Sony are a peculiar case of a game company. Sitting at the top of the adult console market, chest to chest with Nintendo, you'd have thought they would have a strong grasp on what it takes to succeed. But as Microsoft starts shooting itself in the cranium, I think we're becoming more and more privy to the fact that Playstation has only be getting a foot up because Xbox so regularly falls on its' face providing a step from which to move up from. If the Microsoft Xbox brand were competent, controlled by people who knew what they were doing, extracting the right games out of the right studios and making a name for themselves, Sony would be the donkey of the free right now for how utterly moronically anti-consumer they always insist on being. Of course, in such a reality Xbox would have no reason to play nice with consumers either so they would be just as big of monsters. There really is no winning when you play with corporations, is there?
And we can see this clearly in Sony's bizarre first party direction, which to this day hasn't changed from the Live Service mandate of yester year. Despite their successes in buying single player developing studios that have secured award after award for the company, even going on to secure and award winning show from one of their first party produced properties- Sony wants to chase after the biggest no-where prize in gaming: Live Services. What is the point? As this point it's a more likely best to take your money to the high-rollers table and bet on a hand of Blackjack, the odds are actually better to make a profit doing that then investing in a Live Service- given their horrific failure rate. Helldivers 2 may have skewered perceptions for Sony a little bit, but if they really invest in this direction as much as they're threatening to, in 5 years time habitual Poker Players will be more in the black than they are!
But that's the old news, how about that Helldivers 2 situation, eh? Remember when that all transpired and Sony tried to wiggle their account requirements upon a game that provably functioned just fine without them- twisting PC players into creating PSN accounts just to play the game they bought. Of course, the team themselves cared very little about the comfort of their playerbase before discovering that due to various countries not having PSN countries, some of their players would be actually unable to keep playing the game. Funny how it changes the conversation when "I'm actually not comfortable doing this" turns to "I actually can't keep invested in your ecosystem if this continues." But my surliness regarding Arrowhead and their backpedalling aside, why was such a system even a Playstation mandate to begin with?
Rumours abound but the most likely idea I've heard brought up is the ol' hotshot exec wants to show how much of an impact he's had excuse. It's the classic. Change the brand logo to something objectively less clear and worse to prove you've effected something worth sticking in the CV. This was just a case of a guy wanting to talk about the big new sign up numbers that PSN has received, even it was at literally gun point in order to play the hit new game. The requirement was suspended upon the rocky launch, but when the game blew up that drove the heat under the execs collar for that sweet praise from his sugar daddy bosses. That seems to play out perfectly in my mind explaining all of this to an unfortunate T. But whatever the truth of the matter, whether it was Sony pushing this or Arrowhead, the results were perplexingly bad for Sony.
Ignore the PR hit for a moment, if you can. Logistically the shrinking of your current most popular user base is an active assassination of the PC port to an unreasonable degree. A desecration of basic profit making principals in an age of the games industry ruled by the almighty dollar bill. Steam ended up pulling the game entirely from storefronts outside of the purview of the PSN, cutting off entire countries worth of customers for absolutely no real gain. There's so lip service about making moderation a little easier on the team's side because they can just ban a PSN account rather than work to ban IPs- but is that alone worth cutting off thousands of customers? Who then will be granted refunds by a surprisingly understanding Steam?
Of course the story has that happy ending where the big bad Sony were told off by a user base who review bombed the game, got the decision overturned and now have a shiny new cape to show off the great meta-war: but those regions are still blocked from buying the game for whatever reason. It seems some degree of the damage has been done, and nothing of consequence was gained. Whatsmore, absolutely nothing was learnt either, because Sony are doing the exact same crap again for the port of Ghost of Tsushima, and one has to wonder whether or not there's one sycophant in charge of PC ports that no one at Sony is keeping a close enough eye on, because financially, this makes no sense!
Now Ghost is a single player game primarily, meaning the decision to not sign into a PSN account isn't going to invalidate the entire game suddenly. But the game did get a post-launch online mode which, according to folk from the time, is supposed to be pretty fantastic. Oh, but what's that? Ghost of Tsushima has also been blocked from purchase in all regions that don't have PSN coverage. Which... actually makes no sense whatsoever! The game doesn't need online connectivity whatsoever, there is no reason to take a torch to everything like this! Is this just the cost of working with Playstation? Having them kneecap your product out of misguided caution over a non-existent backlash because they're too stupid to employ any amount of critical consideration to the situation?
Sony have always had a strange and icky relationship with porting their first party games, almost as though they're terrified of people realising that the only value the PS ecosystem holds is it's exclusive games and without that they're just an average console developer who made a few lucky studio investments back in the day. But it's only recently they've demonstrated an unhinged level of frank disconnection with the reality around them to an absolutely dangerous degree. And for those that sold their studio to the Sony machine, they can just sit back in perplexed horror as their hard work is stamped upon for absolutely no good reason as Sony flails around striking out at phantoms. Is this what it means to experience cognitive company decline?
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