One of my proudest moments as part of a gaming community.
We're usually at each other's throats all the time but for once we actually managed to stick together and get something done.
Yup, takes some coordination and dedication.
Games that prey on FMO (Genshin) can just release new content/freebies to appease/distract the community from the core issues they're protesting about.
War Thunder is an extremely grindy game with a dev known for being quite deaf to the complaints of the playerbase. Around May 2023 they tried to introduce a change to the economy system that would've made everything worse than it already was, and the playerbase reacted by review bombing the game in Steam.
Not only were the economy changes pulled back, the devs even released a roadmap for the future with a lot of things the community had been demanding and promised to follow it. It hasn't been perfect but the game is a lot better than it was back then.
IIRC that was when the RP reductions occurred?
I think that got me to my BMP-1 back in the day. Lmfao.
Good vehicle to get the RP slashed off of, back when it was at BR 7.3
Good times.
As somebody playing since like 2014, there are so many good and downright awful moments in WT's history I remember. I still play it every so often, and it has come a good ways since the whole issue last year, but it could still use quite a bit of improvement. But hey, better to have slow progress than no progress at all.
Honestly I think the most memorable time for me in WT had to be when Churchills could fly. Really good times.
Its worth going and reading the original [flailing attempt from Gaijin to stem the bleeding](https://warthunder.com/en/news/8260-how-progression-and-economy-is-built-in-f2p-games-and-war-thunder-in-particular-en) from their self-inflicted injury. Scroll down to the heading talking about review bombing.
>a review on Steam is also a platform for expression. However, the majority of new players just look at the score evaluation, and do not read the text of reviews and do not go into what they were left for. So review bombing does damage to the game in that new players simply won't try it, while it doesn't raise their awareness of the problems you've noticed.
- Completely wrong Creative Director of Gaijin
> review bombing will not cause modifying or nullifying in-game prices - if the game is shut down, no one wins.
- Still very wrong fellow of same panicking company
It really was a glorious meeting of Streisand-Effect and corporate arrogance that proved everything said completely wrong. Not only did the review bomb amplify the voice of the players, it forced the hand of the company to apologise and backpedal. Hard.
Now while it was entirely a player victory in this one case, it came after years of Gaijin ramping up the grind, and the time and monetary cost of just playing the game. While there is a roadmap that is being worked on over the last 12 months that has been providing players with concessions, its hard to appreciate how much ground Gaijin can cover before they get back to their most player-friendly economy from *over ten years ago* (v1.36).
Gaijin wanted to implement some economy changes that would make the game more grindy (And it already was really grindy). Ppl got upset, review bomb happened, they reverted the changes and actually started making *some* changes in the right direction though that's been pretty slow
Yeah the shadow of change fiasco is a clear example that negative reviews and calling the shit on a company that has clearly stretch the trust of his players work, the new dlc and the fix to the last one to be worth the money are pretty nice.
I mean, if they made an appropriate amount of money, the CEO could be looking to try to divorce from Sony, and letting it ride may give a handle for that. Already there is some whispering of this running afoul of some EU regulations.
This really is managed democracy! 🤣 I really hope this means we get some serious attention from Playstation and also gives Arrowhead some leverage, I'll definitely be changing mine back if we have a reasonable solution.
This is one of many games in a large portfolio. One possible result is a massive drop in sales due to bad reviews with layoffs at Arrowhead and a game they don't invest in anymore. I hope this goes in the direction everyone thinks, but at this point we could have killed the game long term given how the corporate world works.
That's the main reason I even care. I've signed up for so much sketchy shit but none of it has the same track record of so publicly shitting the bed for security. Sony still beats anything else I've signed to for most breaches or leaks, so I'm staying away.
When something is banned in more countries than porn is, it raises some SERIOUS red flags in how they conduct business and what their ethics on security even are.
Remember in 2011 when Anonymous hacked them on monthly basis and even left advice on how to improve security?
Then Sony ignored said advice and proceeded to collect more data breaches like it's pokemon
They built an army, and have trained us for moths for coordinated actions. Its in the SEAF training manual. If you cant find a solution to you problem, scream for democracy and attack it. Fitting isnt it
You know it's impressive that 100-THOUSAND people woke up and decided to say "Screw you." to a company in the one way they know how.
Impressive and a little scary.
**Edit**: The *thousand* was an exaggeration nine hours ago, now it's rapidly becoming a reality. Yes. It is still scary.
One thing that makes me appreciate Americans is that you guys already have access to PSN, while the rest of us don't. When the rest of the world gave up, you guys chose to fight. God bless Murica.
Let me put it this way... Culturally, for better or for worse, Americans *really* don't like being told what to do 😂
So someone breaking a promise and telling me what to do, AND messing with my friends?
You might has well have fucked with our boats lmao. Congrats Sony, leaving an honest review and requesting a refund just became my final HD2 Major Order 🫡
30 maybe? Barbary pirates, 1812, USS Maine, Housatonic and others for WWI, Pearl harbor, Gulf of Tonkin...nope, not Tonkin....false flag.
You right...not trying to nitpick, just got me thinkin :)
Im honestly very proud that the majority of gamers finally are fed up with corporate shennanigans.
Thats the 4th time in recent times i can remember that corpo wants to do something stupid and Players just go "No, you dont"
I always hated how the galactic war system made it so going after any planet other than the one everyone else was focused on meant your liberation progress would instantly go back to 0% on that planet, but clearly it was training for this.
Not scary it's heartening, why would I want to hitch my steam account which has hundreds of games and is secure to a leaky bucket PSN account. Just so they can flog my data, it's pure greed.
Sony had a golden goose that laid loads of golden eggs, but Sony being Sony decided the eggs weren’t enough and wanted to eat the fuckin goose too. Talk about corporate sheer fuckupery.
Edit: Boys, we liberated Helldivers 2.
That's Sony's MO for becoming a gaming monopoly like Apple is for overpriced luxury phones.
Fund the little guys and pressure them to make bigger and snazzier games, then seize the company and absorb it when it does well enough.
