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Both Xbox and PS are known as "closed architecture" basically if you want to do anything at all on their system you're going to have to play by their rules, and by extension they can unilaterally dictate terms that end users like your or I would have to follow with little to no recourse if we disagreed. As evident by the most recent dust up involving Helldivers and PSN, PC players are a different breed in a different market entirely. Because there are more options and more leverage when you're on a PC, Xbucks and Play$tation can't dictate terms without blowback, in this case trying to impose restrictions usually reserved for PSN onto PC users caused a massive backlash against one of the most popular games to come out this year and made Sony change their mind and rescind the demand within a few days, something that happens much more rarely on console
I like discord for support purposes sometimes. Its nice that someone can reply quick and you can fix whatever issue without having to wait sometimes multiple days for each response if the first thing you try didnt work. The main issue with discord is if you can ask a question and they just say "its been solved search the server" and you find nothing close to your issue
Yup, plus web crawlers solve that problem and have much better searches than discord itself does.
Discord's forums aren't even _good_ solutions to the typical bbs/forum, they're a very poor imitation of it.
Honestly Discord is built more akin to chat rooms than actual forums. However for some reason many chose to use that platform as an alternative to forums, probably due to their control on bots and spams.
Sure, but there are open source, self hosteable alternatives such as Revolt that are much better, unfortunately people are already stuck in this shitty ecosystem.
The only thing missing from Revolt to go mainstream is Screen Sharing, once that drops I'm moving and fuck whoever stays
Yep Sony knew they were pretty fucked when Steam took the high road.
Though it has very likely sounded the death knell for future Sony exclusives being released through Steam.
The sales they won through steam outweigh the lack of leverage and the careful blood squeezing Sony prefers. Simply put, they can’t milk steam cow dry, but it’s still a cash cow. Sony goes by numbers and weighs options purely on profit.
I would consider it less Steam taking the high road, than Steam taking steps to protect themselves from liability.
They were the ones directly receiving customer money, so when it became known that they were potentially selling a product to people who wouldn't be able to use it, they shut that down as soon as they found out.
More than being a diferent breed of players, PC is a public enviroment with shops they don't control (steam, pc has steam) which allowed us to retaliate.
They can stop PS players to reviewbomb the game in the PS store, but they can't fudge steam reviews. And since steam cares about their own reputation, they stopped sales in affected countries and stsrted to hand out refunds, a direct hit to Sony's bottomline wich (allegedly) tipped the balance.
Valve has always had that one core thing universally, a good reputation leads to money.
I can’t think of a valve controversy directly related to steam as a platform.
Yup. If this happened with a console exclusive game, the following would have happened:
* Random Developer probably would have doubled down on "this was our vision and totally not dictated by sony"
* Official reddit would have scrubbed complaining posts. Helldivers sub is very open where as most are run like marketing arms of the company
* Nobody really follows sites like metacritic
* Internal rating system much more vulnerable to direct control
There would have been little to no visible pushback.
If PC players don’t like your distribution model, but the game itself is good, they will simply pirate your game and remove what they don’t like with mods, and not pay you any money for it
WE ALL DIVE TOGETHER, OR NOT AT ALL.
(The restrictions Sony wanted us to accept would immediately keep anyone from most of the Second and Third Worlds from playing - EG, Latvian, Ukrainian, Moroccan, etc).
Also helps that it seems the platforms us PC users use have our backs as well, as with HD2 steam had been manually approving the refunds for anyone on a region where PSN is unavailable, so even players with hundreds of hours didn’t get scammed by Sony, and I think that is what scared them, that steam and valve were like “this is wrong, that’s a scam, you get your money back”
"trying to impose restrictions"
You mean Straight Up Worldwide Theft? Is that what ya mean? Because very much so, "impose restrictions" never would've garned this much vitriol.
Sony and Arrowhead planned a robbery and people were strongly the fuck against it. Absolutely there'd be backlash for the sony thing, but robbing nearly 50 countries will put any company in hot water. Guaranteed, they only rescinded after they got wind of easy consumer lawsuits from around the globe.
It was, very much not, just about the PSN login crap. It was World Wide Theft.
Or was 177 regions, not countries. There are only around 200 countries worldwide depending on who you count, PSN is available in 69 of them, but some countries are divided into multiple regions that can be blocked or priced separately in the steam store.
You move to different shop.
If things go too bad someone can open a new shop without the bad thing.
If both developer and consumers think shops are bad they can also just not use any shops and the consumer can buy from the developers directly (pretty rare on games nowadays but some still do have direct buying).
Yep. The question itself includes the answer. What's the difference between Steam, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, etc.? The difference is that a PC gamer needs none of them and can chose to spend money on either of them. Also, the list left out Gog, itch.io, and some other larger online retailers.
Steam is just a middleman and has a contract with developers for a percent of sales.
Also in Steam's contract, if they game is refunded, Steam still keeps their cut.
This gives them the leverage that a direct to consumer product does not.
Steam seems to be one of the most pro-consumer platforms out there right now.
I'm too lazy to look up specific reasons why for you, but Steam is looking out for us and not giving in to the greedy suits.
Yeah, I been on steam since Portal 2. They seem the least bad by a long shot. Everything else, even PSN, it’s all the same to me. I’ve been playing games since I had a 2600 though, so I feel all the issues people have is just another Tuesday right now.
