Steam is now refunding Ghost of Tsushima for people in affected countries.

Remember the people suggesting to change the Hell Divers negative reviews because Sony listened?
They have learned nothing
- Sounds like they will be bringing the PSN requirement back for future games maybe. The only thing they probably learned was to announce the requirement for account linking from the start and make it more vissible
  
  I think for the executives the only reason to release old games on pc is to bring more players to their console, and if they can't have a psn account that means they will nvr buy a PlayStation. That's my guess
  
  Definitely the third option. They're going to wait until Helldivers hype dies down then quietly reimplement the requirement when much less people are tuned in. Guaranteed.
  
  Probably bullshui but there's a 3rd option that they have legal reasons not to operate servers in some of those regions and helldivers was violating those restrictions. It takes more than a week to review the legal code in 180 countries, review the internal policies in place and audit the game for any violations all with the added complexity that arrowhead and sony are independent entities.
- Yeah I'm sure changing negative reviews is a factor here and totally wouldn't have been an incentive for future good behavior
  
  Their incentive is money. All this is teaching them is that they need to find a different approach to do the same thing.
  The AAA outfits are trash and should die.

Steam is like the only company that I actually somewhat trust
- How is GOG?
  
  Better than Steam I'd argue. Unlike Steam, games you buy on GOG are yours to keep forever. No DRM like steam that ~~forces you to log on after a few days offline~~. You also get better version control.
  Edit: the offline limit was a bug. Offline restrictions would be dependent on the DRM solution for each individual game.
  
  I liked it until CD Project Red showed they care about the shareholders more than the users with Cyberpunk. It's clear that GOG will flip to be anti-consumer as soon as the shareholders change the company leadership. Enshittification comes for all companies because business majors don't understand people.
  Steam is private and Gaben is benevolent so that worry is distant. I also have no illusions that should Steam ever go public or change hands then the inevitable end of good, customer needs focused storefronts. But for now, Gave has proven he knows how to make a place consumers like myself want to use.
  
  I haven't had any issues with them. Their older games are fixed up to work on modern systems with few issues. The only thing I wish they'd improve on is to make a Linux launcher similar to how Steam's works.
  
  Fantastic if you're a patient gamer. It's the only place I get my games from. The only bad thing is the selection of games (lack of AA/AAA games) and a bad client compared to Steam because they're not a multi-billion dollar company like Valve is. We had to wait 12 years for Skyrim to finally come out for example.
- For now. They still cave to Nintendo's pressure
  
  Yeah that whole Dolphin thing was weird. Seemed like valve just didn't want to deal with the legal headaches of fighting Nintendo in court over an application that didn't really need to be on the steam store in the first place.
  Can't say I blame them really.
  Personal opinion time: I don't think emulators belong on a commercial store anyway. Keep them on their own websites or Github. Putting them on a store like steam is just asking for trouble.

Steam has got to be considering blacklisting them as a publisher over this. This is so, so dumb.
- I'm afraid they would just make yet another barely functioning launcher/storefront
  
  We need to blacklist anti-libre software. They do this because we let them.
  
  …that nobody with a functioning brain would use.
- Why would they? They still get a %30 cut of those $70 games. Blacklisting them would just be giving GoG and Epic a leg up in being the only stores you can play Sony blockbusters.
  Just a reminder that the steam Refund policy in America is illegal everywhere else in the world. They aren't this great company that's consumer first. They are trying to make as much money as possible and have Allowed the likes of 2k games and EA to be as scummy as possible on their platform.
  
  I'm genuinely very confused - why is the steam refund policy illegal everywhere except America?
- Don’t give your competitors a win
  It’s the same reason sports leagues don’t punish good players

I hope they bill Sony ten times of what they are losing out on now. They need to set a precedent that no other publisher will want to repeat what Sony did.
- Yeah, they’ve got to come up with some publisher-aimed punitive actions, because this is frankly indefensible.
  
  Charge 30% of sales and 100% of refunds.
  
  Sony got the “ you should be grateful it isn’t a play station exclusive”
  
  These companies are obsessed with money. The money they lost on refunds forced by Steam is the punishment.

