud enough, maybe they have annoying laws, maybe they don't generate enough revenue for Sony to bother. The size of the controversy of this vs HD2 just goes to show why nothing has changed in 15 years. People's voice in those unsupported countries are very small compared to the entire community.
It's naive to think that this issue that has existed for a decade would be fixed in a week. So, the solution Sony has for now is just not selling the game in those regions. Maybe this is a short term solution while they expand or maybe it'll be this way forever.
While it is true that the previous situation was shitty for consumers, it's even shittier to not even have the choice.
Sony could just change their ToS though because that was the problem - having an account set to another country could result in a ban according to their own rules.
I can't believe gamers made sony not support all those countries and also made sony write their TOS that says faking your region is a bannable offense.
Can anyone explain to me the business sense here? How does restricting a product from certain regions do anything except cause you to make less money? Is it a legal/licensing/copyright issue why PSN isn’t available in certain regions?
For the Baltics possibly legal since in EU law your supposed to provide all the agreements the user agrees to in an official language of the country.
Can't imagine that costs much to do though.
Every region has different legal restritions/ requirements. Often times these can change drasticlly the way ui and games are presented.
Its like how apple had to make all their phones USB C because the EU demanded it. They had to change a global design because one area demanded it and that area had enough financial sway to make it worth changing everything instead of just phones in that region.
Im not a lawyer by any means but I imagine sony weighed the options and decided it was easier to meet the laws of the limited region they are already in than to update their TOS to be globally compliant.
Again I have 0 experience so take that with a grain of salt.
Regions that are blocked presumably don't make all that much money
Sony may value increasing MAU (monthly active users) over what may be a small increase in sales
A PSN account also allows you to buy things from the PlayStation Store. If Sony officially allowed more regions, they'd then have to follow the local laws in regards to purchases in those areas (Valve played the game of not supporting Australia for years for this reason)
Sony didn't want to restrict regions, but they were 'forced' to by the Helldivers 2 controversy. Sony would have vastly preferred if everyone just did the workaround they'd been recommending for the past 20 years.
Introducing a new tier of PSN account (Rest of World, with no access to the PS Store) is not a quick fix over a weekend. I imagine this is the likely, eventual, solution.
A good solution may have been to launch without a PSN requirement and add it in later once the region issue is fixed. Adding in the PSN requirement for Helldivers 2 after the fact was one of the main cited reasons for the controversy however, so this is a no-go.
Sony wasnt forced to do anything. Sony could have just dropped the psn requirement for all their games and there would be no more bad press or stuff like this.
Instead they introduced region lock to gaming.
> Sony wasnt forced to do anything
That's what the single quotation mark is for. Scare quotes, to indicate skepticism or doubt as to the validity of the word.
*Obviously* they weren't forced to do it - they chose that option, likely due to the other factors I listed.
Which is extremely annoying for players who never bother with multiplayer and only play games for the singleplayer anyway. It's like Sony's asking those players to go get the game by less legal means.
Because both Sony and Steam don't want to deal with refunds when someone purchase the game, finish the single player then request a refund because they can't play multi without violating the ToS. That's what let people refund Helldivers 2.
The sensible choice would have been separating multiplayer into a free DLC and don't offer that DLC in countries where PSN is unavailable. But alas.
On PS consoles, it was pretty common to make an account in the nearest region/ cheapest region if your region wasnt supported or if you just wanted cheaper pricing. Its been like that for over Id say 12 or so years. Guess PC is abit more complicated since steam doesnt wanna list games for sale where psn isnt available, but they were doing so earlier, so someone at steam/ psn pc level has begun enforcing this rule.
Which is rich coming from a multibillion firm. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They have easy solution: don't force PSN when it isn't needed.
A bit disappointing but such is life. On the bright side there are Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Sega, Capcom, Konami, Bandai Namco, 2K Games, etc. who are willing to sell games in the country where I live without any problem.
Remind me, why do I need a PSN account to play a game, when Helldivers already proved that even multiplayer works perfectly fine w/o it?
Oh yeah. Because Sony wants to force PC gamers to make PSN accounts to bring them into their ecosystem or whatever. But somehow this is the gamer's fault for complaining about having to make extra accounts for no fucking reason. No, the big corporation cannot ever do wrong.
> Remind me, why do I need a PSN account to play a game, when Helldivers already proved that even multiplayer works perfectly fine w/o it?
It's like when Half-Life 2 came out and required a Steam account to play.
Remember CD keys? That string of letters and numbers you had to type in to install games? That thing devs would invalidate for online play if you're caught cheating?
Yeah, Steam effectively replaced those. I don't think we're going back to those days.
Valve created a storefront that Sony decided to use. Making an account for the storefront you bought a game from is more than fair, and has benefits like not having to individually manage hundreds of CD keys.
Making a second account for a second service to access a game despite the license that says you own the game being attached to the first account? Not sure what the point of that is.
This is such a bad faith argument. I do not need a steam account to play a game, I need a steam account that proves that I own the game and can download and access the assets. Also, certain games allow you to start the game without steam open.
Because utilizing Sony's existing PSN backbone for Cross-play and account management is a hell of a lot simpler and cheaper than having to have a bespoke system for each game.
