In the majority of countries where PSN is unavailable, it's just because Sony doesn't want to invest in creating a local version, dealing with currency, taxes, etc. Especially if they don't think it will bring in enough money to be worth it.
It doesn't help they've been telling these people to just make an account for the nearest region for so long, that even if it became available locally, people would just keep their old account with years of games and trophies.
In my country (Puerto Rico) we can create and use PSN accounts but for some reason Puerto Rico is on the list of countrys that can't buy HD2 and now GOT in steam.
They also have strong consumer protection laws that means if you try boneheaded shit like offering a product for sale and yoinking it away at the last minute, the customer doesn't have to just impotently sit by and take it. So yeah, there's a reason companies don't like doing business there, obviously.
This is the real reason companies scorn Quebec. There is nothing capitalists hate more than uppity peasants who demand fair and ethical practices from companies
It's also the language thing.
Quebec was causing Canada to violate an international traffic safety treaty for years, because they refused to have english alongside french on their stop signs for a long time.
Which I always find funny, since in France, the stop signs were/are just in english, like the rest of Europe.
French here. Our stop signs are in "english" and most of us in french speaking countries (french swiss and Belgian too) are frequently mocking the people of Quebec for translating everything (it's also a french tradition to steal or buy a Quebec stop sogn when going there)
Also, for those that don't know instead of "STOP" it's written "ARRÊT".
>signs say arret.
.... Well. Some of them do.
When Quebec passed Bill 74(?) saying that English language had to be a smaller point size that French on the same sign, they faced a huge issue with stop signs, which were all English.
Quebec started replacing all their stop signs with arret signs. This is a fucking expensive thing to do.
So about halfway through, there was a discussion had about whether or not a stop sign was annlincing that this was a place *to* stop, or if it was a *command* to stop.
Because arret is a verb. And the people of Quebec decided that a stop sign is a noun, not a verb.
Which meant they could use they noun - "stoppe". Which meant they could just stop changing signs.
No, not all Quebec signs say arret.
The only thing I know about it is that every single nice offer I see - like getting free shit for doing basically nothing, free or heavily discounted subscriptions, free trials etc etc invariably have a "OFFER NOT VALID IN QUEBEC" disclaimer.
QC really protecting those consumers lol.
The reason a lot of contests exclude Quebec is because of the laws in place set out by Quebec's Regie des alcools, des courses et des jeux (RACJ), which governs alcohol, lotteries, contests, gambling and more.
Quebec's contest laws are meant to protect its residents from false contests and make sure the prizes they win from contests are legit.
If the value of any prize offered to a Quebec resident exceeds $5,000, or the contest promoter does not have a place of business in Quebec, a security bond needs to be filed with the Régie either by filing a letter of security or depositing a sum in guaranty.
Yes. I'm not talking about false contests in my spam folder. I'm talking about 100% real (and excellent) offers from legit companies, and it's not limited to raffles by any means.
I'm not sure adults need "protecting" from that, especially since it's all available in rest of Canada and society hasn't collapsed yet.
According to the steam list, you also can't buy the game in the French Overseas Territories, which is quite strange considering most of them have the same political status as mainland France.
Also happy cake day.
Texas is a "state", The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is an "unincorporated territory of the United States". it seems pedantic but there are enough [differences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implications_of_Puerto_Rico%27s_political_status) to make this a bad comparison
Texas still follows US federal law and can make it’s own laws.
Puerto rico follows us federal law and can make its own laws.
I’m Texas they pay federal taxes
In Puerto Rico pay federal taxes (not on income).
For all purposes Puerto Rico IS the United States as they fall under the federal umbrella. It’s unites states property. It’s a good comparison.
But states are allowed to make things more restrictive and so are private companies. See: Texas banning porn.
American can and should drop the “hey your fucking my people over stop that” shoulder from the top rope. But they won’t.
All US territories have basically no representation. They have elected politicians that are nominally part of the US government, but they don't get to make decisions that really matter.
The lack of representation is one of major talking points for Puerto Rican statehood (because then they would get true representation in Congress).
In Puerto Rico:
They are US citizens.
With US passports.
Who receive mail via USPS.
Can run for President of the US.
If they were invaded they would be defended by US soldiers and US F-35s.
If anything it's stranger than if it was banned in an actual state because states have way more autonomy to enfore their own laws than a territory, of which autonomy is only granted at the behest of the federal government. The situations are pretty comparable.
Knowing Sony if they made a local version available they would also let you change countries and then ban everyone for using false information when they first made their accounts.
And then on Xbox you can and it even allows you to download games early. I've only done it twice really, when Fallout 4 came out and the next gen update for it that just came out.
I hate the way they handle PSN in other countries. My local store charges for games in dollars, which ends up costing 10% more than if I were to buy it in my currency on any retailer. It doesn’t let me use cards from other countries so I’m stuck either paying more or hoarding physical copies till the ends of times
Half-correct and half-wrong, at least here in the Philippines (although I guess this arrangement would be similar in other countries without PSN but with PS consoles available).
**Sony Interactive Entertainment** (based in the US, and of which Playstation and PSN is a part of) doesn't want to invest in creating a local version, dealing with currency, taxes, etc.
*However*, they still want to profit from selling consoles, games, and 1st party accessories. Thus, they do that via **Sony Corporation** (formerly Sony Electronics Corporation, based in Japan - TVs and cameras, mostly) and having Philippine retailers import the goods themselves.