I'm not in an affected country, nor did I plan to play multiplayer, but I still removed it from my wishlist and decided to boycott all titles requiring a PSN account. If you want to have some option but annoying account service, fine. I can survive clicking the X on that. But if they push this hard then we know they'll push this onto all games next.
- Have you looked at the list of affected countries? Are you really that upset that these titles aren't available (for purchase) in places like Haiti and Afghanistan?
  
  Have you? Because it also contains countries like Baltics. But that's not even the point. The point here is that Sony forces restrictions upon users for absolutely no reason or benefit for them, just so that Sony has some numbers to show to their shareholders. But thanks for proving my point about you people. You're literally the reason why companies like Sony, EA, Ubisoft, etc. can ruin the gaming market without repercussions.
  
  yeah fuck people from other countries and let the corporations fuck over people who aren't me am I right?
  it's not whining people who fuck the gaming community. it's the corporations who are making decisions that cause people to whine over them

Companies whinge about piracy yet they incentivise it with their shitty practices

Dang, why do they love to ruin the good will they collected.
- People are paying a monthly fee for multiplayer on PlayStation. I assume that is Sony's goal for their PC ports.
  
  That, MAUs to brag about to investors, or data harvesting through linked accounts. Or all three.
- Maybe it gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment

Good guy Steam.

Sony could resolve this by allowing any country to register an account, but they don't lol
- Or by making the PSN account an optional feature, the way these shitty integrations almost always were.
- The better solution is to not force a third-party tie-in that doesn't really do anything
- There are often legal issues to be resolved for each individual country. It's possible, but expensive. Ultimately, linking accounts at all is an unnecessary requirement that exists for Sony's benefit, not yours.

Good guy Steam ensuring that people with peg legs, hook hands, and eyepatches get that 100% disability discount
- Yarrrr.

i swear to fucking god if they do this with horizon

The single player game??
- There's a multiplayer mode. I believe, although I do not know, that it was announced that there would be no PSN requirement for single player mode.
  I have no fucking clue what the play is here. Why the ban instead of a huge flashing disclaimer on the store page and when you first open the game saying "You have to use our shitty services if you want multiplayer"? That would solve a lot of issues and they wouldn't need to ban it anywhere.
  
  That was indeed the announcement; PSN required for multiplayer but not singleplayer.
  
  Yeah like with EAs garbage they make it clear with branding all over the start pages
- There goes the "we need PSN to effectively moderate the online playerbase" lie right out the window...

Sony: You people don't have normal passports?

Maybe this is a hot take, but… I kinda understand not selling a product in a country where nobody in your org knows the laws or speaks the language.
3-person indie teams self-publishing can skate past, cuz they’ve got nothing to lose and can’t spend time triaging crashes due to unicode chars and weird keyboard layouts even if they wanted to. Big companies have to decide what’s worth the risk and the potential demands on their time.
Sucks, but it is what it is.
- Except they've been selling in some of those countries for years? GoW, days gone, returnal, horizon series and Spiderman series are all available and some have been for years. It's not about selling games in those countries, it's about wanting to force PSN on the players. Can't force PSN to people in countries where it's not available so they're not going to sell there.
  
  I would not be surprised to hear that this was a disconnect inside the org.
  One place I worked had both physical and digital products. We initially listed the digital stuff anywhere and everywhere. It stayed that way for years and years. It was only because of an incidental meeting about localization that folks from legal and customer support went “Wait, you what? You can’t do that. Can we stop that, like today?”
  They assumed we were just gonna do the same markets that the physical products do. We assumed there was no reason to limit it.
  I guess a good question is: Does Sony sell Horizon for PS5 in any of the countries they don’t sell it for PC?
- Surely hireing a person so they could sell it other countries would would make them more money than that person wages cost
  
  You can’t just hire one person to manage that many countries. Even if they spoke all of the languages, and the incoming customer support workload was low enough, they would still be operating in countries with different laws and probably requiring their own corporate entities with their own accounting and legal experts, and any third-party software that you use to do all of this also has to be licensed for that country.
  Big companies are just a mess, and they’re not gonna spend the time, money, and risk building out a thing in a new region for probably a few hundred K per year.