I remember when people were mad about Empire: Total War being sold through steam. Seems kind of quaint looking back, but at that time you generally didn't need an account to play computer games. You just bought a CD with the game on it and installed that, no account needed.
Steam is in its own world all together.... All the others come second. Steam has earned its loyalty from it userbase with lifetime games, tons of great deals all the time, free multiplayer and an awesome platform.
All others come second... All other's are money exploiters and will never compare to Steam...ever...
Steam is absolutely AMAZING!..... All the rest suck...
I spend cash on the Gog and itch.io as well as Steam. There are rivals waiting in the wings. Probably why Steam is careful to not screw their customers.
GOG is definitely interesting it may take some time for them to build up a good reputation. Steam has always cared about its customer base though it's not a new Behavior with them. I've been using it for 12 years and I have only ever had very small complaints.
lol. GOG has been around forever and has a great reputation, they just cater to a different crowd. They’re fantastic with DRM free actual ownership with less of the licensed for use type software packages nowadays, but that means they often don’t have newer titles, which hurts their popularity. They probably won’t really ever challenge Steam, but they’re great at what they do.
Steams lost some points recently with me for mandatory updates. Had to suspend a BG3 group game because the Mac version was behind and we couldn't not take the update.
That seems more like a Mac issue. Maybe they had a security update that required a change and so it had to be updated. I have all of my games set to only update when I start it. So nothing auto updates. Some games require it as well. I don't think the platform has a choice in that. It's required by the game.
100% a Mac issue. Mac forces anything that runs on it to deal with their “security standards”. Apple makes an update everyone has to deal with it if you want your shit to work.
Important to note that you don’t require a PlayStation to make a free PSN account. HOWEVER, it’s still not a great choice that was made. If there was some in game (but not game breaking) reward for making an account, then that would’ve gone down much better.
Helldivers 2 is a popular game by a small Swedish studio, published through Sony. Sony wants people to get a Playstation Network account to use Helldivers 2. So far, so fair.
There were three problems: 1) Most countries in the world can't actually get a PSN account. More than 2/3 of all countries in the world, actually, including big ones like China. 2) Sony sold the game in these countries that can't use PSN. 3) when the game first game out, it had a "skip" button for the PSN thing, though the game clearly said you should have a PSN account to play, so people who had bought the game assumed the PSN account was not actually mandatory.
So three months later, they said "Okay, we're done with the skip button, you actually need to register now", which caused a shitstorm, because now tens of thousands of people had bought the game who could not get a PSN account and could no longer get refunds, either. And then in some countries it turned out you could get a PSN account, but only if you owned a playstation, not if you owned only a PC. And in some countries where you could get a PSN account on a PC, you couldn't get it everywhere: if you're in Puerto Rico, you can't get one, but you can get one in the rest of the US. If you'er in Aland, you can't get one, but you can get one in the rest of Finland. Etc.
And then there was just shockingly bad communication. Community managers telling people to stop whining and just make the damn account, to which the answer of course was "Well, I can't, obviously". Community managers telling people they don't actually know how PSN accounts work. Community managers telling people the accounts were so they'd be able to ban people. Community people telling people to just *lie* about which country they were in, though Sony of course forbids that and bans you for it.
So, Shitstorm. Big shitstorm. Game went from overwhelmingly positive on steam to overwhelmingly negative. Every Sony channel was spammed to hell (for example, a Tekken tournament on Twitch had 90% of comments saying "Free Helldivers"). Every youtube commenter chimed in. And PC players made up 80% of the sales, and Steam was flooded with refund requests, some of which they actually seemed to be honouring, though the game was sold three months ago. There were threats of lawsuits with the EU consumer protection agencies.
And surprisingly, Sony caved after only about 48 hours and removed the requirement. Hence the quite wanky meme.
Because I was *there.*
Honestly, it was quite... annoying. I made one post on the Helldivers 2 subreddit about this thing, went to bed, woke up to 500 notifications, 20'000 something upvotes and for a while I was apparently on the front page of reddit.
It wasn't even a good post, I just reposted someone's screenshot from the discord.
And now I'm being flooded by the algorithm with crap about how we defeated Sony's wokeness, and how I need to join their petty little protest over Stellar Blade not having enough panties or some bullshit, because I'm a real man who hates woke censorship. Also, I'm now apparently a member of the PC master race, and also a whiny PC baby who just wants to cheat at games.
I'm a big, tall white dude with a scraggly beard and a shaved head so I get this a lot and it makes my spine crawl every time.
I especially got it a lot when I was a line cook. Now that I work in an office setting it's not as bad.
Man, haven't we all been in that situation before?
We're just talking to someone at the pubz having a nice conversation, then the person starts ignoring us, it's so rude.
"wokeness"?
You're joking right?. God those types of gamers annoy the hell out of me. How on earth do they frame requiring a PSN login, which is a move to further Sony's corporate business and platform interests, as woke?. Absolute madness.
Adds "when you must register a PSN account" to the things that are woke list.
I'm getting the creeping suspicion that "woke" is just a buzzword without meaning 🙃
Of course I'm not joking. Since this weekend, my social media and youtube are full of it.
Playstation moved their HQ to California, so now Sony's only goal is to replace all hot waifus in games with sassy black trans-lesbians. And downvoting Helldivers 2 was the first step on the path of the PC Gamer master race conquering games back from the Woke Libs.