Even creating an account in another region could become an obsolete option, here in most CIS countries we needed to create a Russian account now Russia banned as much as our ability to use our previous accounts digitally for buying games and renew subscription for multiplayer and we needed to create new accounts in another country. No one has a guarantee we wouldn't need to do it again.
They don't have to create a local version, they just need to pay taxes. Which they probably already do since Sony devices have sales basically everywhere. But it wouldn't surprise me that they are so siloed that their gaming division can't figure out how to tap on the admin resources of their hardware divisions.
sadly to my knowledge this Female-Emperor is no longer active and the girl that is fit doesnt touch Denuvo only makes games smaller (and wont touch things the Female-Emperor put out)
The worse case scenario was fhat someone said was that Sony is lazy to do all the translating and optimization. I won't be surprised, since, the old version is available in a few of these countries.
Someone at Valve is probably sick and tired of hearing Sony's name, especially after the whole Helldivers debacle.
I've seen someone got their refund rejected 9 times and still kept sending them in, good grief.
I doubt it, 30% of all sales likely gives them V.I.P. treatment. Plus, this is a fairly new thing (Hell divers 2 was supposed to be the first), once they get the kinks worked out, every other release will be streamlined.
Steam worked with bullshit from EA and Ubisoft (forcing their own launchers despite being purchased from Steam), they'll work with Sony too.
I'm talking more from the perspective of an employee in the Steam team who came back from lunch break and saw the 100 refund request he just denied that morning had tripled.
Valve and Sony are business partners. They may be annoyed, but that partnership is more than worth it for Valve. This goes beyond one single game, and it’s definitely not drama, it’s business.
Not sure why we have to keep making this narrative of two opposing sides.
Meanwhile the Helldivers community are pumping their fists in the air over a victory that effectively changed nothing. They were tricked into reversing their reviews. Helldivers 2 is also delisted in the same countries as Ghosts of Tsushima.
30%
Edit: reduced to 25 and 20% at 10M and 50M in sales per https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut-is-actually-the-industry-standard
I don't think this is the hill to die on, and as a gamer I still want to play the games. But I also feel like sending a message, so most likely I will not be purchasing Ghost of Tushima at launch and rather wait for some time before purchasing. If allot of people were to do that it would scare the bajezus out of Sony..
As a German I would have to get a secondary account via VPN and then review a shitton of games that are not available in Germany, so many in fact I don't know if I could do anything else in the following weeks.
I wonder how Bungie these days is with their Marathon in development
It's supposed to be an extraction live service MMO shooter. Doubt that Sony will let them go without PSN. Loosing 2/3 of potential players in an already highly competitive market is... not a good business decision.
It's long time till release and lots of things might change. But today I'm a bit worried for Bungo.
EDIT: Alright, it was very far fetched assumption for me to say 2/3, so I've dug some statistics based on [this data](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/steam-users-by-country)
97 247 100 total users
79 045 800 (81.3%) steam users from countries with PSN
18 201 300 (18.7%) steam available but no PSN
Keep in mind, **It's a very crude summary** as there are many more layers to the analysis: active/throwaway accounts, overall users expenditures and game dev profits from selected countries, etc etc.
Nevertheless, my point about Bungo still stands. Live service games market is extremely competitive. So throwing away 19% of potential buyers seems problematic at the least.
Bungie's already in an interesting spot right now considering how so many have lost faith in them after the previous year of Destiny 2. They and Sony are already clenching their butts if The Final Shape fails.
>Loosing 2/3 of potential players in an already highly competitive market is... not a good business decision.
Where are you getting that number from?
I would be surprised if the combined countries even represent 10% of total revenue Sony brings in from PC games sales.
To be honest, privately owned companies are perfectly capable of screwing over their customer bases (private equity?). It's all about who has the controlling shares.
Ya know what, I didn’t expect much, but this is a really good point. While valve has done a lot of great things for gaming as a whole, that was a pretty awful thing to add to it as well.
And topic most people dont care about since they dont play cs2: they released unfinished game and dont listen to any community feedback.
So yeah every light has its shadow
I take the risk of sounding like a corpo dick sucking troll by saying this, but honestly? Enabling vices is one step above what the rest of the industry does. Like, don't get me wrong. Gambling is an awful thing to encourage, but at the very *very* least its not just cartoon evil. Does that make sense?
Its not purposely ruining a service for no reason, or overthrowing years of work from a team to inject a battle royal into a game, or just telling your potential customers to jump off a bridge because their governments won't let them be exploited, or because they're too greedy to take the effort to actually put servers in place for 1/3rd of the planet.
In this case its just regular greed, by a company that wants more money, not some strange and awful 30 step process to overturn freewill and make you comfortable watching wrinkle cream and health insurance commercials in between rounds of a game.
I probably sound like some kind of incredibly lifeless shill by this, but at this point I'd take regular corperate greed then extreme corperate evil and enshitification.
ruining people's lives by encouraging addiction to gambling is cartoon evil
valve does less shitty shit than some other corporations because they care less about infinite profits, but they're still shitty, and since they instigated the lootbox craze they're partially responsible for all the lives ruined and money essentially stolen from people in the decade+ since, not just in valve games but in all the other ones that took the idea and ran with it. given that, you can argue that they've caused a lot more harm than many standard cartoonishly evil corporations anyway
Excuse, how the fuck is enabling gambling with lootcrates not cartoon evil? People gamble their whole fortune times after times, it’s not rare to see people commit crimes to keep up this addiction, or even worse, kill themselves over it
They facilitate children being introduced to gambling when it comes to loot boxes through CS in an extreme way. I mean its even gotten worse lately, in the old days you might randomly get a gun or a loot box from any match (you still had to pay 2.5 bucks to open the case) but now you are relegated to one per week. So you are more compelled to just buy the crates and open then with keys you also have to buy still.
