Democracy is back on the menu!

God do I ever hate corporate speak.

"Yeah we figured we could increase our market share but that controversy would harm profits even more. Nevermind thihi >.<"

"Rest assured we'll keep trying other ways until we find one that you don't really care about or don't realize it's screwing you over. Thank you for your continued support!"
Yeah, but Sony cant say "Fuck, calm down we wont do it if you cunts are gonna carry on like this."
- Yeah, they’re not…
  Uhh, would maybe Mark Cuban or Richard Branson have those stones? Know there’s somebody out there…

Democracy? No, free market capitalism, yes. They would not give a shit about negative reviews on steam if it were not affecting their bottom line.

Definitely. Hitting them where it matters most, their pockets. They probably have a long term plan with this game and being hit this early with that many reviews would hurt their pockets. I guess most of us have very little hope that Sony would reverse their decision hence the refunds etc but here we are with this announcement. Anyways, what do we know. We are just kids playing games.
Its a reference to the game

Major order complete. The Automaton... Er, Sony Menace has been driven back can the south quadrant of the map just be sony executives and we have to go fight them off periodically

Reminds me of this Steam review I saw posted a couple days ago:
That would actually be fucking hilarious. It is only available to PC players.

So let's see if I've got the situation surrounded here:

Helldivers 2 = popular game built by a mid-sized studio under parent company Sony Fuckwits International. Well liked game, lots of people playing and enjoying it having purchased it on Steam for PC.

Sony Fuckwits International decides after loads of copies have been sold on Steam that a Playstation account is now required, including for copies of the game sold in regions where Playstation accounts aren't allowed.

Helldivers 2 sees a catastrophic drop in reviews, Valve starts issuing refunds outside their normal refund range, and Sony Fuckwits International spends an entire week getting cornholed by the gaming press. The CEO of the smaller studio makes some press releases sounding just as upset as the gamers, almost saying "Things were going so great until ultimate retardation descended from on high."

The backlash was apparently going to effect investor returns this quarter so they have reversed the decision. This is what it takes to keep companies like Sony in check.

This is the sort of thing that should make everyone everywhere really think twice about ordering that shiny new PS6 when it comes out in what? 1 or 2 years?

I've been seeing a lot of this stuff in the gaming news lately. Helldivers 2 has been a big one, I think Kerbal Space Program 2 has outright died, like the parent company fired the team who were making it? And I'm a little nervous about Coffee Stain Studios, the latest update video from Satisfactory's community manager Snutt contained some noise about parent companies and restructuring that had that distinct smell of yacht polish and trafficked children that always follows upper management bullshittery.

The only thing I would say isn't 100% correct here is that the decision to require a Playstation account was made 6 months before the game launched, not after. Technical issues prevented the game from launching with the requirement actually implemented though, and from the abruptness of the original announcement, I would guess that the developers are the ones who actually had their "grace period" from Sony to get it implemented expire.
- Still puts me in a place of wanting to avoid large companies in gaming as much as possible. Studios with large parent companies to this shit. I don't understand why anyone is willing to buy games from big companies anymore.
- Worth noting that 6 months may not sound like a short timespan, but the game was in development for ~7 years. They were down to the “get this polished” stages, when Sony handed down the PSN requirement. Doing it properly would require a lot of redone work and code. So of course, it didn’t work properly on launch.
- if that were so, why go through the trouble of translating the game to Russian / Chinese? no psn there. Incompetant greed, thru n thru.
yeehaw preach it brother
Brilliant roundup.
Would you hate me if I mentioned the “until ultimate […] descended” bit might ruffle feathers? But please never stop ruffling Sony feathers :)
- Hate? no. Scoff at? yep!
  "Retard" rolled off the same euphemism treadmill that "idiot" and "moron" did, but if I had said "until ultimate idiocy descended from on high" you wouldn't have felt the need to say anything. I was reaching for a derogatory term for the actions of a stupid person, and I found one. And it ain't gonna ruffle any feathers that aren't already permanently ruffled.

I guess seeing your game rating go to nearly 50% negative over the course of 3 days after being overwhelmingly positive for weeks made some execs scratch their heads.

I saw it as low as 14% positive review in the last 30 days before they reverted the decision.
- I was looking across all reviews rather than the most recent.
  Most recent ones would highly likely have been absolutely garbage.

...future plans.

Like what twisted new bullshit scam will be next?

They are working on their ingame overlay for Ghost of Tsushima right now. Which also requires a PSN account for the coop mode.
Probably followed by a PSN launcher for PC and then paid online multiplayer.
- I don't think paid online is gonna happen. The only way I could see them doing it would be if they left steam so valve couldn't refund the game, made an absolutely killer multiplayer game, idk if Helldiver's would even be good enough, and bait and switch everyone after the game got really popular. Even then most of the players would probably just go to another game.
- cries in potential Tsushima Player

Great job PC Helldivers. Can the community do something about the Kernel-level rootkit?

It runs in userspace on Linux
- Eee. But, big scary terminals and penguins! /s
- Noob question: has anyone confirmed that it's really running in userspace on linux or win gaming tech forums yet? Doesn't effective anti-cheat require root privileges?
  This is a pretty important thing to validate, in my opinion.

what is this feeling, this trembling and energetic feeling, deep within me...?

is it ...

... joy?

Nah, you burned that bridge, Sony. I'm not coming back.

This is the wrong way. This is what collective action does. But then we all have to have the grace to let people and Companies change course.
- No, what? They're supposed to just return once Sony reverses, trusting they won't try anything again later?
  Permanently losing a customer teaches them a better lesson. Distrusting them unless they actually spend the time and effort to earn it back teaches them a better lesson.
  Anything else is the same as the slap-on-the-wrist mild fines we all hate to see when businesses are finally caught committing massive fraud.
- I think both of these positions are important for coercing Sony. If everyone who was upset left permanently and kept their bad reviews, Sony would have no incentive to backtrack their next boneheaded decision. But it's also true that if everyone jumps back in as if nothing happens, they have no incentive to avoid excessive greed in the future.
  Most of the players will come back, and so Sony will be rewarded for compliance. But some players will be permanently alienated, and those permanently lost profits will be a reminder of what happens when you try to screw your players over.
Hey! You're entitled to that opinion. I think each person has their level of bullshit tolerance. I think many people will review positively since the game was overall very good for 2 months and the change that would have made it awful was reversed, and willing to give it one or more chances. Others will keep the negative and request a refund, which will hopefully remind Sony not to do it again.
- At this point they might not grant more late refunds.

The Sony way:

Shitstorm = Feedback

Noted

Holy crap what a weekend

Time to change back them negative reviews and then time to GET SOME!

Great news.

A huge collective effort to have players voices heard. I think some credit might need to go to the devs as well, as I'm sure they have been pushing back against this bullshit that Sony were trying to pull..

The devs must be pleased, they made a cape for Helldivers to wear that looks like the review graph.

Finally ! I hope we can go back to ~~bitching~~ talking constructively about balance patches now.

Helldiver fans -- we've heard your feedback...

Pretty sure -- and I use them all the time to add bonus thoughts -- that's not how you use an em dash.

You call that an em dash? THIS is an emdash! —

What the hell happened here lmao
- This was an incendiary thread. I have a scorched earth policy regarding moderation. I kindly ask all parties to threat it as a dead topic and move on. Thanks.
- A lot of pointless arguing about semantics that really didn't have anything to do with the subject at hand.
- Hood rat shit.