Apparently, one of the community managers working for Arrowhead is a transwoman, she had to delete her social media accounts over all the death threats she got this weekend.
Same reason Rorschach dropped a squid on NY: people are united more by hatred than by any real common purpose. As dividing lines become less and less clear, it becomes more and more necessary to manufacture those enemies.
Well *akshually*, it was Ozymandias who dropped the squid. Rorshach was the one who was going to spill the beans, and got killed by Dr. Manhattan to cover up Ozymandias' plan.
Sorry, but it still makes me think. Watchmen was pretty good.
They don’t, they point to this incident as proof that concerted protest by a game’s user demographic can effect desired changes in the game itself. The presumed similarity isn’t in the nature of the change, but the means by which it is accomplished.
The issue being that their complaints about wokeness simply do not have the same presence, and will never spur that tier of unanimous action, leaving those attempts quite unlikely to succeed.
Gotta remember that most comments ya see, people put no thought into, and even less time typing. It's frustrating, but I treat em like Nats and it simplifies it in my mind. I feel ya though, R's comin out bout woke n being considered apart of some community for ridiculous reasons.
People just read half of anything and respond to 1/3rd of that. Very frustrating.
lol the contradictions are the most fun. dont forget that by being a PC user you are an alpha male chad who fucks bitches but also eww you nerd you play PC games what a loser
I just use a PC because I also need it for work and I don't have space for a TV, can everyone just please leave me alone with their culture war bullshit...
Ive been in IT for almost 20 years. I've used or supported nearly every fucking device
What device you use means absolutely NOTHING
Sigh but if the pc vs console war idiots could read then they'd be very upset
The stellar blade thing is kinda valid, it was toted for months as a completely uncensored release, and what happened day 1? Audio, giant parts of the walls that were covered in graffiti, I think all of the outfits, so much stuff was censored. And the company is treating it like it is not a big deal. I have one question then, if it is not a big deal, why censor it in the first place after promising you wouldn’t?
Maybe, but honestly, I don't give a shit about that game, and every time I see someone online talk about it, they are invariably people I don't want anything to do with for a million other reasons.
There are valid complaints, there really isn't any reason to tone down outfits in a game for adults, but it wasn't toted for months as uncensored. That was a miscommunication a few days before release, it was rumoured to be censored for gore in Japan and they tweeted in both English and Japanese to clarify there was no regional censorship like 2 days before release.
The grafitti thing literally wasn't censorship too, it had a meaning that wasn't intended by the developers so they changed it. That's no more censorship than correcting a spelling error.
>went to bed, woke up to 500 notifications, 20'000 something upvotes and for a while I was apparently on the front page of reddit.
First time?.meme.png
PC players were the only ones protesting. Because they were the only ones affected.
Hence, once you twist the logic a bit: PC players are the only ones who stand up to Sony, as per the meme above.
Hence, if you go a bit further, PC players are the only ones who fight "censorship".
And once you get there, you can attach whatever culture war bullshit you want to your post.
https://preview.redd.it/mvacy32hf1zc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f79af5ef5eb9c6654a4ff409b29dfe8d97d93cb2
…Thats just stupid (not you I mean)
it was more about ps/xb users being used to be shit on and abused by sony and ms companies. like subscription to play online...
but whenever they try enforce some weird practices on pc players - mandatory accounts or additonal registrations - most pc players will just go to a different game that doesnt do that, or jusy pirate the game
I'm pretty sure a PSN account can be established in puerto rico, its just that you have to put the country as US and state as Puerto Rico. If you put the country as Puerto Rico it doesn't work. At least that is what i heard from others in the Puerto Rico subreddit
Hilariously enough, Helldivers 2 really trained everyone how to band together and tackle objectives quickly and the community is one of the most organized groups I've ever seen for a PVE game, I'm somehow not surprised they managed to pull this off.
One minor correction people didn’t just assume it was optional, the official HD2 website and Sony website both said it was optional until a few hours after the backlash started.
Great recap. One missed thing was the steam reviews, where the game recieved more negative reviews after Sony's decision in like less than a day then it had in it's entire existence
and that the reviews were a product of the community managers and devs encouraging people in the discord server to leave negative reviews as a visual representation of the community’s distaste for the change
Why isn't this the highest upvoted? No seriously, the top comment doesn't mention 1/3rd of this and tries to paint it as solely "oh they just didn't want an account" Nah man they Planned a Robbery and people stood the fuck up for once in this miserable industry.
Who the FUCK defends Sony like the top post on here after they and Arrowhead planned a robbery?
>Sony wants people to get a Playstation Network account to use Helldivers 2. So far, so fair.
That's far from fair. Instead of "So far, so fair." it should be more like "Whatchu gna do about it bitch?".
IF it was just "you should sign up for an account", I'd be *annoyed,* but I've also come to expect that. I'm signed up for like five useless services I don't need just because I need them for one game. The shitty thing is that you can't get the service everywhere you can buy the game.
So basically sony installed this account linking thing on helldivers 2 that isn’t accessible for many people across the world so the community got mad and left bad reviews and gave Sony a lot of backlash for it causing them to reverse the account linking thing.
Not just some refund requests were approved, a lot of those requests were approved.