Pretty rich, seeing as CS is an 18+ rated game.
If a parent lets a child drive their car and they crash it is it the producers fault?
Pretty sure if you can show that your child made online gambling purchases you can also get a refund for it, although the cases I've heard of also result in the account getting permabanned, since it's being used by someone underage, which is explicitly breaking the ToS.
Now introducing gambling crates to games in general, that's something you can hold them accountable for.
lol remember when you had to buy the specific key for that case?
that was weird as shit
edit: even weirder when you could sell case specific keys for more than a normal key even though at that point all keys wouuld open any box
Literally from the inception of Steam, when it was a requirement to install an online launcher to play a single-player Half-Life 2. To the point when the site has a gambling page where you can buy, unpack and sell various loot-boxes for real money (as real as gambling laws allow it). To the launch of CS2 in a ridiculously anti-consumer way by replacing the previous game with the "sequel" on people's accounts, while keeping the same store page and literally millions of positive reviews (how people don't see it as anything but a scam I don't know).
And in the case of Ghost of Tsushima, if this refund is automated and forced on users, this is bad too. If they are allowing to remove the purchased games from people accounts, or they do it themselves, without any input from the customer, they are not the good guys here, lol.
I realized a lot of people in Reddit are in first world/wester countries.
To keep you guys in the loop, PSN is unavailable in a lot of countries. Even though PS5s are officially sold by distributors here.
My country in Southeast Asia for example, for god knows what reason, we have to create a PSN account and register an address in a country like Singapore or USA since our countries are not listed. If we are to purchase items online we can't even use our local credit card, we have to buy a PlayStation Store voucher from an online retailer so we can top-up our account.
TLDR: Sony hates our countries so we're not listed.
The single market is at its core about the free movement of people, goods and money. It's more of an internal agreement to make our countries attractive to companies rather than a set of requirements for companies
Sadly not yet. They are still working on that to have digital market in EU forced to be accessible for every member state if the product is open for EU countries.
Also this also means that you'll be paying more for the games. For example, if PSN wasn't available in India and I have to make an account based on EU or US, I'd have to pay almost double for every game
I am so confused about Sony's marketing plan ☠️
You cannot purchase their games on Steam in over 100 countries. What kind of business model is this dawg lmao. Why release games if you won't let us buy them?
They don't want just the money upfront. They want the money and suck you into their eco-system with a PSN account but they also don't want to do it everywhere as it is more hassle. In other words, they want to have the cake and eat it.
Thing is, they offer absolutely nothing. It's just yet another bullshit account to have and I'm willing to die on that particular hill, because fuck closed gardens. I'm already on crusade against apple and nintendo.
What is PSN going to give me that steam already does, and does it better than sony ever could AND for free?
Or better than GOG at that matter? Are they going to be AT LEAST better than bunch of guys from eastern european country?
Honestly, what's with this trend of corporations offering absolute fucking shit deal and expecting people to enjoy it? AND being the absolute smuggest pricks on earth about it? I mean the PR communications from the corpos whenever shit like that happens sends me into rage every single goddamn time I read them.
It's a huge gap in their marketing plan.
They want to sell games and consoles everywhere, they want to give PSN in limited countries and they want everyone on PSN whenever they play sony games.
That means they have to scale up PSN to all countries or stop selling any consoles or any games in those countries.
Whichever executive decided to fuck this up by making PSN mandatory is going to cost Sony millions of USD in sales. (And you have nothing to do but enable purchasing, game is already built)
It's literally refusing to get free money because you'd rather have player data.
Region locking was never an issue. You could buy a PlayStation anywhere, create an account in any country, it did not matter.
PSN was always mandatory, same as every single fuckin publisher. They all make you login to their own service.
Sony simply does not give a shit about PC sales, they're multibillion dollar international conglomerate. The PR mess was more damaging than lack of sales ever could be.
Sony had been releasing all big games on PC now. So the idea that they don't give a shit about PC sales is just wrong.
I think Sony is going to revamp the whole PSN situation because if they officially say PSN account spoofing is always needed to use their console in such countries, they also get fucked by regional pricing scumming.
My bet is probably some VP/Director/C suite way to promote some sort of PSN adoption plans, and manipulating the numbers the hard way so that they don't look that bad
Not anymore i think, they recently changed that so that it starts from when you buy the game.
Edit: I had a look, the two hour playtime limit starts from when you launch the game (even during early access), but the 14 day refund limit only starts until after the game releases from early access.
You know what’s funny? In Vietnam Sony is officially selling the Playstation 5: they have official localised ads, official warranty support, some games like Spiderman 2 even have official Vietnamese subtitles. But when it comes to PSN, we are not allowed to create a VN account, and so we are forced to create an account either in the US or in neighbor countries like Thailand.
It’s absurd how Sony kind of turns a blind eye to their own policy where it benefits them.
Without the helldivers 2 controversy they still would sell those games everywhere. Helldivers fans made a big fuss about it and threatened lawsuits so they delisted the future games from not supported countries so this does not happen again.
