Arrowhead CEO on negative reviews: "I guess it's warranted. Sorry everyone for how this all transpired. I hope we will make it up and regain the trust by providing a continued great game experience."

You will never regain trust to all the players who paid for the game, played it for months, and now will never be able to play the game again because they live in a country that PSN doesn’t support.

Absolutely go fuck yourselves, criminals. Y’all took my product I paid for out of my house and out of my control.

64

Not sure about the consumer laws where you live but it might be possible that you can return it when you cannot use it anymore because of this

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- It is likely that the countries with the best consumer protection laws are among the ones served by PSN because those tend to be policies enacted by richer countries.
  
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- Steam support might just do it anyway if you describe the situation.
  
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This is why live service games are bad

11

An honest reaction... From a ceo? That's the first time I've ever seen that. I figured those people were clones and programmed to say the same thing as every other ceo.

54

All it takes to be a CEO is to be the person in charge of running a company. There are a lot of companies that are a lot of different sizes doing a lot of different things. If you start your own company you're the CEO, but you're also the head of sales and the person who makes coffee runs.

The stereotypical CEO (who makes boilerplate, sanitized public statements) is stereotypical in the first place because they run big companies, reporters care what they have to say. If you read the news you hear their words a lot.

Smaller firms, self started firms, and a lot of the more unique operations that would have CEOs that go against the stereotype don't make the news often, so the stereotype stays intact.

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What else did you expect him to say?..

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It's not so much honesty as much as trying to stem the bleed.

A CEO has a fiduciary obligation towards maximising the profits of the shareholders of his company first.

Another comment here said how they needed money and expertise from Sony to roll out a game that could support concurrently the number of players they do support and how Sony is collecting their dues.

However, the fuckton of hate that's being piled on now goes at least partially on to the developer which puts a wedge in the previous alliance.

As a developer, because of the demands of the publisher, they've gone from a position of such extreme good will that they had only blue skies in front of them - heck they could have crowdsourced their next game with ease and people would buy it sight unseen, meanwhile I bet Sony would be considering buying them to become in house studio, MS has a history of scooping such studios also - to revulsion and betrayal.

It also opens up a strategic vulnerability for a different developer to white knight the now proven market.

That's not good news for the shareholders and future prospects and the CEO is trying to stem the bleed without pissing off the publisher. Seems pretty tame to me.

1

I guess acknowledging the problem is the first step.

47

If this is about the new PSN requirements, I don't even think Arrowhead should take the blame. That was obviously something that came down from the publisher.

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- Arrowhead, as the developers and artists who worked to create the game, deserve little to none of the blame. Arrowhead, as the business entity who voluntarily entered into an agreement with Sony to have this requirement in their game in the first place, definitely deserves the blame. Whatever project lead thought this was an acceptable concession to make in order to secure funding from Sony was definitely not on the same page as the rest of the team who actually made the game.
  
  Seeing a lot of parallels to the Cyberpunk 2077 launch; beautiful game created by a passionate team who loved their craft, massively damaged by short-sighted, greedy decisions by studio execs.
  
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- This might be true but this one title's success will have a bigger impact on the developer's (≈100 staff) future prospects than Sony (≈113k staff).
  
  Sony could simply ignore the issue and they wouldn't be losing any sleep.
  
  On the other hand this game is the only title the studio has released since Helldivers in 2015, they have the most incentive to protect the reputation of the new title, the IP, and the studio.
  
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- They might not be the at fault party, the guilty party but they are the responsible party. It's their game, their interface with people, their reputation.
  
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I think they knew they would get backlash and factored that in.

He didn’t say anything like “I hear your concerns and we will look into them”

13
- That’s because there’s nothing he can do - this was Sony’s decision as the publisher and the developers can’t do squat about it unfortunately
  
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I don't live in a place without PSN, however I uninstalled because of the malware style anticheat files that a small update tried to sneak into my system. Fuck off Arrowhead and Sony both, no thanks, I don't need to jnstall that kind of stuff to enjoy games with my friends on PC.

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Idk why they even need anticheat in a PVE game lol

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- Only reason I can think of is to sell MTX boosts for xp or currency, like Activision does in COD
  
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39% of recent now.

Mostly negative now

28

19% recent and 52% all time. This is wild.

6

if they want to make great games, maybe they shouldn't do business with sony

24

To be fair they did make a great game, and the current drama has little to do with the actual game.

I am not defending them, I understand why people are cheesed off, I just don't think it affects how good or bad a game is.

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- It doesn't matter if you made the best game ever if people aren't able to play it.
  
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- I'm not denying they made good game, their choice of publishing it with sony is what is soiling it.
  
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Not defending Sony, but I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to make a game that can have hundreds of thousands of players playing multiplayer matches simultaneously all over the world, but it needs a lot of infrastructure, and network support and other expensive hard to do stuff that you can’t just shit out like it’s Flappy Bird.