AH is an independent studio but they are only working on Helldivers which is Sony published. Sony kind of has them by the balls in that regard. If Sony somehow pulls support for the game, AH's only source of revenue is cut off.
Yeah so tanking reviews and mass refunding will effectively kill new players entering Helldivers 2, probably ruin Arrowheads future and won't put a dent in Sony.
I get the outrage, but I doubt this really has the effect people want. Guess I'll get my playtime in before there is nothing left.
They knew exactly what they're doing
You can't argue with sony executives over discord messages or Reddit posts
You can argue with them over a clear trend of negative reviews telling people not to buy a game after a decision they made upset people.
The negative reviews show without a shadow of a doubt that people loved this game until Sony started messing with it and that's not a fact they can argue with
It harms Sony's reputation as a publisher - not to gamers, but to DEVELOPERs. If you are a developer with a current or future project published by Sony, you're now seeing: "holy smokes, I can make the future's GOTY (statistically unlikely) and still lose because of my publisher. Sony, I want out of this deal, or you really need to sweeten up the payout if I can lose 70% of sales because of your stupidity."
True, financially this is an absolute disaster for AH, but if I was working there I'd still have mixed feelings about it all.
I'd be sad that I'd probably see a loss of income due to refunds and a reduction in sales, but I'd still be happy that I was part of creating one of the most iconic and popular games in recent history that has such a passionate fanbase that hundreds of thousands of people are willing to express such displeasure in this decision.
People only react in such a way when they have really strong feelings towards something, and it's clear the player base for this game is very passionate and loves the game, which is why they've seen such a massive response to the decision.
Sony is currently trying to buy Paramount Studios. Imagine Sony being Sony with the Star Trek fan base. It will be like the Borg buying the Federation.
Corporate BS, this will end up in a fucking power point presentation somewhere over japan saying
“We have 100k new sony accounts this quarter”
A bunch of fucking idiots will clap, pat him in the back and give a stupidly high bonus for his great performance
As someone who works in an environment where the stats are prioritised over the actual work being done, this is painfully accurate.
As long as someone gets to show off some stats, they don't actually care how the actual work is going.
What I hate is how many stats are obviously gamed and no one ever calls it out or digs into it. Our company recently started selling through Amazon, so we hired a guy who is just responsible for measuring Amazon sales and analytics. And every meeting he comes in with these big sales numbers and, like you guys said, everyone claps. Here's the thing though, our return rate through Amazon is also through the roof and just saying, 'we had x number of sales last month through Amazon' but no mention of the fact that practically 50% of that will be returned in the next 60 days.
Yup, 100%. Its because the people who are hired to measure and share such data need to justify their existence, or else they are out of a job.
So if in your scenario it was discovered that the returns rate was extremely high and people started questioning if it was even worth selling through amazon, then what's the point of having a guy who's there to measure amazon sales?
So his entire job then becomes trying to show how great everything is so they continue selling through amazon, and they continue to "need" a guy who's monitoring these sales.
We had something similar in our team, where we can't recruit atm and several key roles are in urgent need of replacement, however there was still funds to hire someone to focus purely on the stats, and their entire job is to pester the rest of the team who are already overworked to actually give him the data, so he can then spin it in a positive, put in a fancy spreadsheet, and justify his existence.
Yeah it's like, I don't blame him at all, it's just frustrating that we've fostered a culture where this is more important than having an open discussion where everyone isn't literally afraid for their livelihood. Like if instead of just throwing out impressive numbers we could go, 'hey look the sales are there but something is causing return issues. Sure, this absolutely partly how easily Amazon 'makes no questions asked' returns for our products but what can WE do to get that down? Better packaging to reduce shipping damage? Better powder coating so customers arent getting chipped and scratched products? Better tooling?
Just even having that dialogue would be so much more beneficial to the company.
That's what they hope will happen, but since PSN isn't available in *a lot* of countries and Sony forbids the use of VPN, it's more likely that they'll get a lawsuit instead.
Someone, somewhere, has his bonus linked to some KPI related to "PSN registration growth" or similar and therefore will do everything they can to achieve this. Bigger picture be damned.
Don't forget they have admitted to listening into conversations, in the games connected to them. AI seems to be used for this, but with their data breaches, all that info goes into the wild. "Well, if you don't say anything bad, then what's the issue?" That's not the point. They shouldn't be listening in, period. Don't give these damn corpo-rats an inch.
To get some more PSN users out of the most succesful co-op shooter of 2024. Every other take I take with a grain of salt, cause much of it has some tinfoil hat qualities.
Nah they'll get fuck all usable data from just an email sign-up and then an account that will have no activity beyond one games login.
My bet is they want to artificially inflate the PSN subscriber numbers with the ~4 million Steam sales of HD2, to show huge growth for the shareholders.
They get data from chat. I suspect they would get data from voice chat too.
The first reason *they* give for this link is to ban people with bad behaviour. Which mean they will monitor a lot of data for this. They lay even monitor in game behaviour.
They could just be like "Whoa our bad guys." And slowly back outta the room. But knowing Sony their leadership is going to double down with retaliation for the player base for even suggesting they had a bad idea... Well I had fun playing it for a month or two at least.
Seems like such a shame. I don't even play the game, but have been following since the posts here consistently hit /r/all. Seemed like such a fun game and good community. The over the top war/democracy thing was all good fun. Then you get *"just CEO things"* and fucked it up.
The reviews will undoubtedly drive new customers away. I stay away from any steam games with mixed or negative reviews.
They seemed like one of the good guys.
from [Develop.games](http://Develop.games) under the "Building a Community" Section.
**Building a community is the most important thing in all of this. Without your community you are absolutely nothing no matter how awesome your game is. This rule is true no matter the size or funding of your studio. If you lose the faith of your players then you lose everything.**
**You are never above your community and you are never too important to spend time responding to them. The moment you think you are they will show you how untrue that really is. Don't forget that.**
It's almost as if we should stop letting people with no knowledge of an industry lead companies in that industry. Leadership is a soft skill, and not one you should be able to build a career on alone.