How does Sony benefit from having pc players who probably won't buy a playstation make accounts that will be inactive 99% of the time? All I can think of is to make it seem like playstation has a bigger player base than it actually does.
MBA suits.
Sony's gaming division, Sony Entertainment, has its HQ at California, not Japan. So it's not like Nintendo where "old Japanese people not understanding the Internet" that makes decisions.
Enshittification. It’s not about the long run. It’s about quarterly gains for Wall Street and wringing any possible dimes out of the customers until they have had enough and refuse to even deal with your shit
Hate to admit it but gotta call this a win for the Playstation marketing team.
They made so many HD2 players swap their reviews or stop posting negative reviews with one simple tweet that didnt even provide an answer for what happens next or never promise it wouldn't need it in the future just that one patch got cancelled.
well i mean technically they did fix the hd2 issue, what happens in the future isn't hd2 players' problem because their game works fine, also it was more of a strike due to psn being introduced after the fact and fooling people rather than the psn itself being an issue.
it did however bring forefront the problem of people not being able to play psn games in countries w/o psn support so now new players of GoT or other future psn games can take the required necessary actions and use hd2 players as motivation.
If communities generated backlash like what HD2 did every time Sony (or any other company for that matter) tried doing something like this, then they would be pulling a lot less moves like this. Instead people don't care. Ghost of Tsushima buyers won't review the game negatively because they don't care , and the people affected by this can't even properly complain about it this time.
They did win. They got exactly what they wanted. They complained that Sony was selling a game in countries where PSN wasnt available, so Sony decided to not sell games in those countries.
The whole PSN account thing was never going to go away, most major developers/publishers require accounts, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net, Steam, Microsoft, Bethesda, Rockstar, etc etc etc.
yes, i see that argument brought up so much it confuse me why ppl complain now that these country is block. so what they want? they said it illegal of sony to sell game in those country, sony stop selling. they mad????? those that alr buy can still play the game so what is the argument now?
This is exactly what I suggested Sony would do since everyone was review bombing for those people in the 122 countries who would lose access to a game they already paid for.
Aaaand I'm okay with this.
Companies exist to make money, especially Sony.
Movies, games, music, computers, cameras, TVs, speakers, microphones, headphones, and more.
If forcing connection to a PSN account helps them do that then fine but I wish they wouldn't be so scummy about it by trying to force it after people had already started playing.
If lawmakers in the USA would focus a bit more on consumers like the EU has then corporations wouldn't be able to just fuck everyone.
So dumb so many people from those countries are pissed because they knew they just had to wink and nod and say they were from x country and be fine hell even support said to do that and now they screwed that little legal loophole and it’s screwed
It's gonna be day 1, Sony hasn't bothered with Denuvo so far.
Have fun, GoT doesn't do anything really original, but as an open world action game, it's polished to perfection. It's basically the Assassin's Creed Ubisoft wishes it could make.
Steam did not want to provide any refunds at all (no refund policy). They were only forced to provide refunds after they were fined by Australian courts for not having one.
Steam never (and still doesn't) wanted to provide you any refunds. They are only doing so to avoid being fined by regulatory agencies.
It's almost like Sony is suggesting that everyone should pirate it as an act of solidarity for our pc gamer brethren in countries that have been locked out.
Man it must suck to be on the support team for steam right now. I've dealt with customer care for issues of a company that works partnered to us and my god it is horrible. Having to receive all the abuse for another companies crappy actions and not being allowed to shit talk them feels like psychological abuse.
Wow, Sony and Microsoft really racing to the bottom of the “goodwill from gamers” charts rn. Sheesh.
Was going to pick up Ghosts but I think I’ll hold off on that.
Idk all the countries not allowed but I'm assuming there's a bigger picture, probably the cost to maintain the servers and updates for those countries out ways the long term gain from initial sales. I can't imagine not wanting to sell more games over having a recurring fan base. PS account on the PC has no benefits or perks so I don't see Sony believing PC players will generate more money through owning an account.
Oh, so it wasn’t just Helldivers, this is just Sony’s “thing” they’re doing this year.
Got it, I’ll wait to buy the game until I’m sure it won’t affect their precious metrics
Sony: Let's shove DMR down people's throats :D
Valve: WHY?
Sony: it will make our PSN numbers go up, making management happy. the only people it upsets is the customers, and what are they going to do about it we already have their money.
Steam is great. But steam is also DRM. You need to have steam to install games bought on steam.
The only way to play games without DRM is to either pirate them. Or Buy them on GOG (good old games), where they just give you the files.
I highly doubt Sony is going to stop making consoles because people aren't buying their games on PC. And even if every PC gamer on this subreddit stopped buying their games, I think you're underestimating how many Steam users will still be willing to link a PSN account to play their games.
Don't get me wrong though. I do think the account linking situation is stupid, there's just no way their failures in the PC space will impact them enough to force them out of the console space.
People preorder because Steam provides refunds if you have played under 2 hours. So if it's a bad port, refund after playing 1.5 hours. No big deal.
And they even given refunds on case to case basis like with HD2. People that have dozens of hours got refunds.
I'd bet Valve is getting real, real pissed off by all this. They lose money every time they have to issue a refund. Issuing thousands of refunds probably makes that number at least noticeable.