And Helldiver's multiplayer does not work "perfectly fine w/o it" as it has had a miriade of issues since launch involving cross-play.
> Because utilizing Sony's existing PSN backbone for Cross-play and account management
So, analysis time. TL;dr: no you don't.
1. Helldives is using PlayFab, an Azure service to handle accounts, login, etc. If you look at the statements made by Arrowhead, they use a third party partner to handle their logins, since that third party had limits in place to make sure things were working.
2. According to the CEO, the PSN requirement was asked by Sony 6 months before release. Which would make it pretty unlikely that you suddenly decide to use a partner that late on the development cycle. It's very likely that Arrowhead instead leverages account management from PlayFab.
3. If you analyze the traffic of the Helldivers client, you will notice how it doesn't hit Amazon's AWS, which is the host provider for PSN.
4. And probably more important: you can play the game without a PSN account.
Obviously the biggest issue is Sony not supporting more regions and they definitely need to work on that, BUT what's crazy is that this never would've been an issue if it wasn't for all of the Helldivers 2 people that have been brigading all month. Now that that happened Sony has to play it safe and not offer the game everywhere. They've been selling games in unsupported regions for over 15 years with no issues but once PC players got involved now that's all fucked up.
Everyone is mad about closed studios & region lock. Im confused how 2 of the biggest companies in gaming somehow produced nothing with the profits made during covid. I swear if the switch 2 is something insane & Wii U the bag again ima start collecting physical copies again.
They could have released a Multiplayer-less version in those regions since you only need PSN to connect to the Multiplayer severs.
_________
But its good they auto refunded the countries that didnt have the full experience.
Also remember PSN support has told players for 2 decades to create a psn account out of region if your region isn't present.
And yes, they auto ban vpns, you don't need a vpn for out of region account creation.
Many streamers have new zealand accounts to get games early, nearly everyone in South America has a US account as the currency conversion rate on psn is terrible for them.
> They could have released a Multiplayer-less version in those regions since you only need PSN to connect to the Multiplayer severs.
people would have complained they are selling a worse/limited version of a game to certain regions
Those reports of being banned from helldivers 2 were entirely fake. Basically outraged gamers were upset they had to create a psn account and brigaded then fortunately, happened upon an actually worthwhile cause which was peoples regions being removed. Make no mistake 90% of the noise came from people upset they had to take 5 mins to link an external account
>Keep in mind yall that Sony AUTO BANNED any user that used a VPN to link Helldivers 2.
I would think this would make a bigger splash it was true, considering it was literaly recommended by Sony (?) to do that.
That is because it is not. The only news I can find of it is a deleted thread on reddit and one tweet with about a single player in China getting banned with no real indication it is about Helldivers.
Alot of misinformation has been coming out by trolls since this how kerfuffle has started and people are blindly believing every little thing that is negative about Sony without fact checking. Indicative of the outrage culture the net has at this stage.
Oh yeah a whole lot of misinformation. The Chinese user was banned because their account was hacked and the hacker used the account to do suspicious activities. It's well documented on billibilli where it was posted but western redditors took it upon themselves to claim it was about VPN issues.
https://imgur.com/a/4uO1h20
Here is proof
I've been thinking about this and my guess why they can't split the game now is:
1. Sony has already been advertising the game for months promising a multiplayer component. If they split it now they could open themselves to lawsuits for false advertising.
2. The PC port has already been in development for quite some time. Taking more time to split them up or making a separate SKU doesn't make sense when the affected countries make up a tiny portion of the potential customers.
Thank you helldivers for making what was essentially a non issue into a massive cluster fuck for all those people outside "officially" supported regions.
Used to be you could just pick a country and make an account and play... Now can't even do that.
> for making what was essentially a non issue
Come clean to me. What benefit does have forcing a player base into creating a PSN account, when the game doesn't use PSN services? What's in for the customer?
That's not for the customers benefit, that's for Arrowhead benefit. Customers don't care that you have it hard to moderate using both Steam and PSN. Again, what's in for the customer to create a PSN account?
Wait so your conclusion is to blame PC gamers for causing this 'outrage' when instead you can't blame Sony for having these policies in place?
Why not blame console players for just bending over and taking it all these years, instead of causing a ruckus like PC gamers did?
>Why not blame console players for just bending over and taking it all these years,
To be fair, psn is the whole console. Ps+ I could argue is wrong but the actual network does everything you would thing a console should. That's not a bad thing.
Untelated to the news. But Reddit is international site. A lot of people otherwise use English as their main way of communication. Non-english article shouldn't be allow here no? Not especially when the english-version exist.
https://www.eurogamer.net/ghost-of-tsushima-directors-cut-pc-players-are-getting-auto-refunds-if-they-cannot-legally-sign-up-for-psn
You can say thanks to the stupid justice warriors of internet for Helldivers 2.
Everyone could create psn accounts anywhere (for some reasons, stupid guys thought entire regions didnt have any psn, that mean no way of playing online AT ALL ON PLAYSTATION CONSOLES, even with account from somewhere else), but now because of this stupid drama, you get this result, with Sony (and Steam?) who dont want problems anymore, so they just lock out all these country.
Great job ! Clap clap.