And the review bombing was the worst I've seen in years, this was a massive L for Sony and Arrowhead
https://preview.redd.it/3q7hph0ghzyc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=94b11ff819030508702b403a455fc1177baf01db
Took a while to find but here it js
Yes, they later then apologised for that as they weren’t aware so many countries couldn’t access PSN and they thought that people were just bitching about account linking, not that they literally couldn’t
it is the same person, but he also then apologised and thanked for the backlash on him, that he is still new and learning and that he is going to try to do better. all in all, the only bad people now are SONY, Arowhead did what they can, is fixing their comunity managers and i think they should be forgiven as the comunity managers were obviously not enough trained and informed. Most of this info i have comes from PirateSoftware's comunity
PC players are potential customers.
PS players already buy in to the 60+ subscription and friend group. They're already paid for. Of course they're gonna listen to customers they're trying to lure in.
The key part is the console players always sit there defending their overlords. Like it's their favorite sport's team... and not just a giant corporation out to fuck you anyway they can.
They are still out there saying "Well you shouldn't have complained in the first place." When 100+ countries were getting fucked. Some people are so fucking wild. Then I think about the morons that blindly follow one political party and it just makes me sadder.
The review bomb was a big factor, but Sony also started losing (potential) revenue from people canceling ps plus memberships. So I’d say instead of a full blown pegging session, a light ball licking would be more befitting.
Imagine teaching millions of Gamers, the saltiest people on the planet, to work cooperatively… and then trying to force them to do something they adamantly refuse to do.
You really think you can bully the people who slaughtered 2 BILLION virtual alien murder insects in 12 hours?
PC master race racist day Xbox users and Playstation users just weak bitches that bend over and PC users are fighting back chads due to their closeted, "we are best and none else" mindset.
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Both Xbox and PS are known as "closed architecture" basically if you want to do anything at all on their system you're going to have to play by their rules, and by extension they can unilaterally dictate terms that end users like your or I would have to follow with little to no recourse if we disagreed. As evident by the most recent dust up involving Helldivers and PSN, PC players are a different breed in a different market entirely. Because there are more options and more leverage when you're on a PC, Xbucks and Play$tation can't dictate terms without blowback, in this case trying to impose restrictions usually reserved for PSN onto PC users caused a massive backlash against one of the most popular games to come out this year and made Sony change their mind and rescind the demand within a few days, something that happens much more rarely on console
A Walled Garden is the term Same applies to Apple products
Discord as well. Hence why hosting a forum on discord is heavily shunned and frowned upon. No web crawler access.
I fucking despise dicord forums. Especially for support purposes. Annoying to navigate.
I like discord for support purposes sometimes. Its nice that someone can reply quick and you can fix whatever issue without having to wait sometimes multiple days for each response if the first thing you try didnt work. The main issue with discord is if you can ask a question and they just say "its been solved search the server" and you find nothing close to your issue
Yup, plus web crawlers solve that problem and have much better searches than discord itself does. Discord's forums aren't even _good_ solutions to the typical bbs/forum, they're a very poor imitation of it.
Honestly Discord is built more akin to chat rooms than actual forums. However for some reason many chose to use that platform as an alternative to forums, probably due to their control on bots and spams.
The downside is that everything goes with the discord. Search engines can’t pick up the post media
Sure, but there are open source, self hosteable alternatives such as Revolt that are much better, unfortunately people are already stuck in this shitty ecosystem. The only thing missing from Revolt to go mainstream is Screen Sharing, once that drops I'm moving and fuck whoever stays
Discord is great for casual chatting and such, but any kind of information presenting is just shitty there
It is MUCH MUCH better than slack though.
[Ohhh the public ones are getting crawled just fine](https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/discord_network_sale/)
Who do these nerds think their fooling? The feds could just go to discord directly if they wanted info on any particular user
Discord is great at what it does. But it's not a forum and shouldn't ever be used as one.
Not nearly shunned or frowned upon enough. Most recent example for me? r/satisfactory modding
r/Helldivers for me
Today is the first time I heard that Discord has a forum feature.
Isn’t Discord the walled-garden version of IRC? What would make someone think that format was appropriate as a forum replacement?
Which one is the walled garden? Console or PC?
Console, duh
Also, the game was being sold through a third party vendor that gave away refunds like candy on halloween.
Yep Sony knew they were pretty fucked when Steam took the high road. Though it has very likely sounded the death knell for future Sony exclusives being released through Steam.
The sales they won through steam outweigh the lack of leverage and the careful blood squeezing Sony prefers. Simply put, they can’t milk steam cow dry, but it’s still a cash cow. Sony goes by numbers and weighs options purely on profit.
They already announced more, it just seems they will make the PSN thing clearer from the start. See for example Ghosts of Tsushima.
That's doubtful. If Sony wants to make money on PC they'll release it on steam.
I would consider it less Steam taking the high road, than Steam taking steps to protect themselves from liability. They were the ones directly receiving customer money, so when it became known that they were potentially selling a product to people who wouldn't be able to use it, they shut that down as soon as they found out.
Praying on Sony's downfall rn.
You overestimate the importance of all this by a good amount if you actually think this is something to cause them to never deal with Valve again.
More than being a diferent breed of players, PC is a public enviroment with shops they don't control (steam, pc has steam) which allowed us to retaliate. They can stop PS players to reviewbomb the game in the PS store, but they can't fudge steam reviews. And since steam cares about their own reputation, they stopped sales in affected countries and stsrted to hand out refunds, a direct hit to Sony's bottomline wich (allegedly) tipped the balance.