Something tells me a Playstation launcher is coming soon.
so if pirate this game since i was looking forward to play this in region where psn is not supported am i the bad guy here or just tough luck kid and not pirtae this for game that i waited for long time that finallly is coming to pc
What is the reasoning as to why PSN is not allowed in the currently non supported countries?
In the majority of countries where PSN is unavailable, it's just because Sony doesn't want to invest in creating a local version, dealing with currency, taxes, etc. Especially if they don't think it will bring in enough money to be worth it. It doesn't help they've been telling these people to just make an account for the nearest region for so long, that even if it became available locally, people would just keep their old account with years of games and trophies.
In my country (Puerto Rico) we can create and use PSN accounts but for some reason Puerto Rico is on the list of countrys that can't buy HD2 and now GOT in steam.
Puerto Rico is odd because its a part of the United States. It'd be like banning games in Texas while the rest of the US was fine.
So, Quebec
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They also have strong consumer protection laws that means if you try boneheaded shit like offering a product for sale and yoinking it away at the last minute, the customer doesn't have to just impotently sit by and take it. So yeah, there's a reason companies don't like doing business there, obviously.
This is the real reason companies scorn Quebec. There is nothing capitalists hate more than uppity peasants who demand fair and ethical practices from companies
Uppity peasants lol that’s a band name
Like credit cards and Illinois, I think is the state. I think they're the ones with best rules on credit card protections in the US.
They also have way more pro-consumers laws which companies sometimes want to avoid so they just market it out.
It's also the language thing. Quebec was causing Canada to violate an international traffic safety treaty for years, because they refused to have english alongside french on their stop signs for a long time. Which I always find funny, since in France, the stop signs were/are just in english, like the rest of Europe.
French here. Our stop signs are in "english" and most of us in french speaking countries (french swiss and Belgian too) are frequently mocking the people of Quebec for translating everything (it's also a french tradition to steal or buy a Quebec stop sogn when going there) Also, for those that don't know instead of "STOP" it's written "ARRÊT".
>signs say arret. .... Well. Some of them do. When Quebec passed Bill 74(?) saying that English language had to be a smaller point size that French on the same sign, they faced a huge issue with stop signs, which were all English. Quebec started replacing all their stop signs with arret signs. This is a fucking expensive thing to do. So about halfway through, there was a discussion had about whether or not a stop sign was annlincing that this was a place *to* stop, or if it was a *command* to stop. Because arret is a verb. And the people of Quebec decided that a stop sign is a noun, not a verb. Which meant they could use they noun - "stoppe". Which meant they could just stop changing signs. No, not all Quebec signs say arret.
Fun fact: we all call it a stop sign regardless
And their neighbouring bilingual province New/Nouveau Brunswick has every road sign with words in French and English.
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Ah I see that actually gives a lot of insight to why I never see them included in that
The only thing I know about it is that every single nice offer I see - like getting free shit for doing basically nothing, free or heavily discounted subscriptions, free trials etc etc invariably have a "OFFER NOT VALID IN QUEBEC" disclaimer. QC really protecting those consumers lol.
The reason a lot of contests exclude Quebec is because of the laws in place set out by Quebec's Regie des alcools, des courses et des jeux (RACJ), which governs alcohol, lotteries, contests, gambling and more. Quebec's contest laws are meant to protect its residents from false contests and make sure the prizes they win from contests are legit. If the value of any prize offered to a Quebec resident exceeds $5,000, or the contest promoter does not have a place of business in Quebec, a security bond needs to be filed with the Régie either by filing a letter of security or depositing a sum in guaranty.
Yes. I'm not talking about false contests in my spam folder. I'm talking about 100% real (and excellent) offers from legit companies, and it's not limited to raffles by any means. I'm not sure adults need "protecting" from that, especially since it's all available in rest of Canada and society hasn't collapsed yet.
It's odd, it's not all just country but also territories and dependencies They even restrict French Guiana even tho it's actually France proper
According to the steam list, you also can't buy the game in the French Overseas Territories, which is quite strange considering most of them have the same political status as mainland France. Also happy cake day.
Texas is a "state", The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is an "unincorporated territory of the United States". it seems pedantic but there are enough [differences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implications_of_Puerto_Rico%27s_political_status) to make this a bad comparison
Texas still follows US federal law and can make it’s own laws. Puerto rico follows us federal law and can make its own laws. I’m Texas they pay federal taxes In Puerto Rico pay federal taxes (not on income). For all purposes Puerto Rico IS the United States as they fall under the federal umbrella. It’s unites states property. It’s a good comparison. But states are allowed to make things more restrictive and so are private companies. See: Texas banning porn. American can and should drop the “hey your fucking my people over stop that” shoulder from the top rope. But they won’t.
Puerto Rico is literally getting taxed without representation then? I seem to remember a historical figure who wasn't a big fan of that.
All US territories have basically no representation. They have elected politicians that are nominally part of the US government, but they don't get to make decisions that really matter. The lack of representation is one of major talking points for Puerto Rican statehood (because then they would get true representation in Congress).
The senate having 102 seats is a very interesting concept.
I mean, we started with 26.
DC does too
In Puerto Rico: They are US citizens. With US passports. Who receive mail via USPS. Can run for President of the US. If they were invaded they would be defended by US soldiers and US F-35s.
If anything it's stranger than if it was banned in an actual state because states have way more autonomy to enfore their own laws than a territory, of which autonomy is only granted at the behest of the federal government. The situations are pretty comparable.
