ranzware
Review-bombing campaigns are often motivated by half-baked culture war “controversies” about trans characters, queer developers, or supposed mafias of liberal writing consultants bending multi-million dollar companies to their will. Last May, though, we saw a great example of the review bomb’s utility in pushing back on a genuine consumer grievance: Helldivers 2’s PlayStation Network sign-in requirement.
To be fair to Sony and Arrowhead, it was communicated from the start that such a requirement was meant to be implemented eventually, and at the time, the stakes didn’t seem all that high. Many players pointed to the galling exclusion of gamers in countries that can access Steam but not PSN as a reason to resist the imposition, but Sony has largely surrendered its PSN on PC ambitions while still weirdly excluding those countries in Helldivers 2 and its other releases, and players in the global north don’t seem too bothered these days.
Let’s call a spade a spade: Much of the backlash was because Sony’s requirement was annoying, and the supposed “player protection” justification felt insulting when the move was clearly meant to force more users into Sony’s PSN ecosystem. Having to juggle online services you wouldn’t use if you didn’t have to, another company insisting on having your email and other personal information, is always annoying.
But this weekend we saw first-hand that the issue goes much further than that, and PC gamers’ capacity for acting annoying when we get annoyed helped us dodge a bullet. Sony’s PlayStation Network was completely knocked out for 24 hours, and the company refuses to offer an explanation for what happened. If Sony had held firm on a PSN sign-in for Helldivers 2, it would have been just as borked on PC as it was on console. Ditto for if Sony had retained its log-in requirement for singleplayer games: You could effectively play God of War Ragnarok offline after creating or logging into a PSN account (unless you opted for a handy mod), but just like installing a PS5 disc drive, a PSN outage would have prevented first-time setup of something that simply does not require an internet connection.
Sony does not seem to understand the PC audience. I’d wager it’s only being dragged to the platform kicking and screaming by the continued healthy growth of PC gaming and relative stagnation of consoles. But the demands and delays Sony subjects its PC players to smack of condescension to me: A company that believes it is operating from a place of strength, gracing PC gamers with the essential PlayStation exclusives we’ve been bereft of for so long.
The truth is that Sony has to win us over. There are too many good games on PC to acquiesce to being shackled to a service whose founding principle is charging players extra to go online with games, internet connections, and consoles they’ve already paid for. One that, fourteen years ago, suffered one of the greatest cybersecurity disasters of the 21st century so far. We don’t even know what happened to the PlayStation Network between February 7 and 8 yet or how thoroughly it may have been compromised, Sony still won’t say. But after reporting on this absolute cluster as it happened, it’s clear to me that mandatory sign-ins to extraneous “services” like the PlayStation Network aren’t just an annoyance: They are an odious imposition to be avoided at all cost, with genuine risks to the consumer.
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Kurt Indovina
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