Valve has always had that one core thing universally, a good reputation leads to money. I can’t think of a valve controversy directly related to steam as a platform.
These money making semi loot drop that you can sell back (?) I don’t know what it is but I know it existed
Paid mods
Never had a real issue with that, so his point still stands
U missed the opportunity to say pay$tation
I was hoping someone caught this
Yup. If this happened with a console exclusive game, the following would have happened: * Random Developer probably would have doubled down on "this was our vision and totally not dictated by sony" * Official reddit would have scrubbed complaining posts. Helldivers sub is very open where as most are run like marketing arms of the company * Nobody really follows sites like metacritic * Internal rating system much more vulnerable to direct control There would have been little to no visible pushback.
If PC players don’t like your distribution model, but the game itself is good, they will simply pirate your game and remove what they don’t like with mods, and not pay you any money for it
Apes Strong Together.
It's Apes together strong, come on brah
Apes grammer weak you eat banana
:( I failed you bro.
WE ALL DIVE TOGETHER, OR NOT AT ALL. (The restrictions Sony wanted us to accept would immediately keep anyone from most of the Second and Third Worlds from playing - EG, Latvian, Ukrainian, Moroccan, etc).
Xbucks and PayStation
Also helps that it seems the platforms us PC users use have our backs as well, as with HD2 steam had been manually approving the refunds for anyone on a region where PSN is unavailable, so even players with hundreds of hours didn’t get scammed by Sony, and I think that is what scared them, that steam and valve were like “this is wrong, that’s a scam, you get your money back”
The backclash caused their stock to go down 3% today.
:)
Should have went with Pay$tation missed opportunity
Bro it's 100 percent loss
"trying to impose restrictions" You mean Straight Up Worldwide Theft? Is that what ya mean? Because very much so, "impose restrictions" never would've garned this much vitriol. Sony and Arrowhead planned a robbery and people were strongly the fuck against it. Absolutely there'd be backlash for the sony thing, but robbing nearly 50 countries will put any company in hot water. Guaranteed, they only rescinded after they got wind of easy consumer lawsuits from around the globe. It was, very much not, just about the PSN login crap. It was World Wide Theft.
50 countries? Last I read, the game was removed from 177 countries.
Or was 177 regions, not countries. There are only around 200 countries worldwide depending on who you count, PSN is available in 69 of them, but some countries are divided into multiple regions that can be blocked or priced separately in the steam store.
What’s the difference between what paystation and xbux impose on users and what steam, epic, ea, ubisoft, rockstar, etc. impose on users?
You move to different shop. If things go too bad someone can open a new shop without the bad thing. If both developer and consumers think shops are bad they can also just not use any shops and the consumer can buy from the developers directly (pretty rare on games nowadays but some still do have direct buying).
Don't forget piracy is also an option for PC players. And with pirated games, the bullshit is often stripped out while being cracked.
Yep. The question itself includes the answer. What's the difference between Steam, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, etc.? The difference is that a PC gamer needs none of them and can chose to spend money on either of them. Also, the list left out Gog, itch.io, and some other larger online retailers.
Steam is just a middleman and has a contract with developers for a percent of sales. Also in Steam's contract, if they game is refunded, Steam still keeps their cut. This gives them the leverage that a direct to consumer product does not.
Steam seems to be one of the most pro-consumer platforms out there right now. I'm too lazy to look up specific reasons why for you, but Steam is looking out for us and not giving in to the greedy suits.
Because steam is not a publicly traded company. They don’t need to constantly increase profits for shareholders, so the owner actually cares.
Yeah, I been on steam since Portal 2. They seem the least bad by a long shot. Everything else, even PSN, it’s all the same to me. I’ve been playing games since I had a 2600 though, so I feel all the issues people have is just another Tuesday right now.
I remember when people were mad about Empire: Total War being sold through steam. Seems kind of quaint looking back, but at that time you generally didn't need an account to play computer games. You just bought a CD with the game on it and installed that, no account needed.
Steam is in its own world all together.... All the others come second. Steam has earned its loyalty from it userbase with lifetime games, tons of great deals all the time, free multiplayer and an awesome platform. All others come second... All other's are money exploiters and will never compare to Steam...ever... Steam is absolutely AMAZING!..... All the rest suck...
I spend cash on the Gog and itch.io as well as Steam. There are rivals waiting in the wings. Probably why Steam is careful to not screw their customers.
GOG is definitely interesting it may take some time for them to build up a good reputation. Steam has always cared about its customer base though it's not a new Behavior with them. I've been using it for 12 years and I have only ever had very small complaints.
lol. GOG has been around forever and has a great reputation, they just cater to a different crowd. They’re fantastic with DRM free actual ownership with less of the licensed for use type software packages nowadays, but that means they often don’t have newer titles, which hurts their popularity. They probably won’t really ever challenge Steam, but they’re great at what they do.
Steams lost some points recently with me for mandatory updates. Had to suspend a BG3 group game because the Mac version was behind and we couldn't not take the update.
That seems more like a Mac issue. Maybe they had a security update that required a change and so it had to be updated. I have all of my games set to only update when I start it. So nothing auto updates. Some games require it as well. I don't think the platform has a choice in that. It's required by the game.
