A wise philosopher once said "They found you amusing for a while, the people of this industry. But the one thing they love more than a hero, is to see a hero fall, fail, die trying. In spite of everything you've done for them, eventually they will hate you." Whilst another coined the slightly more pithier quote "You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Both poignant and iconic glimpses into the world of public regard and the constant popularity contest. The heights it soars you to and the cliffs it tries to push you off of. And today it would see it is the Internet's darlings turn to be put up to sacrifice. Just as Baldur's Gate 3 was bullied for a week because of one glitch that destroyed items which was up for a bit, Helldivers is hitting it's wall when it comes to the most frustrating aspect of any online-primary game: convenience and access.
If there's one thing you never want to stick in a post if you want it to be received in any way well and not as some sort of punishment- it is the phrase "The grace period is up." And yet that is how Helldivers chose to introduce the now mandatory requirement that everyone who plays their game has to log on to an active Sony account in order to play. And by everyone- I mean the extensive PC player base. People who might not even own Sony accounts, are now going to be forced to make one in order to play this popular online game that everyone has been raving about. Now this was always a requirement listed on the Steam page, but thanks to the plethora of launch issues that brought the Helldivers team into a bitter struggle with server infrastructure in order to handle the vast hoards of players rushing to their game- that extra requirement was suspended until further notice. Well, welcome to 'further notice' everybody!
Essentially this means another layer of periphery between players and the games they pay for, which we already know that PC players deeply dislike thanks to the ever popular hatred of all game launchers and even more so for alternative store websites that try to secure their dominance with exclusivity deals. (I swear if FF7 Rebirth goes first to Epic again I'm going to spit!) Not to mention this periphery is the Sony ecosystem which has a frightening reputation for being leakier than the Titanic submersible. (Too soon?) So hope you're happy with your details being smeared across the dark net a couple months after creating your account because that's the pipeline of those sign up forms! No one likes password management and no one likes another check and balance which, as proven by the several months we've gone without, genuinely isn't necessary for the game to run.
Now it should be noted that there is a coherent reason for all this. The original way that Helldivers was designed to run it's service was by the monitoring of PlayStation accounts which would allow the team to swiftly deliver ban actions against problematic players without going through the hoops of IP banning they are saddled with otherwise. So for the team it's a convenience feature. I'm just as pessimistic as your most staunch anti-corpo out there, but I have to put my foot down and insist there is no evidence this is some ploy from Sony to force new products down players throats. There's not even a way for Sony to push deals in your face except for maybe direct emails? If anyone reads those!
But here's the thing. For me this is just a frank inconvenience. I'm being asked to make a new account, share my email and details, to a place that I don't want to. It's a pain in the neck that I don't want to deal with. But I have that option. But for some out there, the situation is not so clean. For some, the option to sit down and make a PlayStation account actually is not there at all- because Steam has a wider reach than the Playstation infrastructure does. There are players who actually will be locked out of playing Helldivers thanks to this decision, and those are the hardline and unavoidable concessions that such a policy is forcing on it's own consumer base for the small victory of being able to ban some people a bit more efficiently. Does that sound equitable?
Helldivers community managers took the typical 'hostile community manager' approach to all this when it blew up- mocking people's outrage over this small imposition and encouraging the aggrieved to up and leave like they were proposing to. You know, typical 'I've been hired to crisis manage by shouting louder than everyone else' conduct. (I seriously do not know what Community Managers do besides stoke fires.) But that somewhat turned when people voiced the much more real blocking off of players that this shift was doing. That was when the community started encouraging... people to continue downvoting the game on Steam and getting riled up? (Uhh... yeah, sometimes you have to wonder why these people are employed.)
In actuality there is method to this madness. Because the Helldivers team seem, curiously, to actually be on the player's side here- but it would seem the decision is out of their hands. As the Manager explained, Sony don't care about Discord outrage, but dropping metrics on Steam reviews are unavoidable and provide tangible evidence of community distaste that can be used as ammunition in negotiations. Maybe if people keep annoyed for long enough, Sony will be forced to see the strain their odd mandates are causing for this game, their most popular in a while, and lean off of the unnecessary ruling. Then we can all get back to the harmless community of genocidal democracy-freaks that this game was built to facilitate and foster!
And all this goes to show the frank discontent in the relationship between developers, publishers and consumers in what is ostensibly a 'service community'. When the right limb doesn't even know how what it does effects the left limb, you get situations of unintentional self sabotage where entire forest fires need to be lit and allowed to ravage the country side before solutions can be even so much as considered! You might fall for the lie that these are intelligent decisions made by the well researched and discerning, who know the breadth of their rulings before they play out- but needs merely pay attention to the floundering common in the highest echelon of the industry to know how untrue that is. These people live on a different stratosphere to those they siphoning a living off of. But hey, at least there's hope for Helldivers 2 if only their loyal fans scream loud enough.
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