The problem is is they probably needed capital and support to get it off the runway, and Sony attached strings to the capital and support they gave them.

Now that it’s a hit, Sony is trying to flex its legal power via said strings - I’m guessing - and probably have all but threatened this relatively small dev with pulling the rug or taking them to court if they don’t follow orders.

TL;DR - Making games is expensive. Sony probably offered the small dev with limited resources a Faustian bargain and now the Devil is calling for his dues. They probably never had a choice.

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- So what you're saying is "fuck sony"
  
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I just want to make great games!

(And I can't do that without money from big publishers and without installing anti-cheat on your PCs)

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I am probably completely wrong and this is just my opinion but an indie game dev that sells out to any of the shit companies, isn't really in it for the love of games, they want money.

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- The love of games doesn't tend to feed your family and children.
  
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Haha. Regain trust. You lost people gaming because of that PSN account linkage. Those people are not playing anymore. How will a continued great game experience regain their trust?

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In a week. The changes aren't coming for a week. Nobody has quit because of the changes, they are quitting because they heard about an upcoming change they had the opportunity to read about on all primary storefronts the game is available on, excepting humble.

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- Certified bootlicker in every one of your comments.
  
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What game is this about?

16

Helldivers 2, and the recently announced requirement starting at the end of the month to have a PSN account for a game many people bought a month or so ago on Steam.

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Helldivers will never be what it was from now on, shame I missed that train. Specially considering it's now essentially a free Steam refund (if you insist past the automated responses).

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The thing I don't get about this is that is says on the steam page for Helldivers 2 that it requires a PSN account. Did it not say that before they made that announcement? Or did people see that they weren't enforcing it, buy the game, and now complain that they're starting to enforce it?

15

It was changed. It had a EULA, but that didn't include the requirement for a PSN account

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- Ah ok. Then yeah, changing it weeks/months after release to require one is pretty shitty. Especially for those who live in countries that can't get PSN accounts. The game should never have been sold there as now it will become unplayable for them
  
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- I remember vividly that it did say a PSN account was required on the store page when I bought it a month or so ago. It was a pretty obvious yellow box
  
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It wasn't required at the time. It was listed as optional.

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...by providing a continued great game experience (only for PSN users)

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"Oh no, this seems to be bad for everyone. Too bad there's nothing we can do about it!" Says CEO with enough control and influence to reverse the policy.

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Their publisher decided it. And it's probably in the contract. Apparently it was originally a requirement, but was made skippable when there were login issues.

The only thing they proved by making ot skippable is that it wasnt even necessary at all. The reason they're giving for making it mandatory ( for security and being able to ban for griefing ) is bullshit. Not to mention They're already using a super invasive anti cheat, which apparently isn't capable of catching any cheaters.

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- I already turned down a free copy of this game because it installs a rootkit, and now this happens. I hear the game itself is a lot of fun, and I feel bad for the actual developers who are watching people shit on their work because of management and publisher bullshit.
  
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Clearly not the case

12

I don’t really understand the hype behind helldivers. To my eye, borderlands is essentially the same game but with greater variety, fewer hiccups, and a lower price.

-16

Interesting take. Do you also think of Mario Kart and Forza Horizon to be the same game?

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- I mean, more midnight club vs need for speed but I take your meaning. And yes, aside from the stories and one having significantly more content, they’re essentially the same game. I’d have said battlefront 2, but I don’t respect the remake and fishing out multiple ps2s to play online is preposterous.
  
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Very different games to me tbh. Squad pve with gun focused combat, but thats where the similarities end. Borderland is crunchy with tons of guns stats and special movesin a RPG open world with a set narrative to go through.

Helldivers has a way smaller arsenal and a tighter mission based combat loop. They have more of a meta narrative that you affect vs being the main protags. The tighter gameplay loop is probably the biggest reason I liked it but haven't play borderlands in forever. Like its very much built for dropping in blowing up your friend and maybe some enemies too, try to do objectives against mounting odds, pass or fail the mission, continue. The fact that weapon progress almost always makes friendly fire a even bigger threat makes it almost a trade off and not a clear path to success.

7

Back pedaling PR.

Morons.

-16

What should they do in your opinion? Remember this is a Sony decision Arrowhead have no power over.

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- Give people full refunds.
  
  They put themselves in this position and now they are going to eat shit for it.
  
  The only chance they have at not pissing everyone off is offering full refunds. It won’t happen tho because of corporate greed.
  
  What they should have done was not jump into bed with the enemy (Sony).
  
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If they acknowledge it is a mistake and change it, I’m going to play it again. Everybody makes dumb mistake sometimes.

1
- I’m not holding my breath. Corporate greed is a helluva drug.
  
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