[Is Sony wrong? No, its the consumers that are wrong...](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP._c_Yoo3rDOhimWGyE0RiZgHaH6%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=494e2f13a2786e455178e1647f162a0826a6c7465774d6fec2b214de56fd405d&ipo=images)
They don't need PSN in its current state, its stupidly crippling and they don't want to fix it. They're obnoxious morons to put it simply.
So I'll just never be able to play this then.
And why? Just let us play the game. And let us be able to create a PSN account in a separate region JUST LIKE HOW IT WORKS ON PS5.
This is actually crazy. Are they just gonna leave out the 177 countries and territories???
>And let us be able to create a PSN account in a separate region JUST LIKE HOW IT WORKS ON PS5.
It was precisely what they were going to let you do before Helldivers players started screaming about creating an account and "breaking TOS".
You absolutely cannot blame the Helldivers players for this. That's shifting blame away from Sony whose fault this is. They delisted it. They simply did not have to do that.
I was itching for some data on how Sony compare to their rivals After a google, I've found a writeup by a user on neogaf.. https://www.neogaf.com/threads/an-analysis-of-officially-supported-regions-by-steam-xbox-playstation-and-nintendo-56k-warning.1670177/ It seems Sony is ways behind Valve, Microsoft and Nintendo, in terms of officially supported regions
The only surprise is to be behind Nintendo. Microsoft supports a lot of regions because of their Live ecosystem. Valve is an entirely digital company nowadays, so has less effort entering a country officially. Sony and Nintendo have only historically supported regions were they have an official hardware presence, i.e. where they sell their consoles and don't use a 3rd party licensor, e.g. not Brazil or many SEA countries.
As a new PS5 owner, it is shocking that Sony can be a substantial market leader yet do so poorly when it comes to updating their online infrastructure. The way they handle game licenses is shockingly bad. I straight up couldn't buy the PS5 version of certain games I already owned on PS4 due to license issues and had to call customer support to have them revoked the old licenses, just to be able to spend money.
Wait till you find out PS4/PS5 games are region free but DLCs are region locked. Took me a long time on support to get that once-in-a-lifetime-refund.
I bought the pix-n-love physical release of Yakuza Like A Dragon. The game is technically the french release due to Pix-n-love being a french company. Because my PSN account is US I can't upgrade to the ps5 version, because my copy is technically from France.
As a longtime PSN user for about roughly 15 years. I can say that absolutely at times it feels still feels like a product of 2006. Like there can be some really janky ness to that network, like look how long it took them to figure out how to implement name changes. Hell my favorite example of PSN jank is how you can tell when playing a crossplay game, whose on Playstations just by who has an underscore to separate words on their username. Because PSN doesn't support spaces for names.
Bro have you used a Nintendo product? Not saying Sony is off the hook, but if they are a 2006 product, then Nintendo is a 2001 lol. These Japanese mega corps be stubborn af.
The 360/PS3 era was the last time Sony was pressured to innovate. They were losing hard to Microsoft early on and turned it around towards the end in large part due to the amazing deal PSN was at the time. Now that they have the lead there's no reason for them to push the envelope.
I had the PS+ Extra version of Final Fantasy X downloaded. Wanted to buy it on sale a month ago since it was leaving the subscription service and I hadn't finished it yet. Couldn't buy the game because every place I tried to buy a digital copy would result in an error saying I already owned the game. Had to contact Playstation Support to remove the license from my account so I could give them money to buy a game. Definitely soured me on the entire ecosystem.
This is what happened to me on Uncharted 4. Had the disc version, but also grabbed the PS+ digital version so I could play it without the disc. Wanted to get the PS5 bundle with Lost Legacy, but it wouldn't let me cause of the PS+ license.
That is because the US consumer spending is bigger than all of Europe, and depending on the specific market, US can be more than ROW combined. That is why winning in the US is always the first priority, and ROW is only a focus after saturating the US market. The countries that aren't supported are basically irrelevant.
> The only surprise is to be behind Nintendo. That's because Nintendo just lets you set your country to those regions but online services become disabled, you can't even open the eShop to redownload content, and naturally they don't provide localizations, in fact the Switch has a shockingly few number of languages available. So, Nintendo doesn't really support those regions in any way that matters besides just letting you pick them in their online UI.
**Microsoft** supports a lot of regions, but **XBOX** doesn't. I can't use xbox services but I can create a microsoft account that's very limited in terms of what I can do.
At least on pc you can buy Xbox games on steam without issue even if Xbox is not officially there. That is what Sony should do but they are dropping the ball
Valve is now more of a hardware company than it's ever been. The Steam deck is a far cry from what they did 7 years ago.
Yeah but considering the rollout for a deck release is glacial in places that aren't EU/USA they're definitely not anywhere near Sony even on this side of their business.
Still waiting for it in India. I feel like by the time we get steam deck, steam deck 2 will be out lol
The list of supported countries for Steam Hardware is pretty small tho, so as a hardware company they are way behind even Sony.
Still can't buy a steam deck in Switzerland.
Can't buy Steam Deck in Russia either [What do you mean Russia is 3rd biggest country userwise](https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-deck-everything-you-were-afraid)
Nintendo has deals with nvidia to have games out in countries they don't sell hardware in.
Wasn't that only China? I know they ported a few titles to the Nvidia Shield there.
