What’s the deal with ‘Helldivers 2?’ The PSN controversy, explained

What a fascinating journey Helldivers 2 has been on. Ever since the third-person shooter first began its explosive lampooning of fascism back in February, gamers and Starship Troopers enthusiasts alike have been flocking to Arrowhead’s juggernaut in unprecedented droves; unprecedented to the point where the game’s servers simply weren’t able to handle its legion of players.

PlayStation, who acted as the distributor for the game, launched Helldivers 2 without PC players needing to sign into a PlayStation Network account to play ⏤ a requirement that PlayStation previously intended on enforcing from the get-go, but dropped in order to better manage server stability at launch (which, as alluded to above, was anything but stable at the time). Now that said servers are stabilized, PlayStation wanted to reinstate the requirement of being logged in to a PSN account in order to play. The reason for said requirement, according to PlayStation, is that the company tracks player discipline using its internal systems, meaning that a PSN account would have been Helldivers 2‘s way of laying the smackdown on grief, abuse, and other behaviors conducive to a negative gaming environment. It would have also been the service banned players used to appeal the decision to ban them.

Well, the Helldivers 2 community wasn’t particularly fond of that, especially those who lived in one of 177 countries that didn’t have access to PSN (and who would subsequently be unable to player Helldivers 2). What followed was over 200,000 negative reviews on Helldivers 2‘s Steam page and a myriad of refund requests. The mammoth backlash has since caused PlayStation to walk back its decision to make PSN logins mandatory to play Helldivers 2, and we’ve all since returned to our regularly scheduled programming.

In short, PlayStation was preparing to roll out a game that you could play on your PC, but required a PSN account to do so. It then decided at launch to drop the PSN account requirement because the servers became severely overloaded, and it needed as few headaches as possible during its quest to remedy that. Now that the servers are steady, it wanted to make a PSN account mandatory to play again, but that would have locked certain regions (full of players who already paid for Helldivers 2) out of the game, so players got angry and review-bombed the game on Steam, among other such actions. It got bad enough that PlayStation decided to drop the PSN requirement permanently, so it’ll need to find a different way to deal with bad-faith players now.

In other words, the Helldivers 2 saga is a comedy of errors with a happy ending, and it’s a comedy of errors that’s available on both Steam and PlayStation 5.