I was too busy this weekend to engage with what was easily the story of the weekend, that is, if you aren't fully enmeshed in USDA Choice rap beef. Helldivers 2 announced that they would begin requiring PC players to sign into the game with a PSN account. I started posting panels from the strip over the weekend on the Tweeter which people seemed to enjoy, but by the time it came to act the largest part of the conflict had been resolved.
At the time of this writing, the remaining peninsula of conflict involves putting the game back up for sale again in regions where players can't make PSN accounts. That part, I don't fully get yet - once the review bomb detonated, once the community deployed the Family Algorithmics and returns were being requested, I don't know if Sony pulled it from those places or if Steam itself voided it where it was likely to create legal exposure for the platform. But it's fair to say that once the decision was made at the head end - to no longer require PSN sign-in - the rest of this will eventually melt back into its original state, which is one where one company offers a product for sale and people buy it.
The Algorithmics, much as their Atomic counterparts, leave a lingering toxic miasma that isn't negated simply because the belligerents have laid down arms. Helldivers has other means of discovery, of course, and a motivated cadre of memesmiths and assorted weirdos. For anybody else in the Discovery Wars, this would be a death sentence.
I had seen TikTok content from someone who wanted to know why Arrowhead didn't simply release the game themselves to digital platforms, as we've seen many times this year to profound success - the first quarter of 2024 saw multiple wholly indie excursions crack a million copies. Shit man, Hades 2 just dropped today. But Arrowhead doesn't own Helldivers. Sony owns it. That's why. I'm sure they would love to extract the full value of their labor! It's a total power move. But you have to live in the world your prior decisions made around you. Look at Bungie's now bizarre arc. Look at my own. It can be difficult not to consider Past You an enemy agent.
Somehow, after the term Service Game had become a poison, Arrowhead alchemized it in their belly. Their aggressively small team needs to learn some shit about how to talk to people, it's true. This is something they've had problems with from the beginning. There's ways to communicate to customers while retaining your humanity and they gotta figure out what that looks like. But they... man. They might've gotten out of this alive.
So, the question is "why Sony do dis." I don't think this part is too complex. "PSN Accounts" are mostly a PlayStation thing, tied to hardware. There are hard limits on how that can grow. So, news accounts either became an, ahem, KPI - a key performance indicator, a statistical target for someone to hit - or they have aspirations of having their own publisher PC store like Ubisoft has, and this is how they catalyze a userbase. I mean, I don't want that. I have five fucking stores on here as it is, each one shittier than the last.
It's like a fable, really, studded with moral lessons. If the idea was to monetize the PC audience, they already did it. They were on top of Steam's Top Sellers for weeks, reaping the rewards while somebody else made all the bits go everywhere. I know how to look at Steam Charts, I can compare those numbers to Helldivers.io and I can see just how vast the PC side of this player base is. It's fresh, new money. Arrowhead's frankly insane play gave Sony the audience they wanted, and they risked it all on an aspirational Powerpoint slide, where one slice of a pie chart was almost indistinguishably larger than another.
(CW)TB out.