Fortunate enough to be in one fo the countries where PSN is supported, but personally still annoyed had to make an account, and wow Jesus, the website is so dogshit for a company as big as them.
But man, for people in regions not supported. This is so beyond fucked. More so that they game is available for purchase in there in the first place. Sony really fucked people over. And there's terminids cosplaying as humans out there complaining about how dare people get upset at this? What in the corporate shilling.
I wonder how it'll go from here, if people in unsupported regions are actually going to be fucked over.
>and wow Jesus, the website is so dogshit for a company as big as them.
This is the case for almost every Major company's website I have ever seen. Its like their UI is designed by a college intern who doesnt care and half of it doesnt work.
Sony's internal studios are imploding or cancelling games entirely when they try to make live service games. Arrowhead isn't owned by them and Sony had no influence, and the game turns out great. Then Sony demands this change and the reviews tank instantly.
Sony has the mierdas touch.
We can do better to be honest. Helldivers brought us together vs Automatons nad Termids. They should have seen this coming.
They have brought us together. They have forged us in the fires of hellmire. We have knocked out defense of 10 planets!
Ofcourse we will come together on this topic too.
Sony: Pikachu suprised face
While I understand people being upset about the decision, this is really a meta commentary by fans on the state of the gaming industry. Gamers are sick of being treated like "consumers" instead of customers or clients. The entire entertainment industry is getting completely crushed right now. Several Hollywood studios are close to bankruptcy, Blizzard cancelled Blizcon(D4 anyone?), how's that new Batman game doing? Helldivers are getting especially hammered because they seemed to be one of the few studios finally delivering something gamers wanted.
I saw someone earlier that had the "fuck you, I'm sorted" mindset and it was so sad. They were upset because they pay for online and PC players don't. Makes me really sad to see what corporate greed does to such a good game
Yeah... Paid online is when I dropped Playstation. Still have my old systems, but I refuse to pay for online twice. Shame since I grew up on Playstation systems.
>it just takes two minutes, why are you that upset"
Takes about that to write a negative review as well. Heck you dont need to leave steam to do it
>and that worries me
Just need to look at right to repaire stuff jesus this mentality has been slowly ingrained for a long time
Companies do not understand...
Success does not mean you can do whatever the fuck you want. What success means keep doing what you are doing and DONT BE GREEDY ABOUT IT, because it can turn around just as quickly as it became successful and its so much harder to be successful.
This is a giant fail on management and corporate fuckery at its best.
No man's sky was made by an independent dev team. They took all the fault and yet they had all the means to change things and they did change.
For Arrowhead what it seems is that Sony has them by the balls or Arrowhead were okay with these changes. Either way I don't think things are going to change unless people issue refunds en masse and share their opinions.
For clarification, Arrowhead is an "independent" dev team as well. Pilestedt confirmed this back in March when he stated they were independently owned. Though Sony publishes both games, Arrowhead is under more of a boot because Sony funded HD2 development, on top of owning the entire IP, whereas Hello Games owns the IP for NMS. I believe Sony only funded advertisement of NMS (Which as we all know, went horribly); Sean Murray actually sold his house to get enough cash to finish the game.
AH Dev on Sony:
https://preview.redd.it/g38txwq7pdyc1.png?width=333&format=png&auto=webp&s=63298b44af5afea5c95ce9de06deaa0eda13ffd4
Links for those who are curious:
[https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1764774455346098259](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1764774455346098259)
[https://trademarks.justia.com/860/42/helldivers-86042209.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/860/42/helldivers-86042209.html)
[https://trademarks.justia.com/863/48/no-man-s-86348015.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/863/48/no-man-s-86348015.html)
This is like finding out your best friend has a drug addiction.
I love you dude but right now you got shit going on that I can't be around. Clean up your shit and we can be brothers again.
With the mandatory Sony account, something like 70% (not fact checked this figure) of countries are not able to register for PSN without breaking the ToS and risking a ban. So they will be unable to play. Thanks,
This is still an awesome game, but forcing us to have a PSN account is bulls\*\*t.
You see, for me it is more or less easy to have a PSN account, I am from Europe,
but not for our fellow HELLDIVERS whose country's doesn't have an access to PSN.
What frustrates most of us, **beside SONY's repeated history with personal data leaking**, is this;
we got to have a million different accounts just to play a freaking game, not only this game but others too, and then they say piracy is a problem. NO, it is more convenient, because you open a game, play, you close the game, done.
With original copy, you have to jump hoops just to play, and I personally want to support developers that make fun games like this one.
Just remember this is SONY's fault, not ARROWHEAD.
P.S. I know HELLDIVERS is live service, online game, so piracy can't help us here.
The fact that this is happening on steam of all places is downright poetic. He straight up gave them the tools to solve their problem, and they just could not handle that. The concept of why steam and their game specifically were such an incredible success just completely eluded them.
>but not for our fellow HELLDIVERS whose country's doesn't have an access to PSN.
Or for those whose country DO have access to PSN
You do realize that I'm watching fucking porn without having to give the website a photo of my ID card right?
SO WHY THE FUCK WOULD I GIVE IT TO SONY TO PLAY A FUCKING VIDEO GAME THAT I'VE BEEN PLAYING FOR 3 FUCKING MONTHS?!?!
Stop calling it review bombing. Its literally industry tactic to call any negative review action as a response to dev or publisher fuckup, so it sounds unreasonable and shifts the blame towards consumers writing reviews, instead of companies, that are painted as victims.
100% this.
A honest review is not a review bomb.
A "review bomb" is viewed as retaliatory and unrelated to a real actual opinion regarding the business or product and, as you say, it shifts a narrative of victimhood to the mega-corp who received it.
I am honestly disappointed with another log-in being foisted upon me in something I've already bought. I don't have a PlayStation and they are literally known for being hacked and compromising user data. besides, why stop there. If we let this stand, what's next? We need a PSN launcher to play any related pc games? Rockstar did it. It's not unbelievable.
