• Kyrgizion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    136·
    6 months ago

    Devs (and players) getting majorly shafted by Sony. Make no mistake, Arrowhead doesn’t want this either, but their hands are tied. Fucking Sony…

    • DaseinPickle@leminal.spaceEnglish
      72·
      6 months ago

      Arrowhead kind of messed up by not just implementing the PSN requirement from the start, and avoiding this confusion. It’s not like Sony suddenly made this requirement, it has been there all along.

      • Aphelion@lemm.eeEnglish
        38·
        6 months ago

        Arrowhead and/or Sony also messed up by not having the country restrictions setup on the Steam store. Arrowhead knew they were going to be reliant on PSN to handle support tickets well ahead of launch.

      • xantoxis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        6 months ago

        They literally did do that. My account is old enough that linking it was already required when I started playing. It was off temporarily.

    • potustheplant@feddit.nlEnglish
      48·
      6 months ago

      To be fair, they’re the ones who signed the deal. Hopefully this is something they can learn from for future games.

      • kautau@lemmy.worldEnglish
        34·
        6 months ago

        They are pulling the reverse Hello Games. Sony’s contract with Hello Games (No Man’s Sky) forced them to ship an unfinished game, met with hundreds of thousands of bad reviews, but they turned it around by not only delivering what was originally promised, but continuously adding huge DLC level free updates to the game, effectively nulling the effects of their contract with Sony. Arrowhead Studios shipped an incredible game, but ignored Sony’s contractual requirements to ride the wave of sales, and is now being hit with the effects after finally enforcing what they signed up for.

        • EldritchFeminityEnglish
          6·
          6 months ago

          How did they ignore it when it’s both on the store page and the first thing you see ingame since day one? They didn’t add that in later. It’s always been there. It wasn’t optional for a period of time on launch day, before the servers were overloaded. It was then temporarily made optional, and they said as much (though obviously not clearly enough for people to realize that).

          They expected an active userbase of about 10k. They didn’t know how popular this game was going to be.

          More likely, they didn’t know that PSN accounts are only available in select regions. They followed the stipulations on all fronts except selling the game in places that can’t make accounts, and everything else is the result of the PSN account requirement being made optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player load.

          • techMayhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            I might be wrong about this, but if I remember right, the PR team for NMS and the dev team had pretty much zero communication. Sony kept hyping the game up, very much making promises that the devs were trying to keep. However during development it became increasingly that they either need to push back on the release date or drop some features, neither of which Sony was ready to do. At that point it was already too late: the hype was built.

            So instead of trying to do damage control Sony just pushed Murray in the focus, probably hoping he and his company would take the fall. Honestly it feels hard to blame him for what happened. He, at the time, was just an incredibly ambitious indie dev with no idea on how to manage expectations.

            I feel like with Sony as your publisher, you don’t need enemies.

        • EldritchFeminityEnglish
          8·
          6 months ago

          It was listed on the store page from day one. It was put in front of your face the first time you launched the game. It was only made optional temporarily due to the overloaded servers on launch day. This was said, though not clearly enough for people to realize before now that the PSN account being optional was only temporary, it seems.

          My money’s on Arrowhead not knowing that PSN accounts are only available in specific regions and countries. Otherwise, none of it makes sense. This was always going to happen if they knew and did it anyway, and why would they torpedo their dev studio with the refunds like that.

  • CaptObvious@literature.cafeEnglish
    24·
    6 months ago

    Is it even possible to boycott Sony? Or are they like some other entities: tentacles wrapped around so many things that we can’t avoid them?

    • sorghum@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      42·
      6 months ago

      The only thing I’ve not been able to divest myself from Sony is HDMI. If I could buy a TV with a decent amount of DisplayPort and no HDMI, I’d be so happy. My level of distrust goes back to their rootkit on music CD scandal.

    • Kelly@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      6 months ago
      • Sony pictures is one of the “big 5” Hollywood studios (11% market share)
      • Sony music group the second largest music company in the world (22% market share)

      Its usually easy to avoid using their hardware directly but they have a pretty big slice of media.

    • TachyonTele@lemm.eeEnglish
      15·
      6 months ago

      Completely different scenario with Bethesda. You can stay play any Bethsoft game you own.

    • Mac@federation.redEnglish
      6·
      6 months ago

      I think it’s more because Microsoft isn’t as restrictive regionally and doesn’t have a terrible record with security. Those two things seem to be the main drivers of people’s anger in regards to this.

    • Elextra@literature.cafeEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I def think Arrowhead had some shared responsibility for it. Going into a contract with Sony, they must have known the PSN account was a requirement but no one on either side mentioned it until it was going to be implemented.

      If PSN was required from beginning, it should have been enforced/limited to specific countries. If it had “technical issues”, maybe they should have fixed it much sooner than 6 months.

  • Shyfer@ttrpg.networkEnglish
    12·
    6 months ago

    Can Sony implement PSN accounts in more countries? Seems like this would fix it lol.

    • ichbinjasokreativ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 months ago

      It wouldn’t. Half the outrage is that a game you bought on steam to play on pc forces you to create and link a psn account in the first place