• loo@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    We are still learning what is best for PC players

    More like

    We are constantly limit-testing what level of exploitation our players can endure

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It’s weird how collective action works so well but they only choose to do it for this linking requirement. You could get the rootkits gone as well, gamers.

      • loo@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Most people don’t know what they’re installing or don’t care about their privacy, which is why there’s not enough people rising up against kernel level AC’s. Also, not being able to play until you create an account is much more upsetting to most people, than just clicking ‘update’ in League of Legends.

        • barsquid@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Does the rootkit install alongside the game like without explicit user action? That’s pretty unfortunate.

          • loo@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            There’s a tooltip next to the update button that says something like ‘Our Anticheat Vanguard is out now!’ or smth like that. The rest is exactly the same as any other update

              • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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                7 months ago

                Keep in mind this is purchasing a Sony product after they already showed us who they were with the first rootkit scandal.

                • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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                  7 months ago

                  For the kids:

                  The Sony BMG CD copy protection rootkit scandal was a scandal focused on the implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs distributed by Sony BMG in 2005. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and “phone home” with reports on the user’s private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software’s existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.

    • Guru_Insights99@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Brooooo this victory is an absolute game-changer for us die-hard Xbox fans, and it’s downright exhilarating! Sony’s constant blunders pale in comparison to the countless triumphs of team Xbox, and this might just be the knockout blow that finally converts those Lamestationers to our side. Brace yourselves for an epic shift as the unrivaled supremacy of our console dazzles and dominates, pulling every gamer into its unstoppable vortex of pure excitement and adrenaline-fueled gaming bliss!👊👊

  • stardust@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    This shows the power of steam reviews with it being driven by the actual community. People tried to downplay and belittle its effectiveness, but it being front and center on the store page does have more impact than there would be without steam reviews. If there were no steam reviews the PSN requirement would have been pushed through with it being easier to ignore some random internet comments on social media than a store page.

    • Ech@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Reviews aren’t pointless, but their impact only goes so far. I am assuming the massive amount of refunds had more to do with it, tbh.

      • Glide@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        I suspect someone in accounting ran the numbers and decided they stand to lose more to reduced microtransaction sales than they would have gained via selling scraped data.

        Though I agreed with you. It’s still a win, but we have to be careful not to conflate this with Sony “caring”.

        • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social
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          7 months ago

          I still think the biggest reason why they wanted to push their shitty platform is to artificially push player numbers. “Look how many people use our scam network, see?”
          Now the hilarious part is that hopefully someone has to explain why people go these lengths, just to not join their shitty service.

          • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            That isn’t why. PlayStation doesn’t view this as a problem and in fairness, I don’t either. If the game had shipped with this requirement, it would’ve been fine. Many people put up with Ubisoft and they have a whole separate account plus launcher.

            What Sony actually wanted was to make it easier on their server side to authenticate purchases and then to use the same PSN account systems to matchmaker for easier cross-play.

            Would they collect data? I guess. They can already do that if they want as a publisher. So yeah it’s purely just to use their ecosystem, which makes sense.

            • Glide@lemmy.ca
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              7 months ago

              Insane take imo. How does purchase authentication or cross play suddenly become “easier” with this change? Either it works or it doesn’t; having PC players connected to a PSN account doesn’t alleviate server load.

              • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Did I mention server load? What I mean is that having a PSN account means that whatever game is processing your account details doesn’t have to deal with Steam accounts, it just deals with a PSN account the same as it would if you were on PS5.

                What I’m saying is it streamlines the code on the developers side of the games they’re publishing and again if Sony is using systems already to authenticate purchases or whatever that can be collected in systems they already have.

                This isn’t rocket science, PSN may just be a translation layer.

                • Glide@lemmy.ca
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                  7 months ago

                  It absolutely has to deal with a Steam account every single time I log in to confirm ownership of the title. And then again every time I make a purchase from my Steam wallet. And again every time I connect to a friend through my Steam friends list.

                  It’s literally adding another potential point of failure and removes none of the necessities of dealing with the other service. I only suggested the server load bit because I can’t for the life of me understand how you can think it’s “easier” to insist that these two systems interact in a new way when they’re already up and functioning, and the original reason account linking was disabled was to make the game more stable.

                • David_Eight@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  But… that’s the exact opposite of what actually happened. The PSN requirement was so buggy they had to disabled it for the game to work.

