The Last Of Us Part II will require a PSN account to play on PC, making it unplayable in over 100 countries

One or two lumps of annoyance in your morning coffee? Okay, here’s one. You’ll need to link to a PlayStation Network account to play The Last Of Us Part II on PC, say Sony. The requirement was reported by Video Games Chronicle, and sure enough, the Steam page for the “Remastered” version of the third-person fungus fighter includes a footnote in the game description that confirms it in plain language – “Account for PlayStation Network required”. For a lot of people this is a minor nuisance, for others it more likely means that the game won’t be on sale in your country at all. Sony’s reasons for enforcing the requirement remain obscure.

The requirement for a PSN account to play certain games on PC became controversial after Sony tried to push the requirement on players of Helldivers 2, who were so miffed they review-bombed the game on Steam. In that case, the decision was overturned.

Since then, Sony has applied the mandatory account linking in an irregular way. Ghost Of Tsushima didn’t require it, but God Of War Ragnarock did. Horizon Forbidden West didn’t make it mandatory, but tried to sweeten the deal by giving players bonus cosmetics for linking their Steam and PSN accounts. Now it looks like Sony are confident The Last Of Us Part II Remastered is big enough to cause only annoyed tuts when it comes to this requirement.

One of the biggest reasons this mandatory account smooshing annoys folks is that it means the game will not go on sale in certain countries where PSN doesn’t operate for legal or business reasons. Insider Gaming have compiled a list of countries which don’t have PSN. In Europe alone this list includes Baltic countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Moldova, Georgia, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. If you live in any of these PSNless places, you basically can’t play the affected game. This is despite the fact that many of these games are entirely single player.

As for the reasons behind it, well. Sony’s chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki recently spoke about the requirement in an investor call, and said the account linking was done “so that anybody can enjoy the game safely” (as reported by VG247). But this hardly explains it. The more likely reasoning comes down to digital rights management – they want players to be online so they can check if the game is a legal copy. And this has become such a dogmatic part of their legal and technical process that it now requires cutting off entire markets. It seems a stupid strategy to exclude entire countries of possible sales just to enforce a DRM policy, but corporations are cash-huffing monsters, and do not necessarily value the sales numbers – projected or real – in some nations.

All in all, another example of corporate interest making things worse for everyone, thanks to the arcane legalities and unseeable arithmetic of business. For more lumps of news, please keep reading our website. I promise some of the lumps are actually good.