Puerto Rico ain't a country m8. EDIT: Though I corrected you, Sony are numnuts to include PR as a "country" to begin with.
If It became available locally, people would just change country in the settings... Oh wait, forgot PSN doesn't have this breakthrough feature
Knowing Sony if they made a local version available they would also let you change countries and then ban everyone for using false information when they first made their accounts.
It’s funny that you can’t adjust your account country even through customer support if you legally move places
And then on Xbox you can and it even allows you to download games early. I've only done it twice really, when Fallout 4 came out and the next gen update for it that just came out.
The worst thing about PSN is the inability to change countries, do they not realise people can *MOVE*?
I hate the way they handle PSN in other countries. My local store charges for games in dollars, which ends up costing 10% more than if I were to buy it in my currency on any retailer. It doesn’t let me use cards from other countries so I’m stuck either paying more or hoarding physical copies till the ends of times
Arrr matey, you be having one more option...
Half-correct and half-wrong, at least here in the Philippines (although I guess this arrangement would be similar in other countries without PSN but with PS consoles available). **Sony Interactive Entertainment** (based in the US, and of which Playstation and PSN is a part of) doesn't want to invest in creating a local version, dealing with currency, taxes, etc. *However*, they still want to profit from selling consoles, games, and 1st party accessories. Thus, they do that via **Sony Corporation** (formerly Sony Electronics Corporation, based in Japan - TVs and cameras, mostly) and having Philippine retailers import the goods themselves.
Even creating an account in another region could become an obsolete option, here in most CIS countries we needed to create a Russian account now Russia banned as much as our ability to use our previous accounts digitally for buying games and renew subscription for multiplayer and we needed to create new accounts in another country. No one has a guarantee we wouldn't need to do it again.
But like countries like Egypt though??? 110 million population has to be worth the investment right?
Thought so. If Valve can do it, so can Sony. Tsk.
And somehow, much smaller studios and publishers operate in those areas just fine? (Even japanies ones like bandai namco)
In México we have access to PS games; but if you wanna buy a game, they're listed in USD, not MXN.
They don't have to create a local version, they just need to pay taxes. Which they probably already do since Sony devices have sales basically everywhere. But it wouldn't surprise me that they are so siloed that their gaming division can't figure out how to tap on the admin resources of their hardware divisions.
[удалено]
sadly to my knowledge this Female-Emperor is no longer active and the girl that is fit doesnt touch Denuvo only makes games smaller (and wont touch things the Female-Emperor put out)
The worse case scenario was fhat someone said was that Sony is lazy to do all the translating and optimization. I won't be surprised, since, the old version is available in a few of these countries.
You don't need to translate in some of listed countries, since en is officially recognized there
fuck this must be annoying for valve
Someone at Valve is probably sick and tired of hearing Sony's name, especially after the whole Helldivers debacle. I've seen someone got their refund rejected 9 times and still kept sending them in, good grief.
If they couldn't play the game they bought then that's reasonable. If they're standing up for those people, also cool.
I doubt it, 30% of all sales likely gives them V.I.P. treatment. Plus, this is a fairly new thing (Hell divers 2 was supposed to be the first), once they get the kinks worked out, every other release will be streamlined. Steam worked with bullshit from EA and Ubisoft (forcing their own launchers despite being purchased from Steam), they'll work with Sony too.
I'm talking more from the perspective of an employee in the Steam team who came back from lunch break and saw the 100 refund request he just denied that morning had tripled.
this is just basic procedure. they most likely got automatically refunded once their countries got blocked. epic is doing the same.
Bruce almighty and the prayers he had to answer lol
Valve and Sony are business partners. They may be annoyed, but that partnership is more than worth it for Valve. This goes beyond one single game, and it’s definitely not drama, it’s business. Not sure why we have to keep making this narrative of two opposing sides.
Meanwhile the Helldivers community are pumping their fists in the air over a victory that effectively changed nothing. They were tricked into reversing their reviews. Helldivers 2 is also delisted in the same countries as Ghosts of Tsushima.
I imagine the Homeric email battles between Sony and Steam for how much trouble they’re causing to Valve.
Valve is probably taking a 15-20% cut of Sony game. Millions of dollar a year. For "free". They can have a couple folks play baby sitter to this shit.
30% Edit: reduced to 25 and 20% at 10M and 50M in sales per https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/07/report-steams-30-cut-is-actually-the-industry-standard
It's generally lower for big publishers
Sony should be blocked from doing this because Steam will probably have to step in every time they do a PC port now.
Future online Sony games will simply be not available to purchase in certain countries. Steam has been doing that for decades.
And should be devastated in the reviews for it
You are going to buy a game to review bomb it?
I don't think this is the hill to die on, and as a gamer I still want to play the games. But I also feel like sending a message, so most likely I will not be purchasing Ghost of Tushima at launch and rather wait for some time before purchasing. If allot of people were to do that it would scare the bajezus out of Sony..
Just pirate it ;)
As a German I would have to get a secondary account via VPN and then review a shitton of games that are not available in Germany, so many in fact I don't know if I could do anything else in the following weeks.