            • brbposting@sh.itjust.works
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              7 months ago

              make it easier on their server side to authenticate purchases and then to use the same PSN account systems to matchmaker for easier cross-play.

              Like fraud prevention?

              Easier cross play?

              • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                I mean yeah this is especially true for online games as this is a form of DRM for Sony and it gives them control to easily reject or accept keys and ban users using their pre-existing systems.

                Same thing with cross-play, it’s possible that some of these games were designed to use PSN systems and so that makes integration easy. No clue, but if true it makes sense from Sonys perspective on both of those fronts.

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          It was not “someone in accounting”

          This shit goes all the way to the top. Every manager in the chain will have their take and influence on the numbers.

          • Glide@lemmy.ca
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            7 months ago

            Sure, and I’m not suggesting said bean counter was responsible for the decision. What I am suggesting is that the only thing that influenced the decision was bottom line finances. Someone ran the numbers, and when the suits discovered that they stand to lose more money than they’d gain, they reversed the decision. Never mistake this as Sony “listening” to anything more than their investors and their bottom line.

      • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        It’s probably a bit of this and a bit of that. I mean the game went from one of the best revied games to one of the worst in a day. There were refunds and a drop in players all at the same time.

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          My prediction is that the game will rebound, certainly, but will not reach back to the levels it had before. A percentage of people who refunded won’t be buying again and another section probably will quit the game altogether, now or as soon as something newer and shinier shows up. Lots will forget to change their review.

          Sony actively hurt their own game and probably made irreparable damage.

      • Stern@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I’d imagine that there’s math to be done on sales for a mixed review game vs. a overwhelming positive one, and its not favorable.

    • honey_im_meat_grinding
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      7 months ago

      It’s a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It’s about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.

    • Default_Defect@midwest.social
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      7 months ago

      The sony communities I saw poopooing the whole thing flipped immediately into “WE DID IT” mode, pretending they actually cared about the people that were going to lose access.

    • Syrc@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      This is why Steam reviews should be taken much more seriously. This was impossible to avoid due to the enormous amount of bad press and devs themselves jumping on the hate train, but I’m betting that a lot of review bombing attempts have been quietly offset by the company just paying people for fake reviews. It’s especially obvious when the game has relatively low reviews for months and months, then suddenly bad stuff happens and along with the justified dump of negative reviews, positive ones also skyrocket (99% of which composed of “good game”, random memes or ascii art).

    • Katana314@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      There was a theory that the purchase restrictions were put in place by Valve, not Sony (because those countries couldn’t make an account without violating TOS). If so, Valve might shortly remove the restrictions.

      • TheDonkerZ@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        Would the publisher not have to request the game not be sold in those countries before Valve restricts the sale of it?

        I believe that Valve may be the ones who do it, but just doing it without permission sounds… Illegal and out of their jurisdiction.

        I know Valve controls their storefront and can absolutely pull games down, just looking for some clarification on whether this could be true or not.

        • Katana314@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Valve can remove games from sale for any reason they like - it’s been a point of consumer contention when they are accused of censorship for certain risque anime games, too.

          • They can completely remove a game from sale if it turns out to be bricking people’s computers or function terribly. (Sony did this with Cyberpunk on PSN, without CDPR’s approval)
          • There may be suspicion the game is not legitimate for sale, for instance it illegally uses someone else’s work.
          • Going country-specific, if a game is revealed to be slightly less than universally positive to the perfectly infallible, totally-not-genocidal Chinese Communist Party, they may want to stop sales in China.

          If a game lets you buy it in Tanzania, download it in Tanzania, and then to play, has you sign an agreement that says “I truthfully state that I do not live in Tanzania”, then that bone-headed agreement reflects poorly on Valve, so they have almost a legal need to take it out of sale in that country.

          Basically, each country has its own laws of sale. Having those switches to turn off sales in certain places is important for the store’s own safety. While 60% of the blame for selling a faulty product goes to the manufacturer, 40% still goes to the storefront that chose to stock and sell that faulty good. In this case, the fault was specific to the country of play.

          • TheDonkerZ@lemmy.ca
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            7 months ago

            That’s right, I have heard of some of these cases, but thank you very much for the info! I definitely didn’t want Sony to have any ground to stand on here, so happy that Valve is able to step up to protect consumers however they can.