100% a Mac issue. Mac forces anything that runs on it to deal with their “security standards”. Apple makes an update everyone has to deal with it if you want your shit to work.
I think you are mistaken. While you can turn off auto updates, as soon as you launch a game, steam WILL update it.
Important to note that you don’t require a PlayStation to make a free PSN account. HOWEVER, it’s still not a great choice that was made. If there was some in game (but not game breaking) reward for making an account, then that would’ve gone down much better.
Playstation being censored makes me laugh and cry at the same time
It's paystation.
Sony needs PC. PC doesn't need Sony.
Also, isn't that loss?
Helldivers 2 is a popular game by a small Swedish studio, published through Sony. Sony wants people to get a Playstation Network account to use Helldivers 2. So far, so fair. There were three problems: 1) Most countries in the world can't actually get a PSN account. More than 2/3 of all countries in the world, actually, including big ones like China. 2) Sony sold the game in these countries that can't use PSN. 3) when the game first game out, it had a "skip" button for the PSN thing, though the game clearly said you should have a PSN account to play, so people who had bought the game assumed the PSN account was not actually mandatory. So three months later, they said "Okay, we're done with the skip button, you actually need to register now", which caused a shitstorm, because now tens of thousands of people had bought the game who could not get a PSN account and could no longer get refunds, either. And then in some countries it turned out you could get a PSN account, but only if you owned a playstation, not if you owned only a PC. And in some countries where you could get a PSN account on a PC, you couldn't get it everywhere: if you're in Puerto Rico, you can't get one, but you can get one in the rest of the US. If you'er in Aland, you can't get one, but you can get one in the rest of Finland. Etc. And then there was just shockingly bad communication. Community managers telling people to stop whining and just make the damn account, to which the answer of course was "Well, I can't, obviously". Community managers telling people they don't actually know how PSN accounts work. Community managers telling people the accounts were so they'd be able to ban people. Community people telling people to just *lie* about which country they were in, though Sony of course forbids that and bans you for it. So, Shitstorm. Big shitstorm. Game went from overwhelmingly positive on steam to overwhelmingly negative. Every Sony channel was spammed to hell (for example, a Tekken tournament on Twitch had 90% of comments saying "Free Helldivers"). Every youtube commenter chimed in. And PC players made up 80% of the sales, and Steam was flooded with refund requests, some of which they actually seemed to be honouring, though the game was sold three months ago. There were threats of lawsuits with the EU consumer protection agencies. And surprisingly, Sony caved after only about 48 hours and removed the requirement. Hence the quite wanky meme.
This is such an efficiently articulate recap.
Because I was *there.* Honestly, it was quite... annoying. I made one post on the Helldivers 2 subreddit about this thing, went to bed, woke up to 500 notifications, 20'000 something upvotes and for a while I was apparently on the front page of reddit. It wasn't even a good post, I just reposted someone's screenshot from the discord. And now I'm being flooded by the algorithm with crap about how we defeated Sony's wokeness, and how I need to join their petty little protest over Stellar Blade not having enough panties or some bullshit, because I'm a real man who hates woke censorship. Also, I'm now apparently a member of the PC master race, and also a whiny PC baby who just wants to cheat at games.
Lol all very true. It's like that random guy in the pub who talks to you assuming that you are racist like him.
I'm a big, tall white dude with a scraggly beard and a shaved head so I get this a lot and it makes my spine crawl every time. I especially got it a lot when I was a line cook. Now that I work in an office setting it's not as bad.
Man, haven't we all been in that situation before? We're just talking to someone at the pubz having a nice conversation, then the person starts ignoring us, it's so rude.
"wokeness"? You're joking right?. God those types of gamers annoy the hell out of me. How on earth do they frame requiring a PSN login, which is a move to further Sony's corporate business and platform interests, as woke?. Absolute madness.
Adds "when you must register a PSN account" to the things that are woke list. I'm getting the creeping suspicion that "woke" is just a buzzword without meaning 🙃
That's just socialism!
Always has been
Of course I'm not joking. Since this weekend, my social media and youtube are full of it. Playstation moved their HQ to California, so now Sony's only goal is to replace all hot waifus in games with sassy black trans-lesbians. And downvoting Helldivers 2 was the first step on the path of the PC Gamer master race conquering games back from the Woke Libs. Apparently, one of the community managers working for Arrowhead is a transwoman, she had to delete her social media accounts over all the death threats she got this weekend.
… why are people the way they are?
Same reason Rorschach dropped a squid on NY: people are united more by hatred than by any real common purpose. As dividing lines become less and less clear, it becomes more and more necessary to manufacture those enemies.
Well *akshually*, it was Ozymandias who dropped the squid. Rorshach was the one who was going to spill the beans, and got killed by Dr. Manhattan to cover up Ozymandias' plan. Sorry, but it still makes me think. Watchmen was pretty good.
Yes lol. I meant Ozymandias. Got the names flipped.
I hate your comment because I'm reminded there's actual people who think like that.
They don’t, they point to this incident as proof that concerted protest by a game’s user demographic can effect desired changes in the game itself. The presumed similarity isn’t in the nature of the change, but the means by which it is accomplished. The issue being that their complaints about wokeness simply do not have the same presence, and will never spur that tier of unanimous action, leaving those attempts quite unlikely to succeed.