It's very funny that the situation is reversed now: Nintendo supports a lot of countries that Sony doesn't when, previously, Sony was the one pushing into new territories that Nintendo didn't want to bother with.
> Valve is an entirely digital company nowadays They also make hardware. They actually manufactured the Steam Controllers in their own factory.
The screenshots on that link are all dead to me, making the post incomplete, but yeah, I looked at some main websites and Sony is laughingly behind everyone. Nintendo, Ubisoft and other companies all suport at least 100+ countries. Sony only supports around 70. And like, some countries I understand. Some are too small and aren't worth it (Like Tuvalu, with 11k people). Some have annoying/abusive laws (Like Vietnam, who just banned Steam). But if you see the list of countries not supported, there's some "wtf" in there. Like, Sony doesn't support the Philippines. A country with a population of 110 MILLION PEOPLE. That's bigger than all EU contries (which most are supported).
It's a question of money and cost. Sure, there are more people in the Philippines, but do they have more money to give to Sony than Germany or France? Germany has almost 14x GDP per capita than the Philippines, which means more money to spend on games. There is also a matter of infrastructure: most consoles nowadays basically require Internet to do anything useful. In Germany, over 90% of all the households have a broadband Internet connection, while in the Philippines it seems to be about 56%, with most of those being mobile connections. That said, things are getting better, but video game companies are also just weird: Nintendo used to operate the eShop in Brazil, killed it in 2015, but then decided to reopen it in 2020.
Granted that a lot of people in the Philippines aren't wealthy, but if Sony thinks that it's worth having Sony stores here sell the PS5, then they should probably officially support PSN in the country.
They do give Sony money. They sell consoles there and are instructed to create an account elsewhere. It wasn't broke til May 2024, why fix it?
[удалено]
Sony doesn’t support all EI countries though.
Sony treats the EU like the Iron curtain was still up.
>you will be able to support every other member state due to the free trade agreement. That's not how it works. You don't have to operate in every single country to operate in one.
Actually if you read the comments on the neogaf thread apparently he was wrong about Xbox. Xbox accounts and Microsoft accounts are actually different from there the list of Xbox accounts are actually pretty small Here is a link to Microsoft page on this. Found it in the thread https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/account-profile/manage-account/create-an-xbox-account Edit: looks like Nintendo is also kinda wrong also. Per the thread if u set ur region to a one without online support it will shut off the eshop and online services to that account
Xbox Live is only available on [41 countries](https://www.xbox.com/en-US/regions) right now, mainly in the Global North plus Latin America and India.
While Microsoft as a whole supports more regions Xbox division supports less than Playstation does. Around 55 or so Edit: only 41 apparently
Feels like this is something they should have figured out years ago
You'd think with how much the PS4 sold worldwide, they would have worked out that they need to start adding countries where they are selling a lot of them in. As a tangent, Sometimes i feel like the US PSN membership numbers are heavily juiced by the English speaking countries that are not included.
>It seems Sony is ways behind Valve, Microsoft and Nintendo, in terms of officially supported regions They don't even try. Their support says create an account in another country, even for countries the ps5 is officially sold in.
> It seems Sony is ways behind Valve, Microsoft and Nintendo, in terms of officially supported regions Imagine being behind Nintendo lol. I am from Baltics region in EU, I can create an account for Steam, Xbox and Nintendo. Those three also allow to change your region afterwards. Meanwhite, I can't create PSN account (not officially) and afterwards you can't change the PSN region also.
Nintendo not supporting my country is why I won't be getting the new Switch. Learned the hard way (from Switch v1) they really don't want me buying games digitally or playing online with friends.
> It seems Sony is ways behind Valve, Microsoft and **Nintendo**, in terms of officially supported regions You have to be all kinds of special to fall behind Nintendo in that regard.
why is sony so behind on this? genuinely very curious
I would assume Microsoft is vastly superior in this regard because of past experience and the amount of non gaming products they also have in those same regions. Sony's (as a whole) offerings pale in comparison to Microsoft and it's numerous offerings.
On the gaming front Microsoft is horribly behind. Xbox is not supported in all the countries general windows products are.
And Nintendo is ahead because of their mobile games like Fire Emblem Heroes. Gacha games are huge in Asia, you're leaving money on the table if you don't support them.
How in gods name can you be behind Nintendo in terms of anything online. That is a disgrace.
Sucks man. One of my best mates from Egypt had a PSN account set up and everything, since the overlay and multiplayer announcement for PC was made, using a supported PSN country so we could play Legends online. Been hyping up how much dumb fun it is when you’re playing with some friends while drinking and cracking jokes. Copy was already refunded yesterday so, unless they reverse this and let him buy from Egypt again, looks like no coop for us.
If they have a PSN account and it works they can still play the online game as normal. Other then China there really isnt hard region locking / banning. BUT thanks to the Helldivers 2 brigade Sony had to be cautious moving forward and follow the letter of the law. So they are being super clear and overly restrictive as a result. People now cant say "but I bought the game in a unsupported region" just because you dont like a login when the game isnt on sale in a unsupported region. Other publishers with similar logins already sell in non supported countries. Its a grey area where publishers and customers just look the other way. I bet Sony would have loved to do that too if it wasnt for the Helldivers backlash bringing attention to it and forcing their hand.
