Sony lost me many years ago when they decided it was appropriate to include a PC rootkit on an audio CD. This only lends weight to that decision.

For me feels someone is chasing a KPI on PSN users that, quite frankly, gives no one but Sony executives satisfaction on bigger number = better number. Steam on that sense made the correct decision to give back the money on people that cannot play a game anymore because of a future requirement (as mentioned by op, not everywhere psn exists). But for me, even if psn is available, you should be able to refuse to further engage on a game based on a future requirement like this and get the money back (same applies if for instance a game all of a sudden has something like denuvo).

So my take away of this is: please, get rid of kpis, it's about time we learn to get away from hard metrics that can be cheated

My take: 🏴‍☠️

Sony is testing the waters with trying to console-ify/enshittify PC gaming, for now it's making a PSN account and living in an "approved" country, next it's going to be paying online subscription services to play PSN games. My thoughts are game developers and consumers should avoid Sony like the plague (and request refunds / class legal action in cases like Helldivers 2 where it was introduced after the fact), there are better publishers; and if you can afford it, self-publishing.

I doubt they'll stop. Sony realized that having a lot of people on your platform already inflates its value just by itself. With their pivot to PC gaming, it makes sense that they'd be heavy-handed about it. I for one will not join them.

Make it a carrot, not a stick. I signed in with me gog account for cyberpunk 2077 just fine because I wanted a jacket and it was 100% optional

I'm so sick of companies doing things to maximize numbers rather than for the sake of making the best experiences. Capitalism doesn't work, our data is worth more than our loyalty now.

While I can create a PSN account in my country, I won't. I just won't purchase anymore Sony games and be done with it.

They already joined EA, Take-Two and Ubisoft on my Steam ignore list.

I have a psn account, I own a Playstation.

I don't like the slow march towards all our activities being constantly monitored by someone.

I won't be buying any pc versions of Sony games and adding my psn account to it.

Especially with PSN being a paid service and I'm sure their goal is to charge for access and all pc games will become subscription ontop

Same as I've been saying for 25 years:

Fuck Sony, and fuck their anti-consumer practices.

Think about it: even if you can get a psn account and play without a problem, this is being done to exploit and commoditize you.

Fuck Sony.

With all the very valid talking points that float around the Internet and here, the most important one is how sloppy Sony's data security has been throughout the years. The breaches during the last decade simply stripped every piece of trust from me. That's why I'm not a fan of PSN, even if you could argue it's just "yet another account".

But unless near everybody refuses to buy these PC games and cut into the sales of Sony through boycott, I don't see Sony stopping it.

My thoughts on this is that people, regardless of financial status, should just skip buying a PS5 and for a lower price just get a refurbished Steam Deck from Valve for cheaper. Also to straight up avoid buying PlayStation titles on PC in order to send a message that this toxic behavior is unacceptable.

Common anti-consumer move by huge companies against the consumers who made them rich. What's new?

I wouldn't care so much if they weren't pushing so hard. The fact they are willing to go through all of this to force it makes me suspicious.

No PlayStation (last one I owned was the first one, though I did play on some shared/friends' devices for PS2 and 3). No PSN account. Voting with my wallet and not buying any of their shit.

Makes sense as a requirement for online play.

I even understand region-locking all digital PC titles to regions where they already sell digital console titles. (Global consumer care, legal, and tech support is a complex beast.)

Requirement for single player is unnecessary though.

I can’t think of any good technical or business reason for it. Just shoehorning an extra potential marketing channel that doesn’t really need to exist if they just use the PC-based channels that are already available without extra friction.

My thought is it's bullshit. My reaction is to not purchase or play any games from them and not sign up for an account. I'll be alright.

Last pennies Sony got from me were for Horizon: Zero Dawn, on steam. At the rate they're going, they won't get another out of me, maybe ever.

I respectfully think you're an idiot if you buy psn games on steam with the current situation, respectfully.

Well Sony can do whatever they wish but that doesn't mean I have to do what they want. Normally ignore any Sony related games nowadays.

Thank you for all the respectful comments. I complained about this on r/Steam on Reddit, thinking they'd discuss the issue like grown ups. All I got though was shit comments after shit comments, the likes of "cry about it" and "whomp whomp", someone even dismissed my rant as a "tantrum"!

It's kinda stupid to not have psn available to everywhere and then force your shit down on people's throat, and then shocked that piracy is on the rise. This is what Valve is against but here we are.

At first I was happy that sony finally ported games to PC, but I never though they would force PSN to the PC gaming community...

I would have paid for every game they would have ported, to encourage crossplatform release.

With PSN in mind, I will probably just pirate their game and call it a day. 🖕

Fuck Sony! I will always pirate their games

I have a PSN account through owning a PS3/4. I don't have anything against using it on the consoles since you'd need it to use their online services through there. On Steam however it seems like it's just a means to track you and I'm not willing to do that lest it gives Sony the idea to start its own platform like Origin or Uplay/Connect.

Yeah I was fine with online only requiring it, but now they've lost me. Forcing it on single player games has made me reverse the decision on online multiplayer games as well. So even though I had every intention of picking up God of war Ragnarok at full price on PC, I'm gonna pass.