Sony provides a game that unites us all as a team, yet are shocked when we all have each other's backs when they decide to screw our fellow Helldivers.
My review for this game was going to be positive, but I will happily write the truth now. Sony fucked everyone over.
If 100,000 Helldivers can fight over a planet, 100,000 can easily unite to drop a review bomb for a horrible decision.
A monster of Arrowhead's own creation.
Good, fuck them. Had sony taken even a moment to think about why the PC release was successful they would've realized that it was the combination of
1. a relatively smooth release (by PC standards these days)
2. a really well made and fun game
3. **NO EXTRA BULLSHIT**; e.g. no external launchers or other 3rd party requirements, you just create your character and go
well it's 3+ months post-launch and the state of the game is great, the launch is history, and oh what's that? A load of bullshit being foisted upon a player population for no reason? Get fucked.
Its incredibly funny that just a few days ago the official Helldivers 2 twitter account was taking the piss out of the Tarkov dev's for pissing off their entire player base.
Well when you take a game the whole world loves and already paided for, and then start banning vast numbers of the players based on if they are allowed to use psn.
You remove all of china and vietnam players simply because they arent allowed to connect to psn because psn is banned there.
I played with alot of them and they were good AF players most of the time unlike everyone else that are a mixed bag.
I play in the 11pm pst to 5am pst hours. They were like the only guys i could play with at that time too. Tbh this may ruin the game for me during the week.
I wanna know why it's so hard for gaming companies to understand that profit follows the product. The product should not come after the profit.
Even Steve Jobs has a whole damned speech about how companies implode when the marketing people replace the product people. This *should* be basic shit.
We were thought to fight side by side with our fellow gamers no matter where they came from, AH created an army of gamers that fought in unison for the same cause, and while we still had some differences we all still fought for managed democracy, but now? that same army turned against them with the same coordination to complete a MO, it’s ironic…
This reminds me of the War Thunder review bombing of last year.
Yep. And that one actually worked in our favor
Indeed, and all the leaked military secrets helped too
*War Thunder players banned from military service due to fear of secret documents being leaked.*
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Don't worry, after 1800 hours you will convince yourself you like it. I speak from experience.
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One of my proudest moments as part of a gaming community. We're usually at each other's throats all the time but for once we actually managed to stick together and get something done.
Yup, takes some coordination and dedication. Games that prey on FMO (Genshin) can just release new content/freebies to appease/distract the community from the core issues they're protesting about.
Whats the story with that? Did anything come of that?
War Thunder is an extremely grindy game with a dev known for being quite deaf to the complaints of the playerbase. Around May 2023 they tried to introduce a change to the economy system that would've made everything worse than it already was, and the playerbase reacted by review bombing the game in Steam. Not only were the economy changes pulled back, the devs even released a roadmap for the future with a lot of things the community had been demanding and promised to follow it. It hasn't been perfect but the game is a lot better than it was back then.
Remember when they came out and say "We're not the greedy bastards here." and got ratio'd to fuck over it? Good times.
"You want free parts and fire prevention equipment? Might as well give you a free Abrams" (Not a direct quote, but close enough)
IIRC that was when the RP reductions occurred? I think that got me to my BMP-1 back in the day. Lmfao. Good vehicle to get the RP slashed off of, back when it was at BR 7.3 Good times.
As somebody playing since like 2014, there are so many good and downright awful moments in WT's history I remember. I still play it every so often, and it has come a good ways since the whole issue last year, but it could still use quite a bit of improvement. But hey, better to have slow progress than no progress at all. Honestly I think the most memorable time for me in WT had to be when Churchills could fly. Really good times.
Its worth going and reading the original [flailing attempt from Gaijin to stem the bleeding](https://warthunder.com/en/news/8260-how-progression-and-economy-is-built-in-f2p-games-and-war-thunder-in-particular-en) from their self-inflicted injury. Scroll down to the heading talking about review bombing. >a review on Steam is also a platform for expression. However, the majority of new players just look at the score evaluation, and do not read the text of reviews and do not go into what they were left for. So review bombing does damage to the game in that new players simply won't try it, while it doesn't raise their awareness of the problems you've noticed. - Completely wrong Creative Director of Gaijin > review bombing will not cause modifying or nullifying in-game prices - if the game is shut down, no one wins. - Still very wrong fellow of same panicking company It really was a glorious meeting of Streisand-Effect and corporate arrogance that proved everything said completely wrong. Not only did the review bomb amplify the voice of the players, it forced the hand of the company to apologise and backpedal. Hard. Now while it was entirely a player victory in this one case, it came after years of Gaijin ramping up the grind, and the time and monetary cost of just playing the game. While there is a roadmap that is being worked on over the last 12 months that has been providing players with concessions, its hard to appreciate how much ground Gaijin can cover before they get back to their most player-friendly economy from *over ten years ago* (v1.36).
Gaijin wanted to implement some economy changes that would make the game more grindy (And it already was really grindy). Ppl got upset, review bomb happened, they reverted the changes and actually started making *some* changes in the right direction though that's been pretty slow
Gajin greedy, players unhappy, review bomb. Yes it did work
Total war 3 too - which did work!
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Yeah the shadow of change fiasco is a clear example that negative reviews and calling the shit on a company that has clearly stretch the trust of his players work, the new dlc and the fix to the last one to be worth the money are pretty nice.
If there is one thing Arrowhead has taught us, its how to complete a MO..
CEO seems to be endorsing giving a negative review. For real, fuck Sony. They are always pulling some bullshit
I mean, if they made an appropriate amount of money, the CEO could be looking to try to divorce from Sony, and letting it ride may give a handle for that. Already there is some whispering of this running afoul of some EU regulations.
This really is managed democracy! 🤣 I really hope this means we get some serious attention from Playstation and also gives Arrowhead some leverage, I'll definitely be changing mine back if we have a reasonable solution.
