“Helldivers 2” player revolt forces Sony to backtrack

By wanting to force PC players of “Helldivers 2”, a very popular cooperative shooter, to register on its online service PlayStation Network, the video game giant Sony provoked a revolt which pushed it to return to her decision. “Helldivers fans, we have listened to your comments,” Sony wrote in a message published Monday on a rather rare about-face in this industry.

The Japanese company sparked an outcry on Friday by announcing that from May 6, PC players would have to link their Steam account, the platform from which they launch the game on a computer, with a PlayStation Network (PSN) account, owned from Sony and used by PlayStation gamers. If “Helldivers 2” offers the possibility for PC and PlayStation players to play together, creating a link between accounts on the two platforms was until now only optional. With this decision, players accused Sony of wanting to artificially increase the number of subscribers to its own online service.

Direct consequence: on PC, the game became inaccessible during the weekend in 177 countries, which do not offer the possibility of opening a PSN account, according to the SteamDB database. “I lost access to my main Helldivers 2 account because I live in the Philippines,” said Zanny, a YouTuber with 2.3 million subscribers, on X. In response, fans posted nearly 200,000 bad reviews of the game on Steam in less than three days, causing the game's rating to drop sharply, to the point of forcing Sony to backtrack.

Released at the beginning of February on PC and PlayStation 5, “Helldivers 2” allows the player to play a soldier sent from planet to planet to fight hordes of insects and giant robots, in an atmosphere close to Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers”. . Developed by the Swedish studio Arrowhead and published by Sony, the game has enjoyed great success since its launch, particularly driven by computer sales, to the point of making it at the beginning of May "the 7th best-selling Sony game in history." », According to analyst Mat Piscatella, from the Circana firm. By mid-March, the game had already sold more than 8 million copies, according to Doug Creutz, analyst at TD Cowen. On X, Johan Pilestedt, director of Arrowhead, said he was “impressed” by the mobilization of players and thanked Sony for reversing its decision.