Honestly this behaviour comes off as some way to enact a loss leading strategy. Thing is, I can't figure out what they would be trying to sell here?

Like making everyone use an account for Sony games does not lessen the blow of potentially paying for online, or using a hypothetical PC Sony store, or buying a PS5. It honestly feels like they're just incredibly out of touch and don't understand what the hell they're doing.

It's bullshit but I get a feeling that gamers in general are going to take it like usual for their hit of dopamine.

I don't buy games from big studios. I don't have this problem.

If no one bought games from big studios, this problem wouldn't exist.

Go play games that were made by less than ten people. Go play games that don't have microtransactions. Go play games where no one involved has a business degree. Go eat a vegetable and brush your teeth. Do things that are good for you.

I think the seven seas be particularly fine this morning, arr.

I'm honestly against all the other launchers too, but at the very least I'm able to make an account without inputting false location info, as well as actually buy their games! But with Playstation it's a special case; Sony is the only gaming company that refuse to provide PSN in many countries for some fucking reason!

I'm more upset by the strategy of putting the first game of a series on PC but not the followup games. I'm not getting Rebirth on the PS5 when I got the first one with my save file on PC even though I have a PS5 and it's very doubtful anyone already on PC without a PS5 is gonna go out and buy a PS5 just for a sequel or two.

Will the games still run on linux?

It is their prerogative. They (and Arrowhead) fucked up with Helldivers by removing and then retroactively requiring it. By the time I got the game though it was already required for new players again.

If it means we can cross play to their console I'm fine with it (a feature I wanted). For a single player game it's annoying but as long as it costs nothing I don't care anymore.

I do feel strongly that we need some consumer protections though - and this extends beyond games alone. Any server shutdown (authentication or gameplay affecting) should have a mandatory removal of the requirement or opening of the server to self host. But I digress...

I think honestly they might be looking to have their own platform on PC one day to not paying the platform fee.

if they keep using steam backend for part of their PC framework, they will pay a lot more in the end, compare to invest now take some flames and properly push for their account backend on PC WHILE have steam's market place/distribution work for them.

Don't get me wrong, Sony already have the capability to server digital contents to all the PS5s, but it's a closed system and no worry about hacking etc as much compare to PC.

I have no interest in their games, so meh

None. I don't buy AAA games.

The PS5 doesn't have a web browser. What CPU+GPU Sony makes you pay for the PS5? Well, if your PS5 is turn on and you want to check a web page, you'd better take a cheap android phone out (heck, a old blackberry would do) so you can check the website you want to... because your PS5 can't.

Sony, simply, live in another universe... they still have pockets to buy game studios and bribe exclusive in our dimension, but they simply don't actually exist in our reality. That's all I can think about Sony and their commercial practice: they take money from our reality (fewer and fewer each year), but they have no idea why.

Consoles are dying.

Yeah, the PS5 is doing alright, sales-wise. But even its fanboys say 'it has no games.' What they mean is: almost every game is on every relevant platform. Multi-platform development won. Even hardware has to reflect this: Sony and MS had three lockstep releases of nearly-identical AMD laptops. Nintendo's latest money-printing handheld is literally an Nvidia Android tablet.

Everything is a computer now. Some of them are needlessly locked-down.

This market where every game has to be certified and pressed three separate times in different-colored boxes will not last. It is an absurdity. Sony finally recognizes this, after Microsoft starting doing weird shit with the Xbox brand. Because really - the Xbox whatever-it's-called selling half as many units as the PS5 is still a metric shitload of units. Microsoft still has recurring revenue from millions of customers and the apparently-standard one-third gross cut from retail sales. The Xbox is not hurting.

Microsoft is acting weird because the Xbox was always an effort to PC-ify the console market. They aimed for something 360-ish, whiffed, and released a literal Pentium 3 PC. Then they did the 360, as a generic compiler target, and it got all the good ports. It also gave indie developers something novel: money. Once the Xbone launched, the PS3 had recovered, but only by helping PC devs deal with their wonky vector processor. And the Kinect fucked them. But it was already too late: the PS4 was just a PC. The PS4 Pro and PS5 couldn't even tempt gamers to "wait and see" or jump ship for instant gratification, because MS launched similar machines at the same damn time.

Helldivers 2 finally showed Sony how much money they could make, being just a PC publisher. They desperately do not want to be just a PC publisher. Their overreaction is a desperate effort to protect their platform - because being a platform is all they have. They didn't design whiz-bang hardware that allows amazeballs games like nothing else. They don't have Nintendo's damnable first-party appeal. They need their releases other platforms to coerce people into entering the Sony ecosystem.

Meanwhile: Microsoft is teasing Halo on Playstation because it makes no difference to them. Microsoft doesn't give a shit if all the money in a game sale goes to Sony and Valve, so long as the game's running on Windows. They want a market driven by developers, developers, developers, because they know they can dominate it.

No wonder indie games are getting more popular each year

Meh, more money I get to spend elsewhere which is exactly what they care about.