        • AProfessional@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          We don’t know their personal contract, but calling it illegal is ridiculous, I’m sure Valve explicitly allows for this.

    • poleslav@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Honestly I’m keeping my negative review permanent. The game is great and I enjoy it, but besides a temporary back lash I want the sting to stick around to hopefully teach companies about fucking around and finding out.

      • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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        7 months ago

        They won’t learn anything. They only nulled their bullshit because it would hurt their financial quarter because their biggest cash cow game at the moment is bombing. They only way to maybe make them learn would be if every single one of the “outraged gamers” would just uninstall and never play it again, but that won’t happen and Sony knows that (which is why they can try pulling that shit in the first place).

        Good for the peeps in non-PSN countries tho. For them, this is a real win.

  • asudox@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    “We’re still learning what is best for PC players”

    Well PlayStation staff member, it definitely isn’t having people create another account when they already have a Steam account.

      • Glide@lemmy.ca
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        7 months ago

        How much less bullshit PC players are willing to put up with compared to their console counterparts, apparently.

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          7 months ago

          Uhhhh, people install shit like Vanguard just so that they can keep having their mother insulted in the ingame chat.

          And many people put up with cascades of different lauchers (and accounts).

          So I am glad that there was some push back this time, but it’s not like there would be some sane baseline of PC players in that regard.

          • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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            Imagine doing this for all kinds of stuff like ads, over priced groceries, other games that required needless launchers.

            Just surprising how this works so often and every time there are still people trying to convince everyone to just move on.

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              7 months ago

              If people were capable of choosing long over short term value then the market might be working instead of the shitshow it is right now. IDGI either.

          • xep@fedia.io
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            7 months ago

            It’s almost as if cheaters ruin hyper competitive games like Valorant. How dare they try to keep the game free from cheaters. The nerve!

            • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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              As someone who rehosts an old game after the official servers shutdown, we have a dedicated servers for cheating and real moderators for the non-cheat ones. It works great but big corps don’t way to pay for mods.

              I also wonder why big companies don’t do it to train ML algorithms on the cheat server data too…

                • aksdb@lemmy.world
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                  7 months ago

                  Only if you want to cap the skill limit. Otherwise you would typically have a hand full of players that are genuinely just good or rather far outside the normal skill range. I guess with a lot of data collection one might be able to determine if there was some kind of natual progress or sudden skill jumps, but all in all it could weed out legitimate players.

            • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
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              7 months ago

              I’d have a bit more symphaty if they at least tried to do the bare minimum before choosing the nuclear option.

              Most notably, the PVE queues in LoL were infested with bots for years and you could tell them apart from real players before they even made their first move. Often times you’d be the only human player. If stuff like that wasn’t caught, I have serious doubts about their previous efforts to catch “real” cheaters.

              • aksdb@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Also there could (and should?) be “simply” two launch options. One with “hardcore anti cheat” and one with some much simpler anti-cheat. Then a lobby option what you want to allow. You want to play competitive/league/whatever? Then require the hardcore anti-cheat. Otherwise: why bother.

                • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
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                  7 months ago

                  Yup. At the very least, they shouldn’t have made it a requirement for TFT. If it were possible to cheat there that’d be more of a game design problem anyway.

            • Jako301@feddit.de
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              7 months ago

              I’d be somewhat ok with Kernel anticheat if they would work, but the simple truth is that they do nothing of value. COD has Kernel anticheat with Riccochet and is flooded with cheaters. Valorant has only slightly less cause riot updates Vanguard more often.

              But guess what, it usually takes 1-2 days for new cheats to reach the relevant forums, maybe a few days more until they are more widely aviable. At most cheaters have to spend another 5€ every 6 months, but that’s it. They don’t care, the amount of money spent on accounts every other month is already way higher.

              The only two things anticheat like vanguard protects you from is script kiddies that google “valorant cheat .exe” and Linux only players. And the former could just as well be filtered out without Kernel level.

      • littleblue✨@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        It’s all a fucking smokescreen. Man, people just eat that shit up. Every time. It’s almost like the game is saturated in satire and we’re spooning it down ourselves.

        Oh, wait. fuck.

      • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        They are used to playstation players who buy a console for twice the price it’s worth through discord bots. I don’t think they even know what a backlash is

        • Programmer Belch@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          Nowadays a console is just a locked down, less expensive pc. I think buying the components of a ps5 and assembling the pc is more expensive than just buying a console and liberating it, which is what I would do if I was to ever buy one.

          • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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            7 months ago

            which is why the steam deck was such a breath of fresh air, it’s what consoles SHOULD be.

            A computer built primarily for gaming, sold at a reasonable price, that merrily lets you switch to desktop mode and launch excel for some office work if you want to.

      • mean_bean279@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Maybe a company that has (mostly) made consoles isn’t exactly playing games or has people on staff on the executive level that play(ed) on a PC. I’m 30 and outside of a brief time I tried to play on a PC I’ve pretty much been console my entire life. My first gaming experiences were all on console. It’s completely logical for a company to make a move like this when they have specialized in one area for a time.

  • yamanii@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Just another nail to the bootlicker’s coffin of “review bombing does nothing”.

  • edgemaster72@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    We’re still learning what is best for PC players

    We’ll keep you updated on future plans

    Behind the scenes coming up with the future plans:

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Corporate PR speak always sounds cringe and I despise it. Just be humans you fucking pricks.

      • Kedly@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Tbf, I’ve seen what happens to indies when they’re just humans in how they talk to their customers/fans. HR speak exists for a reason unfortunately

      • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Nah, I’d rather they keep speaking like this. Makes it really obvious from the get go who I’m dealing with. If they speak normally, they might blend in

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Always is. They went too far. They scale back and try again when the dust has settled.

      Oldest trick in the books

    • Fandangalo@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Starting off with “we’ve heard your feedback” is something I’ve never heard from an abusive parent?

      • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Naw it’s more like “we did something we knew would make you incredibly uncomfortable; but now that you’re screaming we’re worried about the neighbors hearing it and we don’t want the cops called on us, so we’ll back off until a more opportune time.”

  • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    Where are the: “just make an account bro” people now? Probably pre ordering skyrim the definite edition

      • Hyphlosion@donphan.social
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        7 months ago

        I’d love to shut up and play Starship Troopers: The Game. But unfortunately, I don’t have a PS5 or gaming PC. Still holding out hope that this will come to Xbox one day.

          • Boldizzle@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Nah there’s a bigger chance of Halo coming to PS5 if MS recent moves are anything to go by.

          • NIB@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Actually Halo Infinite might come out on ps5. Microsoft is publishing a lot of their games to Playstation atm. Sea of Thieves, Hi-fi rush, Grounded, Pentiment are all out on ps5.

            Sea of Thieves was one of the big xbox exclusive games, developed by Rare, which is owned by Microsoft since 2002 and all the games they have made in the last 15+ years have been xbox exclusive.

        • William@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I don’t think politely asking people to change their review so that it reflects reality is a “karen” move.

    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      I was one of them to begin with but once I found out about the whole thing with people of certain countries not able to have an account even though they had already bought the game and were even previously able to play are now locked out, then I was on board.

      I’m not against just making accounts, I must have thousands across the internet, what would be one more if I hadn’t already had a PSN account.

      • Isoprenoid@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        what would be one more if I hadn’t already had a PSN account.

        One more attack vector to gain access to all your other accounts across the internet.

        • NocturnalEngineer@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Using a password manager would avoid this. Everyone should ideally use unique passwords per service, that way a single account can’t compromise the others.

          The loss of personal data however is fricking annoying. If a company has no legitimate reason, I avoid signing up to them.

          Looking at you Nvidia, Razar, etc…

          • RadimentriX@troet.cafe
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            7 months ago

            @NocturnalEngineer @Isoprenoid i was so infuriated back when nvidia demanded an account for shadowplay. I thought id lose access to the encoder thingy. So glad that it can be used by other software too. Uninstalled the shadowplay/gf experience stuff and never looked back

      • bigmclargehuge@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Wouldn’t it be nice to not have your info spread across thosands of accounts that you yourself even implied you don’t keep track of?

        What sony pulled, and coporate moves like it, are at least in part a result of people saying “meh, what’s one more account, I’ve already got thousands.”

        We as a community aren’t an immaculate entity. Companies don’t just make these moves out of nowhere, they analyze what we’re willing to do so they can take advantage of those things to make money. That’s not some sleazy secret scheme, thats basic market research. If we collectively show we do actually care about this stuff and won’t supoort their business when they do it, it might not happen so often.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        7 months ago

        But the game isn’t even available on PlayStation so why am I creating an account? At the very least it’s pointless busy work. And apparently not even well thought out.