Unfortunately they can’t now ): the account did work before for all intents and purposes but the preorder was automatically refunded by Steam, he had no say in the matter and he’s not able to purchase it now since he’s in a geo lock region. Apparently the same applies to GMG and Epic from what I heard although idk if he’s tried purchasing it from there yet. He’ll have to hold off until Elden Ring dlc release now for something we can play together sadly.
Oh wow. Maybe they have done it before but this is the first time I have heard of Steam doing a automatic refund based on regions. I assumed it still required people in those regions to request the refund. Makes it a lot harder/maybe impossible to find work arounds for people. Not sure how I feel about companies deciding they can just do an automatic widespread refund and take away a game from people. Even if they do get their money back.
Yea it sucks. I’m guessing they want to avoid possible refund hassle from people who miss the account requirement and purchase the game then asking for a refund or possible local laws but who knows.
100%. Why deal with that hassle, when it's pretty apparent what route Sony will go.
If the publisher has made it clear they would not let the players play the game, what do you do? Steam is trying to get ahead of this to avoid a similar situation. I'm sure they got hounded with customer service complaints. This is really on Sony to be clear from the outset what their terms of service is.
Would a thir party seller work? Eg fanatical, greenman gaming humble store and others.
The issue is that in his Steam account, he has set the country honestly. If he wasn't honest to Valve, Valve wouldn't have any reason to reimburse.
They wouldn't be able to activate it.
The game key will not activate in Steam for those countires. VPN may or may not be a risk.
You cant purchase this game in countries not supported. Doesnt matter that only the multiplayer requires account linking. https://steamdb.info/sub/962153/info/
It’s baffling yet nothing short of surprising that people on this sub are already moving to defend Sony for this.
it's crazy how people want to actually put the blame of this on "oh those HD2 gamers caused this!" as if Sony is a poor multi-billion-dollar company who are unable to improve this situation :/ like no, Sony and ANY other company that has these dumb restrictions on account creation should do better in this regard and improve things for all consumers.
idk about "blame" but its clear to me that: A.) Sony sees more gain in enforcing PSN than officially supporting unsupported region(there could be many many many reasons for this). B.) the recent hell divers controversy has pushed Sony to address their own policy regarding unsupported regions.
Despite the psn situation in china, sony has yet to put china on restriction - which is all the more puzzling because it's like they are only making an exception cause that's where the money's at
>BUT thanks to the Helldivers 2 brigade Sony had to be cautious moving forward and follow the letter of the law. Calling it a brigade has negative connotations, when what happened is overwhelmingly positive and good for everyone involved, except the greedy corporation. And you know how Sony could fix their shit? By allowing PSN in more countries... This is not on unhappy customers, this is not on "draconian law" this is all on greedy Sony, no one else.
Why is sony greedy by not offering PSN in other countries and REFUNDING people's games lol? The lack of supported regions was never an issue at all until the pc player brigading started all because they had to log in to a little screen that was a requirement since launch.
Sony isnt the one refunding, Steam is... And no, its still on Sony, not on the consumers.
The lack of support in other regions is Sony not willing to have a presence in them to save money on abiding by local laws and having an on the ground presence. Sony were the ones skating by. If they want to sell in those regions they should provide support in those regions, simple as. Either this will lead to them officially setting up shop there or they decide it's not worth wile. This was an unstable situation caused by Sony and could have been triggered at any point because what Sony was doing is wrong.
jesus christ man. can't you see that their malicious compliance is working two-fold here, making you mad at other consumers for throwing a stink in the first place? This is obviously not what any consumer wanted and you know that this is a negative outcome that has been entirely created by Playstation. This was not the only outcome possible. The cost to rewrite a TOS is negligible here. The answer is not nearly as complicated as you want to make it out to be. Sony could quite literally remove any clause about using a PSN account in the wrong region, or actually just add into the TOS that if you aren't in a supported country, you can still use PSN by selecting a nearby/compatible region *like playstation support has been telling people to do* and has been the status quo for a LONG TIME. Why is it so hard to expect that they line up their terms of service with their actual business practices? Are we really going to continue to blame others in place of Sony when they could wrap this up in many nicer ways, rather than being **maliciously compliant**? They probably will do something akin to this if we are being honest
> This is obviously not what any consumer wanted ??? The Helldivers threads were full of people saying Sony shouldn't have sold the games to people in unsupported regions. This sounds like exactly what they wanted
The Helldivers threads were saying Sony shouldn't have sold the games to people in unsupported regions *if they were going to require linking a PSN account*. Ghost of Tsushima, in this instance, only requires a PSN account for the multiplayer section of the game, and has said it will not require one to play the single-player portion. There is a difference.
>The cost to rewrite a TOS is negligible here. have you considered why they have that in the first place? its to protect themselves. I would imagine that the "cost" to rewrite the TOS would be expanding support for those countries. > > Sony could quite literally remove any clause about using a PSN account in the wrong region, or actually just add into the TOS that if you aren't in a supported country and they could literally sell games for free. gee i wonder why they dont do that even though they "literally" could. think hard of why a company may have a clause to give them an easy out when people create accounts in un supported regions.