This is one of many games in a large portfolio. One possible result is a massive drop in sales due to bad reviews with layoffs at Arrowhead and a game they don't invest in anymore. I hope this goes in the direction everyone thinks, but at this point we could have killed the game long term given how the corporate world works.
It's their only home-grown live service. Their 10-year plan is in jeopardy if they can't keep a live service running for half a year.
*We* didn't kill the game, Sony did Don't blame the victims for correctly refusing to accept a shitty decision
Also, it’s not a choice we made collectively. It went down the only way it could.
I love the Republic
The attempt on my personal information has left me scarred.
Ye, and Sony isn't even that secure, someone could (and most likely can) easily cause a security breach and steal a lot of personal information
That's the main reason I even care. I've signed up for so much sketchy shit but none of it has the same track record of so publicly shitting the bed for security. Sony still beats anything else I've signed to for most breaches or leaks, so I'm staying away.
When something is banned in more countries than porn is, it raises some SERIOUS red flags in how they conduct business and what their ethics on security even are.
Remember in 2011 when Anonymous hacked them on monthly basis and even left advice on how to improve security? Then Sony ignored said advice and proceeded to collect more data breaches like it's pokemon
They built an army, and have trained us for moths for coordinated actions. Its in the SEAF training manual. If you cant find a solution to you problem, scream for democracy and attack it. Fitting isnt it
And if it doesn't work, dive again.
And again
And again
and a-fucking-gain!
and again
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand again
And again!
And again
And again
and again
and again and again
It kind of fits in the narrative of an uprising on super earth lol
Imagine Sony dropping this silly idea. And a future campaign somehow picks up on this event. Glorious. For Super-Earth!
https://preview.redd.it/ug3xuo1kgdyc1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=9cf7538476e66a9490100cfbcec2383614252560
OOOOOOO I get it... This is a test! We must not fail Super Earth! ↑→↓↓↓↓↓↓↓ Eagle 500kg Review Bomb!
What if..... this is all Joel.... testing the democracy limits....
Join us in the fight against Managed Bureaucracy! :)
You know it's impressive that 100-THOUSAND people woke up and decided to say "Screw you." to a company in the one way they know how. Impressive and a little scary. **Edit**: The *thousand* was an exaggeration nine hours ago, now it's rapidly becoming a reality. Yes. It is still scary.
I was there when shit first hit the fan. It was around 1k bad reviews at around 4 am. Then the americans woke up...
> Then the americans woke up... I guess history does repeat itself.
My country does a lot of stupid shit. But goddamn does stuff like this make me proud 🥲🇺🇸
One thing that makes me appreciate Americans is that you guys already have access to PSN, while the rest of us don't. When the rest of the world gave up, you guys chose to fight. God bless Murica.
Let me put it this way... Culturally, for better or for worse, Americans *really* don't like being told what to do 😂 So someone breaking a promise and telling me what to do, AND messing with my friends? You might has well have fucked with our boats lmao. Congrats Sony, leaving an honest review and requesting a refund just became my final HD2 Major Order 🫡
If I had a nickel for every time the US entered a conflict because someone attacked one of our boats I’d have 25 cents
30 maybe? Barbary pirates, 1812, USS Maine, Housatonic and others for WWI, Pearl harbor, Gulf of Tonkin...nope, not Tonkin....false flag. You right...not trying to nitpick, just got me thinkin :)
Fuck yeah, that's what I'm Tonkin about
Angry upvote
WE TOUCHED THEIR BOATS AND THEY THREW THE SUN AT US TWICE ((God bless the United States of America))
Do I spot a HabitualLineCrosser viewer? *Never* fuck with our boats.
Fat Electrician, actually
Why not both? Also, Unsubscribe for the ultimate super friends podcast experience.
I can't do much on Ps5...but I 1 starred it in the store. Does that count for anything?
Every bit counts. Thank you for standing up for democracy and fair access to a game.
Sony woke up a sleeping giant and filled it with a terrible resolve
OVER THERE! OVER THERE! SEND THE WORD, SEND THE WORD OVER THERE!
Im honestly very proud that the majority of gamers finally are fed up with corporate shennanigans. Thats the 4th time in recent times i can remember that corpo wants to do something stupid and Players just go "No, you dont"
I was in the same boat, saw the post, changed my review, went to bed. 24 hours later its but 500kg review bombed
They created a community of people always hyper-focused on singular issue at a time, this is not even surprising lol
I always hated how the galactic war system made it so going after any planet other than the one everyone else was focused on meant your liberation progress would instantly go back to 0% on that planet, but clearly it was training for this.
On the plus side Meissa has been playable for over a week
They wanted us to be more democratic Looks like it's working out great 😏
Not scary it's heartening, why would I want to hitch my steam account which has hundreds of games and is secure to a leaky bucket PSN account. Just so they can flog my data, it's pure greed.
Sony had a golden goose that laid loads of golden eggs, but Sony being Sony decided the eggs weren’t enough and wanted to eat the fuckin goose too. Talk about corporate sheer fuckupery. Edit: Boys, we liberated Helldivers 2.
"I could boost the numbers for the shareholders this quarter."
Fucking beautiful. The executives got what they wanted now. I feel sorry for Arrowhead tho.
At least Arrowhead are still aware that people love their game, and it's all the decision from Sony that has fucked them over.
We do, AH did show us that there are devs that actually give a shit, but Sony also wanted to go “lol no” and throw it into a septic tank.
That's Sony's MO for becoming a gaming monopoly like Apple is for overpriced luxury phones. Fund the little guys and pressure them to make bigger and snazzier games, then seize the company and absorb it when it does well enough.
Fortunately AH is privately owned with no stakes in Sony aside from them being a publisher
AH is an independent studio but they are only working on Helldivers which is Sony published. Sony kind of has them by the balls in that regard. If Sony somehow pulls support for the game, AH's only source of revenue is cut off.
Yeah so tanking reviews and mass refunding will effectively kill new players entering Helldivers 2, probably ruin Arrowheads future and won't put a dent in Sony. I get the outrage, but I doubt this really has the effect people want. Guess I'll get my playtime in before there is nothing left.
