Hiroki Totoki admitted the requirement invites "pushback" but Sony wants to maintain control over its games.
It’s fair to say that Sony’s insistence on requiring a PlayStation Network account for PC versions of its games is not widely popular. Don’t expect Sony to back off on it anytime soon, though. Speaking in today’s investors call, Sony president, chief operating officer, and chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki said PSN integration is necessary in order to ensure everyone can “safely” enjoy its games.
“We have learned a lot,” Totoki said. “The way to face the issues regarding PC, for instance, the PlayStation accounts that we have offered—by offering them, for instance, sometimes that tends to invite pushback. But for the live service games, in order to maintain order of the gaming, so that anybody can enjoy the game safely, we need to create [an] environment conducive to that, [and] of course enjoying the game freely.
“Having some restrictions—[we] may not call it a rule—but to ask the users and gamers to follow the manner and [that] balance is very important. We have to continue to seek the best way to achieve this.”
The quote was translated from Japanese to English on the fly (by a human translator, to be clear) and is a little rough, but the point is clear enough: Sony wants to maintain some kind of control over its games, and the PSN requirement is seen as a way to do that. And maybe it is, but it’s also tremendously unpopular with PC gamers.
The most obvious example of that is Helldivers 2, which launched without a PSN requirement because of “technical issues” and enjoyed tremendous success until May, when Sony announced that the PSN-free “grace period” was over. The blowback was furious, to the point that Sony was forced to back down, although not after first trying to power through it, and doing untold damage to the goodwill Helldivers 2 had enjoyed up to that point.
Any thought Sony might drop the idea completely went out the window very quickly, though. Just weeks after the Helldivers 2 blowup, Ghost of Tsushima’s PC port was delisted on Steam in nearly 200 countries because of a PSN requirement for its newly-added multiplayer mode; shortly after that, Sony confirmed that God of War Ragnarok would also require a PSN login. In October, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered came to Steam with the same requirement attached.
That makes Totoki’s comments a little tough to swallow at face value. He talked about live service games specifically, and fair enough: “If you want to use our servers, you have to play by our rules” is a reasonable ask. But God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Zero Dawn are singleplayer games—so what’s the need for a PSN account there?
PlayStation Network accounts are free to set up and once that’s done and your accounts are linked you shouldn’t have to think about it again, so it’s not the most onerous task ever. But it is a hassle, and I can readily understand (and share) the sentiment that we have enough of that to deal with already. Some publishers seem to recognize that fact—I think of BioWare vocally making the point that Dragon Age: The Veilguard can be played entirely offline, with no linked accounts required—but Sony is clearly going hard in the other direction.
Maybe that’s the right strategy for a mega publisher. I remember being pretty pissed off myself when I had to sign up for this new “Steam” thing just so I could play Half Life 2, and we all know how that turned out. There are also signs that gamers are getting used to it, or are at least getting tired of fighting about it. God of War: Ragnarok ate a big pile of negative reviews when it launched on Steam but has since climbed to a “very positive” overall rating, and while Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered isn’t faring quite as well, it also came to the party with a number of bugs and crash issues. Sony wasn’t able to enforce its will on Helldivers 2, but in the big picture I think there’s a good chance gamers will throw in the towel long before Sony does.
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