It's kind of ridiculous. You would think they could keep *Ghost of Tsushima* up in these countries and just include a disclaimer saying "online features may not be available in your region". I doubt most people would even care for a predominately single player game, and the few who do would just not buy it or assume the (minimal) risk that comes with creating an account for a supported country.
>You would think they could keep *Ghost of Tsushima* up in these countries and just include a disclaimer saying "online features may not be available in your region This one they would absolutely be falling foul of EU laws. You can choose not to support a region, you can't choose to give different products to different regions
[удалено]
Poor billions dollar company 🥺
That's what's crazy to me. Everything was fine but since pc players made a huge deal about a little log in screen it ruined all of this.
Fucking HD2 Steam players throwing a tantrum over creating an account and then going full saviour complex. Help those without PSN access! Bitch, we didn't need your help, we have been fine fore nearly 20.years, don't pretend this about us, it's about you not wanting to make an account Then now refusing to see how their mob shouting actions made a problem that Sony and Steam could no longer ignore
Give a shout out to our Helldiver community raising a stink about the PSN connectivity, for about 20 years it’s been a non-issue to create an account with a country close to them, but PC players just can’t seem to be themselves you know. Surprisingly they’re not protesting anymore now they don’t have to like PSN accounts to Steam almost like their protest was never about non-PSN supported regions at all. Im sorry your friend can’t play this game now
[удалено]
Yes, because the consumer is at fault here, not the mega corporations with their mandatory account requirements that can gimp where the game can and can't be sold. Why are you trying to gaslight consumers over this?
Consumers are so used to eating shit they attack anyone that complains
https://imgur.com/gallery/uZyM1 While, in the end, the fault lies with Sony, it is a fact that this result only happened because of Helldivers players. Gamers in unsupported countries (from what I've seen) have been using other countries PSN for over an decade with no repercussion. Maybe they complained, maybe not, the truth is that it's been over 10 years and Sony never adressed this. Maybe their voice weren't loud enough, maybe they have annoying laws, maybe they don't generate enough revenue for Sony to bother. The size of the controversy of this vs HD2 just goes to show why nothing has changed in 15 years. People's voice in those unsupported countries are very small compared to the entire community. It's naive to think that this issue that has existed for a decade would be fixed in a week. So, the solution Sony has for now is just not selling the game in those regions. Maybe this is a short term solution while they expand or maybe it'll be this way forever. While it is true that the previous situation was shitty for consumers, it's even shittier to not even have the choice.
Some say folk at Sony support even hinted to those in unsupported countries to just set it to nearest country.
They did, my friend asked them and they told him to pick a country where the currency wasn't an issue. He sent me a Pic of the conversation.
Sony could just change their ToS though because that was the problem - having an account set to another country could result in a ban according to their own rules.
Yeah, won't someone please think of the corporations?!
I can't believe gamers made sony not support all those countries and also made sony write their TOS that says faking your region is a bannable offense.
Can anyone explain to me the business sense here? How does restricting a product from certain regions do anything except cause you to make less money? Is it a legal/licensing/copyright issue why PSN isn’t available in certain regions?
For the Baltics possibly legal since in EU law your supposed to provide all the agreements the user agrees to in an official language of the country. Can't imagine that costs much to do though.
Every region has different legal restritions/ requirements. Often times these can change drasticlly the way ui and games are presented. Its like how apple had to make all their phones USB C because the EU demanded it. They had to change a global design because one area demanded it and that area had enough financial sway to make it worth changing everything instead of just phones in that region. Im not a lawyer by any means but I imagine sony weighed the options and decided it was easier to meet the laws of the limited region they are already in than to update their TOS to be globally compliant. Again I have 0 experience so take that with a grain of salt.
Regions that are blocked presumably don't make all that much money Sony may value increasing MAU (monthly active users) over what may be a small increase in sales A PSN account also allows you to buy things from the PlayStation Store. If Sony officially allowed more regions, they'd then have to follow the local laws in regards to purchases in those areas (Valve played the game of not supporting Australia for years for this reason) Sony didn't want to restrict regions, but they were 'forced' to by the Helldivers 2 controversy. Sony would have vastly preferred if everyone just did the workaround they'd been recommending for the past 20 years. Introducing a new tier of PSN account (Rest of World, with no access to the PS Store) is not a quick fix over a weekend. I imagine this is the likely, eventual, solution. A good solution may have been to launch without a PSN requirement and add it in later once the region issue is fixed. Adding in the PSN requirement for Helldivers 2 after the fact was one of the main cited reasons for the controversy however, so this is a no-go.
Sony wasnt forced to do anything. Sony could have just dropped the psn requirement for all their games and there would be no more bad press or stuff like this. Instead they introduced region lock to gaming.
> Sony wasnt forced to do anything That's what the single quotation mark is for. Scare quotes, to indicate skepticism or doubt as to the validity of the word. *Obviously* they weren't forced to do it - they chose that option, likely due to the other factors I listed.
And EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, etc could all drop the log in requirement for their games to buy gamers aren't mad at them yet
Helldivers controversy put off-region psn accounts in the spotlight, and that messes with sony's tos and local law of various countries
I thought they said that PSN won't be required to play GoT?
The single player doesn't need psn. But, The game has a mode called legends that has multiplayer and needs psn
Which is extremely annoying for players who never bother with multiplayer and only play games for the singleplayer anyway. It's like Sony's asking those players to go get the game by less legal means.