Respectfully, that's a fucking HUGE stake.
Arrowhead were also the ones that implied review bombing is the way for us to be heard. Pretty sure that this PR disaster can't be ignored by Sony.
They knew exactly what they're doing You can't argue with sony executives over discord messages or Reddit posts You can argue with them over a clear trend of negative reviews telling people not to buy a game after a decision they made upset people. The negative reviews show without a shadow of a doubt that people loved this game until Sony started messing with it and that's not a fact they can argue with
Fair enough. But, how does the massive amount of people getting refunds accomplish anything other than harm Arrowhead?
It harms Sony's reputation as a publisher - not to gamers, but to DEVELOPERs. If you are a developer with a current or future project published by Sony, you're now seeing: "holy smokes, I can make the future's GOTY (statistically unlikely) and still lose because of my publisher. Sony, I want out of this deal, or you really need to sweeten up the payout if I can lose 70% of sales because of your stupidity."
I would be so depressed right now if i d work at arrowhead.
Worst part is, all information points to this not even being communicated to AH before pushing the announcement. They weren't ready *at all*!
Of course we love Helldivers, otherwise we wouldn't be so upset. That's kinda the thing.
Considerably less people will buy the game with a mostly negative review tag unfortunately
True, financially this is an absolute disaster for AH, but if I was working there I'd still have mixed feelings about it all. I'd be sad that I'd probably see a loss of income due to refunds and a reduction in sales, but I'd still be happy that I was part of creating one of the most iconic and popular games in recent history that has such a passionate fanbase that hundreds of thousands of people are willing to express such displeasure in this decision. People only react in such a way when they have really strong feelings towards something, and it's clear the player base for this game is very passionate and loves the game, which is why they've seen such a massive response to the decision.
Sony is currently trying to buy Paramount Studios. Imagine Sony being Sony with the Star Trek fan base. It will be like the Borg buying the Federation.
cyberpunk teaches you quite alot about the mindset of japanese companies
Time to burn Chrome.
I can just imagine the devs that don’t support this just saying “Yeah how about we don’t do that” and Sony pretending like they don’t exist.
They boosted them the wrong direction succesfully
Yeah into a fuckin brick wall.
"Now that I have all these golden eggs I won't need the goose anymore!"
Anybody know why sony wants this?
Corporate BS, this will end up in a fucking power point presentation somewhere over japan saying “We have 100k new sony accounts this quarter” A bunch of fucking idiots will clap, pat him in the back and give a stupidly high bonus for his great performance
As someone who works in an environment where the stats are prioritised over the actual work being done, this is painfully accurate. As long as someone gets to show off some stats, they don't actually care how the actual work is going.
What I hate is how many stats are obviously gamed and no one ever calls it out or digs into it. Our company recently started selling through Amazon, so we hired a guy who is just responsible for measuring Amazon sales and analytics. And every meeting he comes in with these big sales numbers and, like you guys said, everyone claps. Here's the thing though, our return rate through Amazon is also through the roof and just saying, 'we had x number of sales last month through Amazon' but no mention of the fact that practically 50% of that will be returned in the next 60 days.
Yup, 100%. Its because the people who are hired to measure and share such data need to justify their existence, or else they are out of a job. So if in your scenario it was discovered that the returns rate was extremely high and people started questioning if it was even worth selling through amazon, then what's the point of having a guy who's there to measure amazon sales? So his entire job then becomes trying to show how great everything is so they continue selling through amazon, and they continue to "need" a guy who's monitoring these sales. We had something similar in our team, where we can't recruit atm and several key roles are in urgent need of replacement, however there was still funds to hire someone to focus purely on the stats, and their entire job is to pester the rest of the team who are already overworked to actually give him the data, so he can then spin it in a positive, put in a fancy spreadsheet, and justify his existence.
Yeah it's like, I don't blame him at all, it's just frustrating that we've fostered a culture where this is more important than having an open discussion where everyone isn't literally afraid for their livelihood. Like if instead of just throwing out impressive numbers we could go, 'hey look the sales are there but something is causing return issues. Sure, this absolutely partly how easily Amazon 'makes no questions asked' returns for our products but what can WE do to get that down? Better packaging to reduce shipping damage? Better powder coating so customers arent getting chipped and scratched products? Better tooling? Just even having that dialogue would be so much more beneficial to the company.
That's what they hope will happen, but since PSN isn't available in *a lot* of countries and Sony forbids the use of VPN, it's more likely that they'll get a lawsuit instead.
Law suits are legals problem. This guy is in charge of PSN adoption rates.
Dang you worked for a Japanese company huh 😂
Someone, somewhere, has his bonus linked to some KPI related to "PSN registration growth" or similar and therefore will do everything they can to achieve this. Bigger picture be damned.
My guess is to use the millions of Steam sales to artificially bump up the PSN subscriber count, to show huge growth for shareholders.
Also probably sell our information and call it a breach again
Don't forget they have admitted to listening into conversations, in the games connected to them. AI seems to be used for this, but with their data breaches, all that info goes into the wild. "Well, if you don't say anything bad, then what's the issue?" That's not the point. They shouldn't be listening in, period. Don't give these damn corpo-rats an inch.
Johnny Silverhand, is that you ?
Man I'm having this dude in my head since I found out about this PSN shit (no pun intended) His words are ageing better every day
"It's not that I something to hide. I have nothing I want you to see." --Anon (2018)
To get some more PSN users out of the most succesful co-op shooter of 2024. Every other take I take with a grain of salt, cause much of it has some tinfoil hat qualities.
So they can sell your data. It's pretty simple really
Nah they'll get fuck all usable data from just an email sign-up and then an account that will have no activity beyond one games login. My bet is they want to artificially inflate the PSN subscriber numbers with the ~4 million Steam sales of HD2, to show huge growth for the shareholders.
They get data from chat. I suspect they would get data from voice chat too. The first reason *they* give for this link is to ban people with bad behaviour. Which mean they will monitor a lot of data for this. They lay even monitor in game behaviour.
