What happened?
When the game launched, if you played on PS5 you needed a PSN account and if you played on PC the game encouraged you to make one and link it, but it was optional.
New patch made doing so mandatory. Tiny inconvenience for PC players in regions where you can make a free PSN account (basically everywhere except parts of Africa, Eastern Europe, and tiny island nations/colonies), but if you live in one of those regions without PSN access, or refuse to make and link a PSN account, you can no longer play the game. It has also been removed from the Steam storefront in regions without PSN.
This has led to review-bombing and a lot of very angry gamers, most of whom the problem doesn’t actually affect but who still see it as representative of shitty media industry practices. Like how last December, Sony lost access to their license for Discovery content and removed access to paid content for users.
Helldivers was made by a small studio using a big company’s resources to make it cross-platform, but now that big company is making very unpopular business decisions for them.
Most of whom the problem doesn’t actually affect.
Sony has an abysmal data security track record. By forcing everyone to provide a bunch of data to Sony (when it’s been obvious for months that it isn’t a technical requirement, and when their own website says that account linking when playing Sony released games on a PC is optional) everyone who wants to continue playing must now agree to have their data leaked just to pad the publisher’s account numbers.
This is the biggest issue that a lot of these angry gamers aren’t even talking about. If you look at the last ~15 years or so, Sony has suffered a major data breach every like 1.5 years, why the hell should anyone trust them? And you know this new requirement is gonna grab the attention of bad actors who know that hundreds of thousands or millions of new accounts will be made, ripe for the picking.