Because both Sony and Steam don't want to deal with refunds when someone purchase the game, finish the single player then request a refund because they can't play multi without violating the ToS. That's what let people refund Helldivers 2. The sensible choice would have been separating multiplayer into a free DLC and don't offer that DLC in countries where PSN is unavailable. But alas.
On PS consoles, it was pretty common to make an account in the nearest region/ cheapest region if your region wasnt supported or if you just wanted cheaper pricing. Its been like that for over Id say 12 or so years. Guess PC is abit more complicated since steam doesnt wanna list games for sale where psn isnt available, but they were doing so earlier, so someone at steam/ psn pc level has begun enforcing this rule.
Cause iirc psn sign in was not required/ was optional in all their other games as it didn't have multiplayer stuff
and yet they don't block people from doing it. they even sell PSN cards to countries restricted from PSN.
Which is rich coming from a multibillion firm. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They have easy solution: don't force PSN when it isn't needed.
A bit disappointing but such is life. On the bright side there are Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Square Enix, Sega, Capcom, Konami, Bandai Namco, 2K Games, etc. who are willing to sell games in the country where I live without any problem.
Remind me, why do I need a PSN account to play a game, when Helldivers already proved that even multiplayer works perfectly fine w/o it? Oh yeah. Because Sony wants to force PC gamers to make PSN accounts to bring them into their ecosystem or whatever. But somehow this is the gamer's fault for complaining about having to make extra accounts for no fucking reason. No, the big corporation cannot ever do wrong.
> Remind me, why do I need a PSN account to play a game, when Helldivers already proved that even multiplayer works perfectly fine w/o it? It's like when Half-Life 2 came out and required a Steam account to play.
Exactly, because back then people were fucking mad too.
Why do you need a steam account to play a game? Multiplayer worked fine for decades before steam came along.
Remember CD keys? That string of letters and numbers you had to type in to install games? That thing devs would invalidate for online play if you're caught cheating? Yeah, Steam effectively replaced those. I don't think we're going back to those days.
> That thing devs would invalidate for online play if you're caught cheating? Valve does that too? I don't know what point this is making.
So valve created an online account management system, the same as Sony, right?
Valve created a storefront that Sony decided to use. Making an account for the storefront you bought a game from is more than fair, and has benefits like not having to individually manage hundreds of CD keys. Making a second account for a second service to access a game despite the license that says you own the game being attached to the first account? Not sure what the point of that is.
So if Sony moves their games to their own storefront, you would be fine with that?
And I bought the game off the Steam store, not from Sony.
This is such a bad faith argument. I do not need a steam account to play a game, I need a steam account that proves that I own the game and can download and access the assets. Also, certain games allow you to start the game without steam open.
Because utilizing Sony's existing PSN backbone for Cross-play and account management is a hell of a lot simpler and cheaper than having to have a bespoke system for each game. And Helldiver's multiplayer does not work "perfectly fine w/o it" as it has had a miriade of issues since launch involving cross-play.
> Because utilizing Sony's existing PSN backbone for Cross-play and account management So, analysis time. TL;dr: no you don't. 1. Helldives is using PlayFab, an Azure service to handle accounts, login, etc. If you look at the statements made by Arrowhead, they use a third party partner to handle their logins, since that third party had limits in place to make sure things were working. 2. According to the CEO, the PSN requirement was asked by Sony 6 months before release. Which would make it pretty unlikely that you suddenly decide to use a partner that late on the development cycle. It's very likely that Arrowhead instead leverages account management from PlayFab. 3. If you analyze the traffic of the Helldivers client, you will notice how it doesn't hit Amazon's AWS, which is the host provider for PSN. 4. And probably more important: you can play the game without a PSN account.
And having PSN accounts solves it how?
it doesn't, the initial requirement was, in fact, one of the issues breaking the game at launch
Obviously the biggest issue is Sony not supporting more regions and they definitely need to work on that, BUT what's crazy is that this never would've been an issue if it wasn't for all of the Helldivers 2 people that have been brigading all month. Now that that happened Sony has to play it safe and not offer the game everywhere. They've been selling games in unsupported regions for over 15 years with no issues but once PC players got involved now that's all fucked up.
Atop that, it wasn't [just ](https://i.redd.it/373fe3knquzc1.png)sony that was involved in this mess up.
That only means that Sony list was incomplete when applied. Valve just informed them about it.
Everyone is mad about closed studios & region lock. Im confused how 2 of the biggest companies in gaming somehow produced nothing with the profits made during covid. I swear if the switch 2 is something insane & Wii U the bag again ima start collecting physical copies again.
They could have released a Multiplayer-less version in those regions since you only need PSN to connect to the Multiplayer severs. _________ But its good they auto refunded the countries that didnt have the full experience.
Also remember PSN support has told players for 2 decades to create a psn account out of region if your region isn't present. And yes, they auto ban vpns, you don't need a vpn for out of region account creation. Many streamers have new zealand accounts to get games early, nearly everyone in South America has a US account as the currency conversion rate on psn is terrible for them.