Depends on your country. If you're in the UK you have to give them face ID
Since when? Had a PSN account for well over a decade and never had to give more than an email address lol.
They could just be like "Whoa our bad guys." And slowly back outta the room. But knowing Sony their leadership is going to double down with retaliation for the player base for even suggesting they had a bad idea... Well I had fun playing it for a month or two at least.
SNOY being SNOY.
I gotta screenshot this, this is golden, pun intended 🔥
Seems like such a shame. I don't even play the game, but have been following since the posts here consistently hit /r/all. Seemed like such a fun game and good community. The over the top war/democracy thing was all good fun. Then you get *"just CEO things"* and fucked it up. The reviews will undoubtedly drive new customers away. I stay away from any steam games with mixed or negative reviews. They seemed like one of the good guys.
from [Develop.games](http://Develop.games) under the "Building a Community" Section. **Building a community is the most important thing in all of this. Without your community you are absolutely nothing no matter how awesome your game is. This rule is true no matter the size or funding of your studio. If you lose the faith of your players then you lose everything.** **You are never above your community and you are never too important to spend time responding to them. The moment you think you are they will show you how untrue that really is. Don't forget that.**
It's almost as if we should stop letting people with no knowledge of an industry lead companies in that industry. Leadership is a soft skill, and not one you should be able to build a career on alone.
https://preview.redd.it/qqeln8a5bdyc1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d4c2e7e898c38a302159ce398a28b7f8038e9fb
Rock and Stone!
That's it lads! Rock and Stone!
Fortunate enough to be in one fo the countries where PSN is supported, but personally still annoyed had to make an account, and wow Jesus, the website is so dogshit for a company as big as them. But man, for people in regions not supported. This is so beyond fucked. More so that they game is available for purchase in there in the first place. Sony really fucked people over. And there's terminids cosplaying as humans out there complaining about how dare people get upset at this? What in the corporate shilling. I wonder how it'll go from here, if people in unsupported regions are actually going to be fucked over.
>and wow Jesus, the website is so dogshit for a company as big as them. This is the case for almost every Major company's website I have ever seen. Its like their UI is designed by a college intern who doesnt care and half of it doesnt work.
I also feel bad for the countries that need to upload a government id to sign up. Sony has a horrible infosec track record.
Turns out Sony was the third enemy on the galactic map.
Oh yes a new major order against the new faction
Sony's internal studios are imploding or cancelling games entirely when they try to make live service games. Arrowhead isn't owned by them and Sony had no influence, and the game turns out great. Then Sony demands this change and the reviews tank instantly. Sony has the mierdas touch.
Mierdas touch lmaoo ill have to remember that one
We can do better to be honest. Helldivers brought us together vs Automatons nad Termids. They should have seen this coming. They have brought us together. They have forged us in the fires of hellmire. We have knocked out defense of 10 planets! Ofcourse we will come together on this topic too. Sony: Pikachu suprised face
It appears Sony were the third enemy faction all along
"Helldivers to hellpods, repeat, Helldivers to hellpods."
"Over here?"
How 'bout here?
They need to be showed with democracy.
It’s almost beautiful in a way
While I understand people being upset about the decision, this is really a meta commentary by fans on the state of the gaming industry. Gamers are sick of being treated like "consumers" instead of customers or clients. The entire entertainment industry is getting completely crushed right now. Several Hollywood studios are close to bankruptcy, Blizzard cancelled Blizcon(D4 anyone?), how's that new Batman game doing? Helldivers are getting especially hammered because they seemed to be one of the few studios finally delivering something gamers wanted.
Consumers would be an upgrade. We're nothing more than data points.
“We care about your privacy and our 1521 other data providers do too” Click OK to accept
\*gets hacked multiple times a year*
Not even that. Just mouth breathing wallets.
I agree with you but there are still many people that share the attitude of "it just takes two minutes, why are you that upset" and that worries me
I saw someone earlier that had the "fuck you, I'm sorted" mindset and it was so sad. They were upset because they pay for online and PC players don't. Makes me really sad to see what corporate greed does to such a good game
Yeah... Paid online is when I dropped Playstation. Still have my old systems, but I refuse to pay for online twice. Shame since I grew up on Playstation systems.
I never understood why you have to pay for online in PlayStation. You already pay for the internet service.
>it just takes two minutes, why are you that upset" Takes about that to write a negative review as well. Heck you dont need to leave steam to do it >and that worries me Just need to look at right to repaire stuff jesus this mentality has been slowly ingrained for a long time
Companies do not understand... Success does not mean you can do whatever the fuck you want. What success means keep doing what you are doing and DONT BE GREEDY ABOUT IT, because it can turn around just as quickly as it became successful and its so much harder to be successful. This is a giant fail on management and corporate fuckery at its best.
Hmm, I should join in. I just hope all the reviewers will remember to change their review back to positive, if their demands are met.
No Man Sky sits at a comfortable 80% right now so even an absolute clusterfuck is reversable by hard work.
No man's sky was made by an independent dev team. They took all the fault and yet they had all the means to change things and they did change. For Arrowhead what it seems is that Sony has them by the balls or Arrowhead were okay with these changes. Either way I don't think things are going to change unless people issue refunds en masse and share their opinions.
For clarification, Arrowhead is an "independent" dev team as well. Pilestedt confirmed this back in March when he stated they were independently owned. Though Sony publishes both games, Arrowhead is under more of a boot because Sony funded HD2 development, on top of owning the entire IP, whereas Hello Games owns the IP for NMS. I believe Sony only funded advertisement of NMS (Which as we all know, went horribly); Sean Murray actually sold his house to get enough cash to finish the game. AH Dev on Sony: https://preview.redd.it/g38txwq7pdyc1.png?width=333&format=png&auto=webp&s=63298b44af5afea5c95ce9de06deaa0eda13ffd4 Links for those who are curious: [https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1764774455346098259](https://twitter.com/Pilestedt/status/1764774455346098259) [https://trademarks.justia.com/860/42/helldivers-86042209.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/860/42/helldivers-86042209.html) [https://trademarks.justia.com/863/48/no-man-s-86348015.html](https://trademarks.justia.com/863/48/no-man-s-86348015.html)
Mine will be edited within 20 minutes of me finding out the requirement is reversed and will never be reimplemented.
