The censored one is probably Niger
UPDATE - special thanks to @dditty@lemm.ee for making a map showing the countries without access to PSN:
I want to live in ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️.
Looks like they censored the country Niger in their own post.
Steam censored it for them. Nobody would go and use hearts if they were to self censor. They’d use ****ing asterisks.
You’re G****mn right.
Fucking h*ck.
Did you just say the fuck word?
at least he censored the H word
I’m telling Mom you both said fuck.
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Because that’s just how their censor works. It’s a well known fact for anyone used to steam.
Niger is a known intentional misspelling of the n-word used to circumvent censorship. So this is an evolution of the Scunthorp problem.
The hearts are how steam censors things it believes to be swears
Reminds me of when Jonah is running for president and he says something like “N-word country”
God I wish Veep was still on.
love country
luv me wife, simple as
You might not. It’s very hot desert weather all year around.
I live in Australia. I take this as a challenge.
There was also an anti-French Wagner/Russian backed military coup d’etat. The US had to closed down a drone base that kept eyes on terrorism suspects there. Even if it was perfect weather, probably not a great place to be right now.
That was immediately how I read it
Oh man, even all the small European ones are fucked. Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco. Hilarious!
Wait, Luxembourg is not on this list? Wow.
I’m more surprised with the three baltic states
Sony still salty about USSR dissolution
This
Luxembourg is very wealthy.
Also an EU member, so all EU regulations apply within tjeir borders.
Estonia is also EU member but listed in the screenshot.
So are Latvia and Lithuania, so i guess fuck the Baltics
So is Monaco but it got screwed
Why is Andorra always left out?
Why does Andorra even exist? The Spaniards or Français should fight another dozen wars over those mountains
It exists so that people can buy cheap booze. Or at least that’s wha it used to be for.
It exists for tax evasion purposes.
It’s used for ecosystem and biodiversity preservation. Europe forced the poor rich people to hide in places such as Andorra, Monaco, Lichtenstein, and other repressed micro states. But at least there they are free to practice their own tax optimisation strategy, without intervention from evil communist states.
Luxembourg is small but it’s not a microstate like the other you listed. It’s not limited to a single city.
That is true.
Poor Niger can’t be mentioned on Steam apparently.
We’re always making plans for Niger.
Countries whose exchange rate likely made the game even more expensive, and you’ve taken it from them just to dox PC gamers on the PlayStation network.
This isn’t even enshittification. It’s outright fraud.
The silver lining: steam’s refund policy is good enough that most of them will get their money back. Hopefully that’s painful to Sony.
It launched 4 months ago. How are you assuming people who bought it and could play it are still in the 2-hour refund window?
Edit: I hear you. I hope Steam allows a special exemption refund for this issue…
Steam support usually makes exceptions for situations like this.
OK, maybe I’m missing something in all this, as I have both Steam and PSN accounts already, but wasn’t it always on the Steam page, in a gold box, that a 3rd party (PSN) account was needed to play the game?
The 2 hour refund window is for automated refunds, you can still make a request if you’re past that - it’s just going to need a human to take a look at it. I’ve once succesfully returned a game I’ve played for about 5 hours because it had game-breaking bugs and ran like crap for no reason, and it got accepted within a day without an issue.
So Helldivers owners have a chance. I’m assuming that Steam’s Customer Support department is having some kind of an internal discussion right now on how to handle this case.
You’re assuming Steam will just completely ignore a situation where players are flat out incapable of playing the game they paid for.
Boy are you in for a surprise if you think Steam is about to offer 30k refunds if they aren’t legally obligated.
I’m in Finland and peering toward Estonia and wondering what the heck did they do to annoy Sony so much that you can’t make a PSN account there.
My instant guess would be that Estonians are in possession of a Sony tape deck from the 1980s that still works (being a Sony product from the 1980s), and Sony is like “No! We refuse to do business there until they join the modern time planned obsolescence club.”
Probably Sony won’t comply with some sort of regulation.
Liechtenstein as well lol
Only playable in countries with DEMOCRACY!!! HELL YEAH!!!
Like undemocratic Republic of Estonia.
Edit: oh Latvia and Lithuanian is also on the list, has Sony taken the country list before collapse of USSR.
The baltic states are a no fun zone.
Ah yes, the very democratic Russian Federation
“We held elections. You don’t like? Window is over there.”
Wasn’t Valve the one who pointed out that Russia was always pirating games not because they were inherently pirates but because the game releases had zero support for Russia lol. Hence why Valve was the first foreign developer/publisher that gained an actual foothold in the Russian market.
This is kind of like the same thing. Sony will just say something dumb like “we don’t allow PSN accounts in these countries because they’re full of pirates”.
The second problem is absence of regional prices in other markets but Steam.
They are selling games two (!!) or so times cheaper in RU region. For example, AAA game might cost 60 dollars or 6000 rub in US but it will costs 35 or 3500 rub in russian steam.
Even though I couldn’t afford games in the past and pirated them - at some point I started buying stuff just because it gives much better, hustle -free experience.
If I’m low on cash, I pirate. When I have cash, I buy up the games I want. If it’s a game I enjoyed years ago and it’s on sale, I grab it.
The idea that piracy results in lost sales is flawed. No one I know who pirates can purchase the game to begin with.
Is a library piracy? No? Cool, discussion over.
I mean… Saying that it doesn’t result in lost sales at all is disingenuous.
