Key Takeaways
- Sony faced backlash over requiring Steam linking for PSN.
- Despite reversing that decision, Sony faces a loss of trust from PC gamers.
- Sony must learn from the reaction and rebuild trust with the PC gaming community.
Every once in a while, the mob mentality on social media can produce positive results. It doesn’t happen often, so it’s undoubtedly newsworthy when it does indeed occur. One such example of a massive community of gamers getting together and the correct result occurred this weekend when Sony reversed course regarding its policy of requiring gamers to link their Steam profiles to a PSN account to play Sony-published games. The reversal came after users of the uber-popular Helldivers 2 staged a massive review-bomb campaign for the game to protest the aforementioned policy.
Crisis averted right? Certainly, the crisis is averted for one of the best games of 2024 so far. Helldivers 2 players are already working to reverse the review bombing and get its Steam reviews back up to “overwhelmingly positive.” However, Sony opened up a can of worms with how it comported itself over the weekend.
Helldivers 2 made me fire up my PS5 again
After a long break from PS5 games, I got Helldivers 2 because it’s been all over the internet. I’m happy to say, it’s worth the hype.
In fact, it looked like the electronics giant was prepared to go to war with Helldivers 2 players over the account-linking policy at just about the worst possible time. The company went so far as to respond to complaints about the Steam policy by outright removing access to the game in more than 150 regions. The rationale behind this was that Sony doesn’t offer PSN in those regions anyway, ergo no one would be able to follow the account linking policy, and therefore why have access to a game Steam users couldn’t play anyway?
Once trust is truly broken, it can be hard to ever really get it back.
Unsurprisingly, the move created even more of a backlash to a situation that exploded in a very short period of time. And that brought the company to the crux of a brand new problem. With the way that Sony handled all of this, the company now has a trust problem among PC gamers. That group, estimated to be about 900 million strong compared to about 629 million console gamers worldwide, is not a constituency Sony wants to anger, considering it’s only bringing even more Playstation original titles to Steam.
Gamers vote with their wallets, and they also tend to have long memories, especially when they think an entity is going out of its way to anger them. Whether or not that was the aim (and it’s not hard to believe it wasn’t, and Sony was caught flatfooted by the backlash), that is the perception in the Steam and Helldivers communities.
Helldivers 2 is paving the way for more D&D-style game masters
Helldivers 2’s success could lead to more D&D-style game masters in games, like how Fortnite made battle royale modes a thing in games like Warzone.
The policy that caused that uproar has been in place for quite a while regarding other Sony-published games. The company’s policy mirrors plenty of other developers and publishers, like Electronic Arts, 2K, and Rockstar. It wasn’t entirely the policy itself that had users fired up. It was allowing the policy to lapse for months and then giving users a few days’ notice of a major change coming.
Sony now has a black mark on its record, as users feel as though they were blindsided by the policy suddenly being reinstated. That was readily evident after Sony announced it was removing the PSN requirement on social media sites, and users wondered out loud whether or not they should make sure the announcement was also posted on Steam before believing it to be true.
Sony ran into a steep learning curve about trust and the PC gaming community
Can it truly learn its lesson?
There’d be no reason not to believe Sony was about to do exactly what it said. But trust has been officially broken. Now, Sony will have to work to rebuild it. Once trust is truly broken, it can be hard to ever really get it back.
In its official announcement, Sony said it was “still learning what is best” for PC gamers. The question now is whether its higher-ups will really take this lesson to heart. Will they know how to handle games on Steam moving forward? The answer is coming quickly, considering Ghosts of Tsushima is the next PlayStation title to be released on PC. It lands in about 10 days. That’s not enough time for everyone to get over a rather explosive weekend.
That group, estimated to be about 900 million strong compared to about 629 million console gamers worldwide, is not a constituency Sony wants to anger.
There is almost certainly going to be a segment of the gaming community that decides the company needs to be “punished” for how it handled Helldivers 2. A review bomb would be about the least surprising reaction to Ghosts of Tsushima’s release on May 16. It won’t be hard to tell when and if the review bomb hits, considering how positive the reviews were when it was released on the PS4 and PS5.
Sony definitely has a lot to learn about the PC gaming community. That’s understandable, considering it hasn’t been a part of that community very long, nor has it immersed itself with a high volume of games moving from console to computer.
However an established company of Sony’s size shouldn’t have to worry about winning back trust over something seemingly so minor. Here’s hoping it learned the lesson it claims it learned. Another incident like this would cause irreparable damage.
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