You're not wrong. If the concurrent player count had dropped by 99% on announcement and stayed there for a week with no new sales it would have sent a message at least. But you remember the "shitstorm" around Hogwarts Legacy? 850 million in the first two weeks regardless 🤷♀️ that's the kind of shitstorm most would weather gladly, I'd bet.
But hey, you need blameless developers doxxed and threatened, gamers are your best option every time! Heheh yeah up top 🙌
And I mean, unlike the Hogwarts Legacy situation, this shit has a simple and 100 percent effective remedy.
Sony's asking for everyone's email address? Okay. EVERYONE give them throwaway email addresses, and NEVER interact with any of their mailing list garbage, or do anything else with those PSN accounts.
Let them have a huge list of completely worthless email addresses. There is no downside to letting them choke on that shit.
Like I said in another comment, there should be a continued campaign of everyone ALWAYS giving out throwaway email addresses that they never use to do anything other than sign up for the free shit, and nothing else.
Keep that up for long enough, and eventually the value of these bulk lists of email addresses will plummet to functionally zero. And that will mean less corporate nonsense, at least of that kind. And less attempts to hack companies for their email lists. I mean, why commit a federal crime, to obtain worthless data?
The funniest thing to me is that this lot will even admit that the Steam page said a Sony account was required from the beginning, even though it actually wasn't initially. Nobody got bait-and-switched, they either didn't pay attention or they think the temporary reprieve should have been permanent with absolutely nothing to justify that position. "It's not necessary!" is a shit argument, they said it would be and the game got bought anyway.
Though I'd say Hogwarts Legacy had an equally simple solution: people could have just not fuckin bought it. At least, waited a year. Fuck it, a month would have been enough. One month, zero sales. Fuckin ow, right? But no, kiddos gotta have their shinies. I still haven't bought that game, so I guess I accidentally did a better job of protesting than all the people screaming who went and preordered it 🤷♀️
Screaming is cathartic but doesn't effect change; you need action for that.
There's a huge back-and-forth going on right now, with people claiming Sony changed the fine print, and so it is bait-and-switch, and it just devolves into absolute fucking nonsense. It's like on South Park, when the crowd of townspeople are all yelling "RABBLE-RABBLE-RABBLE-RABBLE."
Screaming is cathartic but doesn’t effect change; you need action for that.
Exactly. And in this case, we can all have our cake and eat it, too. My point about Hogwarts was that people would still have to make a decision about buying it or not. But with Helldivers 2, there's ABSOLUTELY NO REASON FOR A BOYCOTT.
We all just have to give Sony email addresses that we don't care about. That will harm Sony's PR bullshit-artists, while continuing to reward the ACTUAL ARTISTS who made this game.
I mean, I saw people on Reddit talking about how Sony's response will be to make sure Helldivers 3 never happens. Well, if these people succeed in organizing a boycott of Helldivers 2, that IS TOTALLY WHAT WILL HAPPEN. Do they think Sony will give another dumptruck full of money to this studio, if they know the next game won't sell?
People are acting like it's the principle of the thing, because "Sony lied to us." Even if that's true, it doesn't matter. Corporations are always going to lie to you. When the lie is "maybe we technically said we didn't need you to give us any random email address, but now we've decided we do need an email address," just give them the stupid email address.
Take the win. It will literally cost them money to store that worthless data.