They aren’t losing 70 dollars for every download, but they also aren’t losing zero.
I often took the same approach back when buying a game was a financial consideration. But even though now 4/5 times I already know hat I’m buying and just pay, there are still the 1/5 times I’ll pirate first as I’m really on the fence. Due to this I have a few games I ended up completing on pirate, but bought the game (and DLC if relevant) with 0 hours in my library because good work deserves recognition.
Otherwise we risk losing those good developers to other careers or into the AAA meat grinder.
For clarity I’m talking Indy titties here, I doubt I average much above 0.5/year AAA purchases anymore
Edit: actually I’ll go one step further. If I pirate your game and hate it, then its delete and forget. If I buy your game and hate it that’s a potential negative review, maybe even though me and that title we just a bad fit. This is why demos need to become ubiquitous again
100% true. India is (or was?) also big for games just not being sold there.
Game companies shooting themselves in the foot? Never heard of it.
That rings true for me. Only stopped pirating once steam was an option, myself.
They’re about to be full of pirates.
Now if only I could see this on a map
Edit: I made a map
Sri Lanka and Suriname are pictured though?
Good catch! Just a typo on my part. I used mapchart.com to make the map, and it was unfortunately an entirely manual process and the map builder I used didn’t include most microstates; the rest of the ones I listed weren’t on the map. Sri Lanka and Suriname are pictured though. :)
Isn’t this illegal according to EU law? It’s a common market but the Baltic states are excluded.
Yes it is
Overseas territories like French Guyana too. It’s fully part of France so you can’t exclude it like that.
It’s not even an overseas territory, it’s a full-fledged department of France. They couldn’t exclude it even if they wanted. And it’s not excluded in the map, if you look closely, even while Guyana and Surinam are.
“Niger” is a swear according to valve?
Because it closely resembles a slur. Its one of those false positives. But the tool that replaces it likely isn’t context aware.
Nigeria please that is a stupid rule
I’m ghana have to ask you to calm down.
Yeah calm Djibouti down
I’ve Benin fights before but this is stupid.
Oman I know where this is going
Kenya stop telling me what to do?
South Africa
Grenada go and do that now aren’t you? Typical!
What Chad made this decision?
They probably pipe all their output text through a filter that was originally intended for user generated content. Might not really make sense but something tells me at some point there was a typo from a valve employee that prompted this decision
The dumbest version of the Scunthorpe problem
I’m not a big gamer so I’m not entirely getting this. It sounds like the issue is they want you to link your steam and PSN accounts, which people don’t want to do. And in some countries it’s even a TOS violation.
My question is, why would they have such a requirement to link the two accounts in the first place?
One RUMOR I’ve heard is so it looks like more people are registering with PSN, to make up for loss of PS sales?Doesn’t make the most sense, but I’m sure its a mixture of that and your data $$$Edit: I’m sure they are using the increase of accounts to make theirs elves look more favorable. All around, it’s shitty, and helldivers will suffer for it. Steam has already allowed refunds from countries that can no longer play.
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Which part? I’m sure it would be fraud to pad their numbers that way. Unless they used a seperate metric which looked favorable to shareholders since number of accounts goes up.
The data part I don’t think you meant to cast doubt on, thats a given.
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For me, it was the 2011 Playstation Hack.
Credit card data was encrypted, but Sony admitted that other user information was not encrypted at the time of the intrusion.
After that, I swore I would never give a corporation that lax with personal information my own.
The legitimate reason is for crossplay.Sony said in the announcement it was for player “protection”, so they could ban people. Plus there is no doubt some data tracking going on.But cross-platform worked just fine before this requirement? Or atleast well enough, I’ve been playing with a PS4 friend for the last month.
Did it? I stand corrected, then.
It’s a Sony online game and it shouldn’t have worked without an account in first place on PC. But they allowed it regardless due to server issues.
It explicitly said you do not need a PSN account to play, in a number of places. Both on the game page, on the Sony FAQ page, and the Steam page too I believe.
It was bait and switch, which is why so many people are upset.
The publishet is Sony. This way Sony can harvest your data and has total control over bans. If they didnt force the links bans for pc players would go through steam and could be challenged over steam in the case of an unfair ban.
That isn’t how bans work at all. The only bans which go through steam are VAC bans, and those are not a requirement.
You’re mistaken. If they make you log into PSN to play the game, then being banned via PSN would also lock you out of the game.
That isn’t what they are saying. They claim Sony needs PSN for the game in order to enforce a ban, otherwise it has to go through Steam.
The only data they can get is what you already share in game. And a little portion of what is on Steam.
You obviously have to give them whatever data is required for a PSN account. You could give them fake personal data of course, but good luck remembering your fake info if you ever need to reset your password.
I don’t know what a PSN account is, but I’m surprised you can get one in North Korea.
Sony Account (PlayStation Network account)
Why can’t these countries get accounts? And what was the controversy?
Game is locked to PSN account system now so if you live somewhere with no PSN support, tough shit
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people now have to create a PSN account in order to play. The people in these countries cannot create an account, so they are locked out of a game they purchased.
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They aren’t locked out yet, the PSN requirement is in 1 month, and the Arrowhead CEO said they are discussing solutions to this problem specifically. I highly doubt they leave these players high and dry
lol. lmao.
We’re talking about Sony. They’ve made Madame Web possible so any disaster is possible…
It made webillion dollars though
You can request a steam refund even if you’re over 2 hours of playtime, it just isn’t automatic