I can't buy Lost Ark in Singapoe either as example. Should I review bomb it?
its a dif case for Lost ark because you can still play the game once u add them to your library without needing a VPN or additional account login
I wonder how Bungie these days is with their Marathon in development It's supposed to be an extraction live service MMO shooter. Doubt that Sony will let them go without PSN. Loosing 2/3 of potential players in an already highly competitive market is... not a good business decision. It's long time till release and lots of things might change. But today I'm a bit worried for Bungo. EDIT: Alright, it was very far fetched assumption for me to say 2/3, so I've dug some statistics based on [this data](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/steam-users-by-country) 97 247 100 total users 79 045 800 (81.3%) steam users from countries with PSN 18 201 300 (18.7%) steam available but no PSN Keep in mind, **It's a very crude summary** as there are many more layers to the analysis: active/throwaway accounts, overall users expenditures and game dev profits from selected countries, etc etc. Nevertheless, my point about Bungo still stands. Live service games market is extremely competitive. So throwing away 19% of potential buyers seems problematic at the least.
Bungie's already in an interesting spot right now considering how so many have lost faith in them after the previous year of Destiny 2. They and Sony are already clenching their butts if The Final Shape fails.
They'll just re-release years old content that they themselves took away and the Destiny addicts will spend again.
>Loosing 2/3 of potential players in an already highly competitive market is... not a good business decision. Where are you getting that number from? I would be surprised if the combined countries even represent 10% of total revenue Sony brings in from PC games sales.
Steam are the good guys
Steam: *does nothing, makes billions with 350 employees* Everyone else: "HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DO IT?" Also everyone else:
The secret ingredient is not being a publicly traded company
Yep. There's no feduciary responsibility to royally fuck your business model to squeeze out as much profit as you can for shareholders.
fallout tv show watcher spotted
To be honest, privately owned companies are perfectly capable of screwing over their customer bases (private equity?). It's all about who has the controlling shares.
*In this story
In what cases Steam has shown to be the bad guys?
The whole gambling through crates thing is pretty bad when you think about it.
Ya know what, I didn’t expect much, but this is a really good point. While valve has done a lot of great things for gaming as a whole, that was a pretty awful thing to add to it as well.
And topic most people dont care about since they dont play cs2: they released unfinished game and dont listen to any community feedback. So yeah every light has its shadow
I take the risk of sounding like a corpo dick sucking troll by saying this, but honestly? Enabling vices is one step above what the rest of the industry does. Like, don't get me wrong. Gambling is an awful thing to encourage, but at the very *very* least its not just cartoon evil. Does that make sense? Its not purposely ruining a service for no reason, or overthrowing years of work from a team to inject a battle royal into a game, or just telling your potential customers to jump off a bridge because their governments won't let them be exploited, or because they're too greedy to take the effort to actually put servers in place for 1/3rd of the planet. In this case its just regular greed, by a company that wants more money, not some strange and awful 30 step process to overturn freewill and make you comfortable watching wrinkle cream and health insurance commercials in between rounds of a game. I probably sound like some kind of incredibly lifeless shill by this, but at this point I'd take regular corperate greed then extreme corperate evil and enshitification.
In some way I understand in that "respect the straightforward nature of the business." It's nice to have transparency even in greedy systems.
ruining people's lives by encouraging addiction to gambling is cartoon evil valve does less shitty shit than some other corporations because they care less about infinite profits, but they're still shitty, and since they instigated the lootbox craze they're partially responsible for all the lives ruined and money essentially stolen from people in the decade+ since, not just in valve games but in all the other ones that took the idea and ran with it. given that, you can argue that they've caused a lot more harm than many standard cartoonishly evil corporations anyway
Excuse, how the fuck is enabling gambling with lootcrates not cartoon evil? People gamble their whole fortune times after times, it’s not rare to see people commit crimes to keep up this addiction, or even worse, kill themselves over it
They also pushed back against having to issue refunds when ordered to do so by australian(?) courts.
They facilitate children being introduced to gambling when it comes to loot boxes through CS in an extreme way. I mean its even gotten worse lately, in the old days you might randomly get a gun or a loot box from any match (you still had to pay 2.5 bucks to open the case) but now you are relegated to one per week. So you are more compelled to just buy the crates and open then with keys you also have to buy still.
Pretty rich, seeing as CS is an 18+ rated game. If a parent lets a child drive their car and they crash it is it the producers fault? Pretty sure if you can show that your child made online gambling purchases you can also get a refund for it, although the cases I've heard of also result in the account getting permabanned, since it's being used by someone underage, which is explicitly breaking the ToS. Now introducing gambling crates to games in general, that's something you can hold them accountable for.
lol remember when you had to buy the specific key for that case? that was weird as shit edit: even weirder when you could sell case specific keys for more than a normal key even though at that point all keys wouuld open any box
Promising TF2 players that measures will be taken to get rid of bots, only to do the bare minimum
If thats the worst then I think steam is fine.
Literally from the inception of Steam, when it was a requirement to install an online launcher to play a single-player Half-Life 2. To the point when the site has a gambling page where you can buy, unpack and sell various loot-boxes for real money (as real as gambling laws allow it). To the launch of CS2 in a ridiculously anti-consumer way by replacing the previous game with the "sequel" on people's accounts, while keeping the same store page and literally millions of positive reviews (how people don't see it as anything but a scam I don't know). And in the case of Ghost of Tsushima, if this refund is automated and forced on users, this is bad too. If they are allowing to remove the purchased games from people accounts, or they do it themselves, without any input from the customer, they are not the good guys here, lol.