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      7 months ago

      Demanding we apologize for the negative reviews now that Sony has reverted the change, if the discord server is anything to go by

  • littleblue✨@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    For now… 🖕🏽 They worded that so weasely, they’re just waiting for the storm to pass and for Legal to come up with some compelling reason why they’re totally “obligated” to make it happen, “hands tied” “so sorry” and all that.

    Fuck Sony. They made this SOP way back when, and there’s no way they let this stop them forever. It’s all about profit, not what “we” want.

    • raker@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      “You know that thing where the initial assault is just a ploy to draw people in for the real attack?”

  • rustyfish@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    This has nothing to do with the shitstorm (it mostly hit Arrowhead anyway), and I think the review bombing didn’t affect their decision making that much. What I think happened was, Sony saw the massive refunds. They got hit right into the wallet 😩

    This makes me smile.

    • derpgon@programming.dev
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      7 months ago

      Once again, Arrowhead decided to go with Sony as publisher, they agreed with PSN account linking. No offense, they are are an independent studio, they did not need to do that. It is sad they lost money, but the developers already got paid. The worst thing that can happen is they have to switch jobs.

      • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Arrowhead did not have the infrastructure for this many people. Sony barely pulled it off at launch and cross play still sucks.

        • derpgon@programming.dev
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          7 months ago

          I mean, who would’ve pulled the sudden influx of players? The game being popular was expected, but not in such huge numbers.

    • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      The refunds may have hurt, but what hurt more was the fact that in the last week HD2 went from #1/2 on the Steam global top sellers to #11. The big red “Overwhelmingly Negative” next to a title is a huge turnoff to new buyers.

      Some executive somewhere has a chart showing daily sales numbers and watched them fall off a cliff in the last week.

    • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
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      7 months ago

      That’s what pisses me off with the steam review bombing.

      If that’s the only way to express discontent then that will fucking sucks for everybody involved in game development.

      If at least review bombing was a last resort but now it’s the norm. These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game even though the drama bubble has now popped.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game

        Good, let them learn their actions have consequences.

        • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
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          7 months ago

          Sure let’s destroy this game all together because of this issue.

          A well thought out and mature reaction is to pretend the game is bad in the steam reviews even though you clocked 100+ hours into it.

          I mean there is a ton of things Helldivers does better than any other games and we are gonna trash that because of a PSN account requirements ?

          I understand this is a valid issue for certain players but is it a proportionate response to this situation to trash the game on steam? I don’t think so.

            • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
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              7 months ago

              No problem.

              Legit question: Did you completely stopped playing Helldivers 2 ?

              Is it uninstalled?

              Did you ask for a refund ?

              Because if you still play the game and at the same time say it should be trashed that’s a lot of hypocrisy.

              It can’t be both. You can criticize the game that’s fine. But if you still play it and you are so vocal for its demise then you are definitely part of the problem here.

              • dustyData@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                I never played or bought it, because I hate Sony and don’t play always online multiplayer games because they treat players as cattle and not as users.

                • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
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                  7 months ago

                  So you are asking other players to review bomb and try to kill a game you never bought yourself?

                  Fascinating.

                  Edit: I think the above conversation is a good example of why I don’t think Steam Review Bombing is the best solution. You get people delivering fake reviews sometimes for games they don’t even play themselves. I understand why they do that I just don’t think that’s the right way to do so. And also thinks it’s not fair for the actual devs working on the project.

              • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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                7 months ago

                Yes

                Yes

                I asked but was denied my first one, and did not submit a second one before Sony walked back the changes.

                I don’t actually have plans to return to the game, because Sony is consistently fucking with the dev team and the game has now accrued so much technical debt that the constant bugs and issues would impact me every time I log in.

                I will also no longer be supporting Sony titles on PC. Even if they release my holy grail Bloodborne, I’ll pirate it and play it offline.

                Fuck Sony forever, and stop trying to gatekeep hating a company over their shitty practices.

          • deegeese@sopuli.xyz
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            7 months ago

            It’s a bad take to tell people their only means of effective protest is not going through proper channels.

            Did you have a constructive suggestion or are you just here to defend Sony?

