Helldivers 2 Makes Connecting to PSN Accounts Mandatory

Helldivers 2, a widely popular online co-op, released in February 2024 has caused quite a lot of controversy months after its launch. To be specific, it was announced that Steam users, in order to keep their profile (and progress) in the game, have to connect to their PSN account or lose all their progress. Current players will start seeing the PSN mandatory login after May 30, 2024, and have until June 4th to connect, while anyone who gets the game after May 6th will have to do it immediately.

Helldivers previously had a mostly positive rating on Steam, but once this was announced, bad reviews started flowing in (almost 6000, though not all of them because of this). 

Sony, the company that published the game, states that this information was known all along, and that PSN account connection wasn’t mandatory at first due to a technical error. Technically, this is true — the note about PSN was added to Steam in December 2023, well ahead of the game release. However, it was skippable upon game release — so, most of us forgot.

Now, many people believe that this change is caused by the huge success of Helldivers 2 and the rumours that Sony will buy (or has bought) Arrowhead Studious (the game developer). I’m not sure if this is true — though it would make sense. However, we also have to consider the fact that Sony is the publisher of Helldivers. As such, they do have the right, you could say, to do this. 

Whatever the cause of this, there are quite a few things that make this whole Helldivers situation concerning. 

For one, there are regions (and thus players) that don’t have access to the Playstation Network. There are options, of course, none of them strictly legal — but the fact is that many players from these regions bought this game, put hundreds of hours into playing it, and now they’ll lose it (and their money). 

Some players don’t have a PSN account due to frequent security breaches and data mining (which is understandable) and simply don’t want to connect their Steam account to PSN. 

If you bought Helldivers 2 and can’t (or don’t want to) connect to PSN, the (relatively?) good news is that you could request a refund from Steam within 14 days of game purchase and with less than two hours of play time. Even if you don’t meet these requirements, you can still submit a request describing your problem, and they will consider it. 

Now, onto Sony’s reasoning — forcing players to connect their game profile to accounts on different networks is nothing new. Many games do it and that’s completely fine (see, Sea of Thieves, for example), if a bit confusing (and potentially exploitative). However, doing it months after the game launch isn’t fair. 

You could say that the information about the mandatory PSN connection was known from the beginning — and you’d be right. But the thing is, if this was so widely known, so prominently displayed on storefront pages, why is there so much outrage right now? 

Their excuse of technical issues doesn’t hold much water, in my opinion. It should have been mandatory from the beginning, or not at all. The information should have been very (extremely) prominently displayed specifically because it concerns players losing progress and money. 

I can’t help but feel like it’s a very exploitative move, done only so Sony can get access to user data, despite their claims that it’s done for security purposes. The decent thing to do would be to offer refunds readily to anyone who can’t or won’t connect their account to PSN, but we all know that won’t happen (though one can hope).

Overall, this whole situation is truly devastating because Helldivers 2 is a genuinely good game. It’s popular and loved for a reason — and now it will lose all (or most) of that love, and have its name besmirched with something like this. It will also make players wary of any future purchases through Steam connected to Sony — and rightfully so. 

Personally, I considered buying and playing Helldivers 2, but got distracted with other games and sort of forgot. Now I’m glad I didn’t, but I commiserate with anyone who got Helldivers and now has to go through all of this.