The team at Arrowhead had quite the weekend, after scrambling to reverse a crucial decision from the game's publisher, Sony. In the immediate aftermath of PSN account linking being announced, it came to light that thousands of people had bought Helldivers 2 in countries where PSN is unavailable. To fix this, someone retroactively removed Helldivers 2 from sale on Steam in over 170 countries. Several days later, those countries are still blocked.
Helldivers 2 sales had to be blocked in over 170 countries, as Sony intended to enforce all PC players to link a PSN account to continue playing. The list of blocked countries coincides with regions where PSN is not available. The issue is that PSN account linking is no longer going to be enforced, in large part due to the number of players that purchased the game in locations outside of PSN's coverage. With this now being the case, many fans had hoped to see the game return to sale in blocked countries, but nearly a week on, the changes to the Steam Store page have not been reversed.
Arrowhead's outspoken CEO, Johan Pilestedt, has now finally commented on this situation. We still don't know why these countries were retroactively blocked from Helldivers 2, and we don't know why this continues to be the case several days on from the decision to drop PSN account linking. However, Pilestedt says that he is in talks with PlayStation and Valve to get this undone:
CEO Addresses Delisted Countries pic.twitter.com/4lHLvFdIAx
— Helldivers Alerts (@HelldiversAlert) May 9, 2024
Helldivers 2 attracted over 200,000 negative reviews on Steam after the changes announced last Friday. With the decision being reversed on Monday, around half of those reviews have been changed back to positive, but others are holding out until the game is relisted in all of the countries the game was available in at launch.
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KitGuru Says: What do you think of the ongoing Helldivers 2 situation? Given PSN accounts are no longer going to be enforced, it makes little sense to continue blocking the game in countries where PSN isn't available.