Arrowhead Tells ‘Helldivers 2’ Players To Change Reviews To Negative Over PSN Linking

The Helldivers 2 community is in a full-on meltdown over Sony’s new demand that all PC players must link their Steam accounts to a PSN account in order to be able to keep playing, starting in a month. Now, it’s becoming more and more clear just how much Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead is upset about this decision, and they’re not really even hiding it.

Helldivers 2 community manager Spitz drew fire yesterday for seemingly snapping at a player over the issue, saying they should just change their review to negative and move on. But now, while Spitz is walking back his attitude, he’s maintaining he was being serious. You really should change your review to negative on Steam if you want to send a message to Sony. Here’s Spitz:

“I want people to make their displeasure known in a place where it might actually make a difference, Steam reviews and refund requests will do that, angry posting in the Discord won’t. I’m not happy about this decision either.”

Then later, “My suggestion to people to change their reviews to negative was completely genuine…People are emotional and rightfully so, many of them won’t be able to play the game anymore. It sucks.”

This echoes similar though less explicit sentiments from CEO Johan Pilestedt who has been posting about the flood of negative Steam reviews, which have now changed the game’s score to “mixed,” saying he is bummed about it but he understands why people are doing it.

He goes on to say they will use “the only lever they have” which is making a great game, as he makes it clear again, this entire thing is Sony’s decision.

This morning, Sony is drawing fire for changing wording in its PSN linking page from saying that it was “optional” to saying that “some PlayStation games may require you to sign in and link to an account for PSN.” It was quite literally changed within the last 24 hours.

Players and observers are still split about the issue, with some saying this is no big deal and players have to make accounts for places like Ubisoft or EA or Microsoft to play games all the time. But the larger issue is that players in dozens of countries without PSN may no longer be able to play the game going forward, despite already paying for it, because this requirement was delayed from launch and they were allowed to purchase it regardless. Even Arrowhead doesn’t seem to know what exactly is going to happen to these players as Sony hasn’t told them, but as Spitz says, they too are assuming they won’t be able to play.

The requirement itself is debatable but the way Sony has rolled this out and communicated this is clearly a mess, and has resulted in close to open warfare with the game developer which has produced one of their biggest hits in years. We’ll see if Sony relents or if this really is going to happen, but for many, the damage is done.

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