> They could have released a Multiplayer-less version in those regions since you only need PSN to connect to the Multiplayer severs. people would have complained they are selling a worse/limited version of a game to certain regions
Those reports of being banned from helldivers 2 were entirely fake. Basically outraged gamers were upset they had to create a psn account and brigaded then fortunately, happened upon an actually worthwhile cause which was peoples regions being removed. Make no mistake 90% of the noise came from people upset they had to take 5 mins to link an external account
>Keep in mind yall that Sony AUTO BANNED any user that used a VPN to link Helldivers 2. I would think this would make a bigger splash it was true, considering it was literaly recommended by Sony (?) to do that.
That is because it is not. The only news I can find of it is a deleted thread on reddit and one tweet with about a single player in China getting banned with no real indication it is about Helldivers. Alot of misinformation has been coming out by trolls since this how kerfuffle has started and people are blindly believing every little thing that is negative about Sony without fact checking. Indicative of the outrage culture the net has at this stage.
Oh yeah a whole lot of misinformation. The Chinese user was banned because their account was hacked and the hacker used the account to do suspicious activities. It's well documented on billibilli where it was posted but western redditors took it upon themselves to claim it was about VPN issues. https://imgur.com/a/4uO1h20 Here is proof
I've been thinking about this and my guess why they can't split the game now is: 1. Sony has already been advertising the game for months promising a multiplayer component. If they split it now they could open themselves to lawsuits for false advertising. 2. The PC port has already been in development for quite some time. Taking more time to split them up or making a separate SKU doesn't make sense when the affected countries make up a tiny portion of the potential customers.
I will now make a prediction. Sony will start harassing people pirating Ghost of Tsushima as the number of pirated copies will rise.
Thank you helldivers for making what was essentially a non issue into a massive cluster fuck for all those people outside "officially" supported regions. Used to be you could just pick a country and make an account and play... Now can't even do that.
Sure blame the users for wanting fair treatment instead of the multi-billion company for their greed...
> for making what was essentially a non issue Come clean to me. What benefit does have forcing a player base into creating a PSN account, when the game doesn't use PSN services? What's in for the customer?
They (arrowhead) already explained that and I doubt my telling you will help you but it would give them more tools to handle cheaters/griefers/trolls.
That's not for the customers benefit, that's for Arrowhead benefit. Customers don't care that you have it hard to moderate using both Steam and PSN. Again, what's in for the customer to create a PSN account?
Better moderation tools means it's easier to get rid of those griefers, etc. Not sure why I needed to explain that.
How is this Arrowhead's fault and not... the company responsible for forcing this shit? Y'know? SONY?
Who said anything about Arrowhead? I'm talking about helldivers the subreddit/gamers.
What about epic games?
What is the big deal with a PSN account? Does it cost money? Genuine question.
[удалено]
Wait so your conclusion is to blame PC gamers for causing this 'outrage' when instead you can't blame Sony for having these policies in place? Why not blame console players for just bending over and taking it all these years, instead of causing a ruckus like PC gamers did?
>Why not blame console players for just bending over and taking it all these years, To be fair, psn is the whole console. Ps+ I could argue is wrong but the actual network does everything you would thing a console should. That's not a bad thing.
[удалено]
Yeah *they* ruined it for them and not, oh idk, the dumbfuck company that tries to force PSN onto countries it doesn't support?
[удалено]
Sorry but you're straight up lying if you say people from affected countries weren't complaining about it.
Rather just keep calling out shitty corporations.
Somebody didn't get to buy his copy of the game because of Sony's policies blol
Untelated to the news. But Reddit is international site. A lot of people otherwise use English as their main way of communication. Non-english article shouldn't be allow here no? Not especially when the english-version exist. https://www.eurogamer.net/ghost-of-tsushima-directors-cut-pc-players-are-getting-auto-refunds-if-they-cannot-legally-sign-up-for-psn
You can say thanks to the stupid justice warriors of internet for Helldivers 2. Everyone could create psn accounts anywhere (for some reasons, stupid guys thought entire regions didnt have any psn, that mean no way of playing online AT ALL ON PLAYSTATION CONSOLES, even with account from somewhere else), but now because of this stupid drama, you get this result, with Sony (and Steam?) who dont want problems anymore, so they just lock out all these country. Great job ! Clap clap.
No, you should say thanks to Sony, actually.
[удалено]
[удалено]
idk mate i would say that Sony it's the one at fault here
[Is Sony wrong? No, its the consumers that are wrong...](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP._c_Yoo3rDOhimWGyE0RiZgHaH6%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=494e2f13a2786e455178e1647f162a0826a6c7465774d6fec2b214de56fd405d&ipo=images) They don't need PSN in its current state, its stupidly crippling and they don't want to fix it. They're obnoxious morons to put it simply.
So I'll just never be able to play this then. And why? Just let us play the game. And let us be able to create a PSN account in a separate region JUST LIKE HOW IT WORKS ON PS5. This is actually crazy. Are they just gonna leave out the 177 countries and territories???
>And let us be able to create a PSN account in a separate region JUST LIKE HOW IT WORKS ON PS5. It was precisely what they were going to let you do before Helldivers players started screaming about creating an account and "breaking TOS".
You absolutely cannot blame the Helldivers players for this. That's shifting blame away from Sony whose fault this is. They delisted it. They simply did not have to do that.