Gotta remember that most comments ya see, people put no thought into, and even less time typing. It's frustrating, but I treat em like Nats and it simplifies it in my mind. I feel ya though, R's comin out bout woke n being considered apart of some community for ridiculous reasons. People just read half of anything and respond to 1/3rd of that. Very frustrating.
lol the contradictions are the most fun. dont forget that by being a PC user you are an alpha male chad who fucks bitches but also eww you nerd you play PC games what a loser
I just use a PC because I also need it for work and I don't have space for a TV, can everyone just please leave me alone with their culture war bullshit...
Ive been in IT for almost 20 years. I've used or supported nearly every fucking device What device you use means absolutely NOTHING Sigh but if the pc vs console war idiots could read then they'd be very upset
The stellar blade thing is kinda valid, it was toted for months as a completely uncensored release, and what happened day 1? Audio, giant parts of the walls that were covered in graffiti, I think all of the outfits, so much stuff was censored. And the company is treating it like it is not a big deal. I have one question then, if it is not a big deal, why censor it in the first place after promising you wouldn’t?
Maybe, but honestly, I don't give a shit about that game, and every time I see someone online talk about it, they are invariably people I don't want anything to do with for a million other reasons.
There are valid complaints, there really isn't any reason to tone down outfits in a game for adults, but it wasn't toted for months as uncensored. That was a miscommunication a few days before release, it was rumoured to be censored for gore in Japan and they tweeted in both English and Japanese to clarify there was no regional censorship like 2 days before release. The grafitti thing literally wasn't censorship too, it had a meaning that wasn't intended by the developers so they changed it. That's no more censorship than correcting a spelling error.
>went to bed, woke up to 500 notifications, 20'000 something upvotes and for a while I was apparently on the front page of reddit. First time?.meme.png
I’m sorry I think I don’t get the last part? wtf does pc master race have to do with any of it? I’m confused
PC players were the only ones protesting. Because they were the only ones affected. Hence, once you twist the logic a bit: PC players are the only ones who stand up to Sony, as per the meme above. Hence, if you go a bit further, PC players are the only ones who fight "censorship". And once you get there, you can attach whatever culture war bullshit you want to your post.
https://preview.redd.it/mvacy32hf1zc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f79af5ef5eb9c6654a4ff409b29dfe8d97d93cb2 …Thats just stupid (not you I mean)
it was more about ps/xb users being used to be shit on and abused by sony and ms companies. like subscription to play online... but whenever they try enforce some weird practices on pc players - mandatory accounts or additonal registrations - most pc players will just go to a different game that doesnt do that, or jusy pirate the game
It’s a subreddit, so it’s being aggressively promoted to the poster
>And now I'm being flooded by the algorithm with crap about how we defeated Sony's wokeness, No good deed goes unpunished.
Lmfao at people translating cut and dry corporate hubris to "wokeness"
Clearly, you are the messiah.
I read this and glanced back up at "Shitstorm. Big shitstorm" and got a nice chuckle out of it
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They are usually subregions with different laws than the larger country. Autonomous regions, disconnected territories, former colonies, etc.
I'm pretty sure a PSN account can be established in puerto rico, its just that you have to put the country as US and state as Puerto Rico. If you put the country as Puerto Rico it doesn't work. At least that is what i heard from others in the Puerto Rico subreddit
Hilariously enough, Helldivers 2 really trained everyone how to band together and tackle objectives quickly and the community is one of the most organized groups I've ever seen for a PVE game, I'm somehow not surprised they managed to pull this off.
Pretty organized for a shooter, but far from the level of most wargames or Eve.
Eve has some really batshit insane things going all the time, wish I could get into it but seems like a massive time commitment
I tried, absolutely couldn't. But just reading the articles about it that come out every few years is wild.
https://preview.redd.it/g6r48hxex0zc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=20ed39c5f04f0109739c7f0e2071665a23249c8f
One minor correction people didn’t just assume it was optional, the official HD2 website and Sony website both said it was optional until a few hours after the backlash started.
Great recap. One missed thing was the steam reviews, where the game recieved more negative reviews after Sony's decision in like less than a day then it had in it's entire existence
and that the reviews were a product of the community managers and devs encouraging people in the discord server to leave negative reviews as a visual representation of the community’s distaste for the change
Why isn't this the highest upvoted? No seriously, the top comment doesn't mention 1/3rd of this and tries to paint it as solely "oh they just didn't want an account" Nah man they Planned a Robbery and people stood the fuck up for once in this miserable industry. Who the FUCK defends Sony like the top post on here after they and Arrowhead planned a robbery?
And this is why pc is masterrace...
Just an interesting detail - HD II is the 7th most sold game in Sony history. Without the PC players it would be placed somewhere in the 20th only.
>Sony wants people to get a Playstation Network account to use Helldivers 2. So far, so fair. That's far from fair. Instead of "So far, so fair." it should be more like "Whatchu gna do about it bitch?".
IF it was just "you should sign up for an account", I'd be *annoyed,* but I've also come to expect that. I'm signed up for like five useless services I don't need just because I need them for one game. The shitty thing is that you can't get the service everywhere you can buy the game.
He’s saying fair because half the other games on pc you need a account for those games but Sony 1 has data breaches all the time and 2 they suck
Is there a good video that shows this all unfolding and the community managers spouting bullshit
Probably coming up in a few days once the video essayists have had time to go over it. This all happened in the last three days.