            • Tetsuo@jlai.lu
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              7 months ago

              First would you mind telling me where I defend Sony ?

              It must be very subtle.

              This conversation already starts in bad faith. You are trying to undermine my comment by declaring I’m taking side with Sony. There is nothing in my recent comments that says Sony has done something right or that I agree with their move. Nothing.

              Am I allowed to genuinely think this account issue wasn’t that much of a big deal ? Or do I only get to choose if I’m a Sony shill or not ? I have seen my favorite game franchise getting shat on for years by their developers (EA) and I have seen things thousands of time much worse from EA than this account requirement from PS. Still right to call out Sony for this but this is not a “this game is unplayable” issue like we had many times on other games. So yeah I have a nuanced opinion on this and didnt immediately accept that Sony murdered Helldivers 2 and that the game is dead.

              My suggestion is not complicated. Stay truthful in your reviews. That’s not rocket science. A lot of these reviews are rating or presenting the game as much worse than they really think it is. Most of these players will review bomb and will play hundred of hours just after that. I’m fucking French I understand what protests are and that being an annoyance is kind of the point. But review bombing on steam and telling a naive player that would definitely enjoy the game that the game is trash will never be cool. You can say in your review that you don’t like that aspect of the game but if the point is only to be negative and untrustworthy this is not the way. Again if you truly suddenly think that game is “the worst game ever” after playing hundreds of hours and learning of the PS requirements then fine but I doubt it’s what happens.

              Also did you stop to think what is your comment bringing to the table here ? It’s just an unnecessarily aggressive comment and doesn’t either provide anything beside telling me I’m wrong and it’s a bad take.

              It’s a bad take to tell people their only means of effective protest is not going through proper channels.

              Steam review bombing is absolutely not the proper channel to voice discontent. It’s a review. Not a forum, not a dev support channel. It’s a review. You are giving your honest feedback on a game. The good and the bad. Not just “the thing everyone told me is bad” and nothing else.

              This is not cool to tell devs their game is trash on the steam page if you don’t really and truthfully think so.

              Absolutely despise th fact that devs have to constantly read their game is trash in steam reviews because some higher-ups decided to go full greed mode.

              So yeah Steam REVIEWS are NOT the proper channel to voice discontent. Almost any other forum or social network is. Just not a steam review page.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        This type of review bombing is actually against steams terms of service for reviews in the first place, they’ve stepped in a few times now to hide campaigns like that, I expect they will do the same with this one. Basically it’ll keep the recent review metric but, it will hide the reviews from the historical and the overall metric. So worst case out of this will be it has a negative recent reviews for awhile.

        your last sentence is actually the exact reason they implemented that policy and they moreorless quote it in their forum post where they talk about how the new system works

      • Syrc@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        These reviews will have a lasting effect on the game even though the drama bubble has now popped.

        Steam has a specific thing that appears when you keep playing a lot on a game that you’ve negatively reviewed asking if you want to change it. I think a game is rarely impacted long-term by review bombing for a resolved issue, unless the reviewers actually dropped the game and went on with their lives.

  • Altima NEO@lemmy.zip
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    7 months ago

    The fact that they specifically mention that date makes me think they’re simply pushing the date back

    • Spuddlesv2@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      They are just being clear and accurate with their comms. No need to over think it.

    • huginn@feddit.it
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      7 months ago

      They specifically said “not moving forward”. Seems pretty clear and concise. No PSN requirement.

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        7 months ago

        And they also said “We’re still learning what’s best for PC players […]”

        They’ll be back.

            • ripcord@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              No, a bunch of people here just need to be outraged about something all the time, and pessimistic about everything.

              Nothing can ever be even modestly positive. Everything - everything - has to be bad and negative all the time. If it was a cute puppy video, there’d be a bunch of comments about how puppy farms are evil and etc.

              It’s exhausting.

              • Syrc@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Not our fault the entire tech industry keeps engineering new ways to give people trust issues.

        • huginn@feddit.it
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          7 months ago

          They won’t be back - they’re not leaving.

          But that phrase also seems like pretty normal rationalizing in an apology.

          If I had to bet it was mostly steam issuing refunds and pulling the game in more than 100 countries that changed their mind.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      You just know that there used to be an “…at this time” at the end of that sentence and some good PR folk edited it out because managers are out of touch douches.