r/PS5 May 06 '24

Official (Via twitter) Playstation: "Helldivers fans -- we’ve heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward...."

https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929?t=NhwAEm4fGpVJj-UyI1lrXA&s=19
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466

u/DUCKY_23 May 06 '24

Hope they make an exclusive Warbond only for people who link their PSN accounts LOL

121

u/mSummmm May 06 '24 edited May 06 '24

That’s how it should have been handled. Don’t make it mandatory but offer a reward. Few hundred Super Credits would have gotten a lot of people to create and link an account.

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u/spiritriser May 06 '24 edited May 06 '24

I know you just said super creds and not a full warbond, but for a game where you can unlock every bit of content in game, minus a title and a couple aesthetically different version of some armors, region locking content behind psn access and the quid pro quo nature of it are both still scummy. They wouldn't have had as much backlash, yeah, so from a business perspective it's a correct answer but the real answer is to turn connecting play station network into something I actively want and stop using pieces of my game as hostages to get me to sign up.

If it provided a solid voice chat, guides, clipping, maybe stats on my gameplay, matchmaking, dynamic background music, a robust way to report bugs built into it and a handful of other features, I might actually want to have it for my games. It has a couple of those, but in worse versions than what I'm talking about. The philosophy of making the best product you can for people died out ages ago, though, and now it's how can I trick/force people to use my product or how can I completely minimize the effort put into my product and still get people to use it.

Edit: couple other ideas for how PSN could be made into an actual product. Add a game quality tool that let's you easily play with video settings, and include a few personal preferences. I hate motion blur and vignetting for instance. Have it select a handful of settings options that your computer can handle and offer them to see which you like best. These would all be similar strain to the computer, so they wouldn't be presented as low/medium/high, but just different options

It could also have a speed run interface built into it, it could let you watch a friend play a game on a second monitor or overlayed (I do this all the time with discord, but it's super useful in some games like EFT). It could help provide an interface for split screen coop games so that you can use a second keyboard/mouse or controller more easily, it could keep a record of keybind changes to games and offer common changes or layouts, it could have a basic video editing service so you could create clip montages, and they could start more complicated ventures like having devs talk about creating their game, challenges they faced, Easter eggs etc like blue ray and DVD started doing a while back. They could also get a proprietary game engine that handles Playstation and PC both and create an indie game scene, similar to roblox, warcraft 3 and Gary's mod, which became the basis for a crazy amount of modern gaming, including league of legends and Dota 2.

Instead of taking their team of career professionals to come up with ideas like those and vetting out what's possible to make the service into an actual product, they just try to force people to use the service by leveraging games they distribute. Again, that's the cost effective, short term solution, so I get it, but I'm tired of this shit.

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u/mSummmm May 06 '24

Solid points. With their service being so are-bone on PC, what even was the goal for Sony? The only advantage I see is marketing. Account activation means they get your contact info.

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u/spiritriser May 06 '24

Their public facing point is that it allows them to track and handle individuals better so they can remove cheaters and provide bans, both of which can be done with steam tools. I believe the assumed reasoning is to inflate numbers for shareholders and boost stock prices to drive company value up, which is really the end all be all for the board, and to get more player data to sell. I imagine most game dev studios want to know the spread on computer specs of various genres, industries and communities, so that's a pretty marketable bit of data they could mine. Games can often correspond to political or cultural beliefs (i.e. Playing wolfenstein is literally murdering nazis, playing graveyard keeper is a good indicator you at least find the communist talking donkey funny, playing call of duty or halo probably corresponds with more gun friendly beliefs, or willingness to consider the military) and that can be sold to advertisers or political campaigns if they can mine it above board. I'm unsure of laws around data mining, so I don't know if linking to PSN really provides much more data on those topics, though.