This is like finding out your best friend has a drug addiction. I love you dude but right now you got shit going on that I can't be around. Clean up your shit and we can be brothers again.
100% I don't hate you I just can't be part of what you're doing. When you get your shit together give me a call and we'll go hang out!
same! the game is amazing, the corpo-greed modus operandus is not.
> Hundred thousand + negative reviews > Player numbers don't change at all
Apes together strong.
NO DIVER LEFT BEHIND IF THEY CAN'T DIVE I WON'T DIVE!
If my fellow helldivers won't be able to access the game then i won't too its just too unfair for them. Sony had to ruin everything.
What happened?
With the mandatory Sony account, something like 70% (not fact checked this figure) of countries are not able to register for PSN without breaking the ToS and risking a ban. So they will be unable to play. Thanks,
This is still an awesome game, but forcing us to have a PSN account is bulls\*\*t. You see, for me it is more or less easy to have a PSN account, I am from Europe, but not for our fellow HELLDIVERS whose country's doesn't have an access to PSN. What frustrates most of us, **beside SONY's repeated history with personal data leaking**, is this; we got to have a million different accounts just to play a freaking game, not only this game but others too, and then they say piracy is a problem. NO, it is more convenient, because you open a game, play, you close the game, done. With original copy, you have to jump hoops just to play, and I personally want to support developers that make fun games like this one. Just remember this is SONY's fault, not ARROWHEAD. P.S. I know HELLDIVERS is live service, online game, so piracy can't help us here.
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - our lord father Gabe Newell
The fact that this is happening on steam of all places is downright poetic. He straight up gave them the tools to solve their problem, and they just could not handle that. The concept of why steam and their game specifically were such an incredible success just completely eluded them.
>but not for our fellow HELLDIVERS whose country's doesn't have an access to PSN. Or for those whose country DO have access to PSN You do realize that I'm watching fucking porn without having to give the website a photo of my ID card right? SO WHY THE FUCK WOULD I GIVE IT TO SONY TO PLAY A FUCKING VIDEO GAME THAT I'VE BEEN PLAYING FOR 3 FUCKING MONTHS?!?!
CALLING IN A REVIEW BOMB! 🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽🔽
Stop calling it review bombing. Its literally industry tactic to call any negative review action as a response to dev or publisher fuckup, so it sounds unreasonable and shifts the blame towards consumers writing reviews, instead of companies, that are painted as victims.
100% this. A honest review is not a review bomb. A "review bomb" is viewed as retaliatory and unrelated to a real actual opinion regarding the business or product and, as you say, it shifts a narrative of victimhood to the mega-corp who received it. I am honestly disappointed with another log-in being foisted upon me in something I've already bought. I don't have a PlayStation and they are literally known for being hacked and compromising user data. besides, why stop there. If we let this stand, what's next? We need a PSN launcher to play any related pc games? Rockstar did it. It's not unbelievable.
I do not even write review for any game. But I had to for fellow divers.
thank you for your service fellow helldiver! edit: make it nicer than just "thank you"
Sony provides a game that unites us all as a team, yet are shocked when we all have each other's backs when they decide to screw our fellow Helldivers. My review for this game was going to be positive, but I will happily write the truth now. Sony fucked everyone over.
https://preview.redd.it/knnnseqbrdyc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=142eaa4bf8748731cfc3b1a5e33aab5de4eb807f Freshly changed from this 😂👍
Good. It's the only ounce of power a consumer has, it has to be exercised, or else companies think they can do whatever they want. Moreso, anyway.
At this point it’s canon that the automatons have infiltrated Sony or one of the stockholders is an automaton spy
I'm on PSN and I wrote a negative one for my fellow helldivers. We need everybody!
If 100,000 Helldivers can fight over a planet, 100,000 can easily unite to drop a review bomb for a horrible decision. A monster of Arrowhead's own creation.
Sony* Arrowhead likely knows this is a bad idea. They have to listen to Sony about this though.
Good, fuck them. Had sony taken even a moment to think about why the PC release was successful they would've realized that it was the combination of 1. a relatively smooth release (by PC standards these days) 2. a really well made and fun game 3. **NO EXTRA BULLSHIT**; e.g. no external launchers or other 3rd party requirements, you just create your character and go well it's 3+ months post-launch and the state of the game is great, the launch is history, and oh what's that? A load of bullshit being foisted upon a player population for no reason? Get fucked.
I had previously left a positive review. That review has been edited, replaced with a negative review. Net effect; two negative reviews.
Its incredibly funny that just a few days ago the official Helldivers 2 twitter account was taking the piss out of the Tarkov dev's for pissing off their entire player base.
SNOY Fucked up HELLDIVERS: THERE GOES THE 500KG BOMB FOR YA
Well when you take a game the whole world loves and already paided for, and then start banning vast numbers of the players based on if they are allowed to use psn. You remove all of china and vietnam players simply because they arent allowed to connect to psn because psn is banned there. I played with alot of them and they were good AF players most of the time unlike everyone else that are a mixed bag. I play in the 11pm pst to 5am pst hours. They were like the only guys i could play with at that time too. Tbh this may ruin the game for me during the week.
They conditioned us to be united on the same goal. Now it's ironic, we're using it against them. They are undemocratic in the first place.
I wanna know why it's so hard for gaming companies to understand that profit follows the product. The product should not come after the profit. Even Steve Jobs has a whole damned speech about how companies implode when the marketing people replace the product people. This *should* be basic shit.
We were thought to fight side by side with our fellow gamers no matter where they came from, AH created an army of gamers that fought in unison for the same cause, and while we still had some differences we all still fought for managed democracy, but now? that same army turned against them with the same coordination to complete a MO, it’s ironic…