I don't normally play the latest and greatest releases but I have heard a lot of chatter about how fantastic Helldivers2 is. I played a bit of Helldivers 1 and thought it was a pretty awesome concept although I never really got good at it because I could never get the button combinations right on the various things that you have to deploy in a timely manner.
I have been closely watching the feud between Sony and the fans though and it is just amazing the me that the fans have actually taught an industry juggernaut that the fans are actually the ones making the rules here if they band together in unison.
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If you haven't heard about it here is the situation. Helldivers 2 released earlier this year and it was immediately extremely popular. It might be one of the best selling or perhaps even THE BEST selling game of 2024 up to now. It was being talked about and raved about by everyone and it seems like all the gaming streams were about this game. I watched a few of them and the game looked wildly entertaining but also looked like it had a competitive element to it that was unlikely to appeal to me since I quickly tire of games where the people involved in it are people I do not know and that are going to quickly become toxic as hell because I didn't do research on a game in order to play it just perfectly.
That aside, the game looks friggin wild.
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Helldivers 1 was a top down shooter co-op game that involved potentially hundreds of thousands of players around the world working together for a common goal of defeating an alien presence on a planet. Forgive my very vague description of the gameplay but I haven't actually played the 2nd installment and the last time I played the original was years ago.
So what happened was that sometime in the past month Sony decided that in order for people to continue playing the game that they were going to have to sign up for a PSN account. I am unclear as to whether or not this was free or they had to pay for it, but the major problem was that there are many nations around the world that for one reason or another, do not have access to the PSN. Also, there are a ton of people out there, myself included, that once they download a game, even a free one, do not want to EVER have to also login to some 3rd party something or other just to play a game that they already paid for.
The Helldivers 2 community, with the power of memes and reddit at their back, united together to review bomb the game on Steam and other places with negative reviews as can be seen in the first picture I posted. Sony's initial response was a snarky one where they basically belittled the fans for being too lazy to sign up for something that takes 120 seconds (their words, not mine.) There was other responses by devs that were a bit more apologetic and some that were more harsh but the community was unrelenting.
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Virtually overnight the scores for this game went from overwhelmingly positive to overwhelmingly negative. I'm not saying that it has never happened before but this is the first time that I have seen an AAA game with such a negative score. As a result Sony's stock even took a hit and people try to blow this up to be a bigger hit than it was, it was only slight but it was clear that this revulsion on the part of this game's community could end up having a much bigger impact that just people to demand refunds for Helldivers... it could result in an outright boycott of "all things Sony." I suppose the upper management finally relented and realized that they had to do some damage control at this point because there was a great celebration when the news hit that "Sony retreats."
Even though I do not play this game and honestly, due to the limitations of my computer I likely wont play it, I am happy to see that the gaming community is taking matters into their own hands and here is why: If things like this, which are clearly designed to generate more revenue for Sony at the inconvenience or even expense of their customers is to ever prevail, you can bet the farm that it will quickly become an industry standard. The video game industry is one of the most lucrative in the world and the people behind this are always looking for a way to make even more.
This small victory is an important one and I hope it serves as a precedent for things in the future. We all need to remember that it is actually us, the gamers, that have the power to resist bullshit like this, and if we stick together and remain organized the industry will have no choice but to bend the knee to us... which is the way it should be anyway.
To me, gaming is a fun hobby at least in part because of the fact that it is affordable and relatively straight-forward. Executives have a difficult time relating to the "average person" so every now and then we need to remind them that they have their yachts only because the peasantry is willing to keep giving them money.
Sony eventually did the right thing here, but only because they were forced to do so. I would imagine that they will not attempt anything like this in the future and other companies have learned from their mistake.
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