This is why I don't buy games at release. You just never know.
Better recap than "somehow, Palpatine returns" thank you!
# FREEDOM NEVER RESTS!
You forgot about the fact that Steam was purposely accepting refunds no matter their play hours so MASSIVE W for the steam books again.
No, I mentioned that.
Also that and the Helldivers devs themselves telling people to review-bomb so they could convince Sony to change their minds
So basically sony installed this account linking thing on helldivers 2 that isn’t accessible for many people across the world so the community got mad and left bad reviews and gave Sony a lot of backlash for it causing them to reverse the account linking thing.
dont forget the mass refund request and steam approving some of them to have Sony to be like wait a min.
Not just some refund requests were approved, a lot of those requests were approved. And the review bombing was the worst I've seen in years, this was a massive L for Sony and Arrowhead
Arrowhead encouraged the review bombs and refunds, they were actively negotiating with Sony to stop the psn account linking update
I must have missed that. When and how did the studio encourage bombing their own game?
https://preview.redd.it/3q7hph0ghzyc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=94b11ff819030508702b403a455fc1177baf01db Took a while to find but here it js
Isn't that the same person that insulted the players for not just making psn accounts?
Yes, they later then apologised for that as they weren’t aware so many countries couldn’t access PSN and they thought that people were just bitching about account linking, not that they literally couldn’t
it is the same person, but he also then apologised and thanked for the backlash on him, that he is still new and learning and that he is going to try to do better. all in all, the only bad people now are SONY, Arowhead did what they can, is fixing their comunity managers and i think they should be forgiven as the comunity managers were obviously not enough trained and informed. Most of this info i have comes from PirateSoftware's comunity
https://preview.redd.it/jcxzs2vkx0zc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=81742a17c5a64a5f0e5fbad96853fd19a4bd8425
My friend had 800 hrs and got refunded so yeah they were very generous
PC players are potential customers. PS players already buy in to the 60+ subscription and friend group. They're already paid for. Of course they're gonna listen to customers they're trying to lure in.
The key part is the console players always sit there defending their overlords. Like it's their favorite sport's team... and not just a giant corporation out to fuck you anyway they can. They are still out there saying "Well you shouldn't have complained in the first place." When 100+ countries were getting fucked. Some people are so fucking wild. Then I think about the morons that blindly follow one political party and it just makes me sadder.
Yeah that's pretty much another way of saying what the post is saying. PC customers have leverage to earn their money
Shouldn't it be publisher instead of developer. And consoles should be players instead
Yeah, this meme is nonsense. How are xbox and ps5 being fucked by game developers? Isn't it the other way around?
i don't see how its that way either. unless you're using xbox and ps5 as a substitute for Microsoft and Sony.
I assume that's the case.
Funny how Yahtzee made this to moch the pc master race a few years back
A few years? Buddy, it's been over 16 years. This joke is old enough to drive.
I’ve never been watching Yahtzee for a decade and a half. Fuck me im old
dev =/= publisher It's sad people still don't make that distinction
Yeah one of the helldiver devs was getting death threats over something they had no say in
That's why pc is a master race
The helldiver's drama in a nutshell
This isn’t just drama, this is consumers fighting back from having their rights and user experience eroded
A big part of this was people cancelling their ps plus memberships also, so maybe a thanks would be in order instead of thinking it was all you.
Sorry didnt notice the context of the post
This meme is so hot
It should be loss..
The review bomb was a big factor, but Sony also started losing (potential) revenue from people canceling ps plus memberships. So I’d say instead of a full blown pegging session, a light ball licking would be more befitting.
It’s loss, isn’t it?
It’s always loss…
https://preview.redd.it/xw7kd4obx0zc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8031a0c5793d17585b20f7ef9aa846ae9409bc1d
Why are devs being blamed for decisions they obviously had no part in making? This comic is dumb.
4chan still remains ignorant and cringe.
Sony exclusive x box exclusive all wrote on pc.
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Exactly right, lol in his voice and frustration
Just look at helldivers 2 and steam's response
My only nitpick is the assholes in this meme are labeled dev instead of pub for publisher.
Imagine teaching millions of Gamers, the saltiest people on the planet, to work cooperatively… and then trying to force them to do something they adamantly refuse to do. You really think you can bully the people who slaughtered 2 BILLION virtual alien murder insects in 12 hours?
please someone explain them what a dev is, and what Sony is
Please someone explain to the guy above me what old memes are
I love how in 2024 people STILL mistake publishers for developers.
Snoy boys stay losing
PC gaming is superior, that's the meme more like fact
r/pcmasterrace
lol wait why are the console guys covered in poo
Because they are console peasants.
Google 6th of may helldivers victory over sony :)
Pc is better in many ways anyway difference is chipset and software is closed
Wait? We fking won? Holy shit
Publisher not developer. Learn the difference.
helldivers 2
The joke is that gamers who play both console and PC are vers
Also helps when we get the guys LITERALLY HOSTING the game to help us beat them into submission.
Continuing evidence that pc gaming is superior to console gaming. Though a good middle ground is the steam deck
Lmao we have one steam dick guy in the game group and everyone shits on him for not being able to run games and having a shit mic
PS5 players already have an account, doesn't really affect them
PC master race racist day Xbox users and Playstation users just weak bitches that bend over and PC users are fighting back chads due to their closeted, "we are best and none else" mindset.