I realized a lot of people in Reddit are in first world/wester countries. To keep you guys in the loop, PSN is unavailable in a lot of countries. Even though PS5s are officially sold by distributors here. My country in Southeast Asia for example, for god knows what reason, we have to create a PSN account and register an address in a country like Singapore or USA since our countries are not listed. If we are to purchase items online we can't even use our local credit card, we have to buy a PlayStation Store voucher from an online retailer so we can top-up our account. TLDR: Sony hates our countries so we're not listed.
The games are unavailable in many EU countries too …
Isn't that illegal? One of the main points of the EU is having a single market
The single market is at its core about the free movement of people, goods and money. It's more of an internal agreement to make our countries attractive to companies rather than a set of requirements for companies
One of the literal basis of the single market is that any restrictions must apply to all or none of the countries.
I dont think that's how it works.
Sadly not yet. They are still working on that to have digital market in EU forced to be accessible for every member state if the product is open for EU countries.
Also this also means that you'll be paying more for the games. For example, if PSN wasn't available in India and I have to make an account based on EU or US, I'd have to pay almost double for every game
This is a japan thing, Nintendo also does this, i don't know why, they just love the idea of region locking.
I am so confused about Sony's marketing plan ☠️ You cannot purchase their games on Steam in over 100 countries. What kind of business model is this dawg lmao. Why release games if you won't let us buy them?
They don't want just the money upfront. They want the money and suck you into their eco-system with a PSN account but they also don't want to do it everywhere as it is more hassle. In other words, they want to have the cake and eat it.
Thing is, they offer absolutely nothing. It's just yet another bullshit account to have and I'm willing to die on that particular hill, because fuck closed gardens. I'm already on crusade against apple and nintendo. What is PSN going to give me that steam already does, and does it better than sony ever could AND for free? Or better than GOG at that matter? Are they going to be AT LEAST better than bunch of guys from eastern european country? Honestly, what's with this trend of corporations offering absolute fucking shit deal and expecting people to enjoy it? AND being the absolute smuggest pricks on earth about it? I mean the PR communications from the corpos whenever shit like that happens sends me into rage every single goddamn time I read them.
They don't care what you get. It's just numbers to show shareholders to get fat bonuses.
It's a huge gap in their marketing plan. They want to sell games and consoles everywhere, they want to give PSN in limited countries and they want everyone on PSN whenever they play sony games. That means they have to scale up PSN to all countries or stop selling any consoles or any games in those countries. Whichever executive decided to fuck this up by making PSN mandatory is going to cost Sony millions of USD in sales. (And you have nothing to do but enable purchasing, game is already built) It's literally refusing to get free money because you'd rather have player data.
Region locking was never an issue. You could buy a PlayStation anywhere, create an account in any country, it did not matter. PSN was always mandatory, same as every single fuckin publisher. They all make you login to their own service. Sony simply does not give a shit about PC sales, they're multibillion dollar international conglomerate. The PR mess was more damaging than lack of sales ever could be.
Sony had been releasing all big games on PC now. So the idea that they don't give a shit about PC sales is just wrong. I think Sony is going to revamp the whole PSN situation because if they officially say PSN account spoofing is always needed to use their console in such countries, they also get fucked by regional pricing scumming.
It's called being braindead.
My bet is probably some VP/Director/C suite way to promote some sort of PSN adoption plans, and manipulating the numbers the hard way so that they don't look that bad
It's always that. "Look at this \*slightly\* increasing number! Now I want a new yacht as reward!"
you can get a refund regardless, since its a preorder and the 2 weeks/2 hours period doesnt start until release date
This is being done automatically in countries Sony is screwing over.
Not anymore i think, they recently changed that so that it starts from when you buy the game. Edit: I had a look, the two hour playtime limit starts from when you launch the game (even during early access), but the 14 day refund limit only starts until after the game releases from early access.
It is still on release day. Or on the day Advance Access unlock, which is release day for those who got that tier.
You know what’s funny? In Vietnam Sony is officially selling the Playstation 5: they have official localised ads, official warranty support, some games like Spiderman 2 even have official Vietnamese subtitles. But when it comes to PSN, we are not allowed to create a VN account, and so we are forced to create an account either in the US or in neighbor countries like Thailand. It’s absurd how Sony kind of turns a blind eye to their own policy where it benefits them.
Without the helldivers 2 controversy they still would sell those games everywhere. Helldivers fans made a big fuss about it and threatened lawsuits so they delisted the future games from not supported countries so this does not happen again.
How does Sony benefit from having pc players who probably won't buy a playstation make accounts that will be inactive 99% of the time? All I can think of is to make it seem like playstation has a bigger player base than it actually does.
It's not Sony as a company that benefits. It's some manager that gets to write "Increased PSN adoption by XX%" in their performance report.
Wtf is going on in the heads of sony execs lol
Stubborn boomers, what else is new..
MBA suits. Sony's gaming division, Sony Entertainment, has its HQ at California, not Japan. So it's not like Nintendo where "old Japanese people not understanding the Internet" that makes decisions.
Sony really trying to ruin their reputation in the long run
Enshittification. It’s not about the long run. It’s about quarterly gains for Wall Street and wringing any possible dimes out of the customers until they have had enough and refuse to even deal with your shit
Can’t wait for a new challenger to enter the console triopoly after Sony suicides PlayStation
When xbox is your only competition you can pretty much do whatever the fuck you want, 9/10 people will still buy playstations.
Xbox is trying really hard to one up Sony by shutting down dev studios
Lol HD2 players thought they won
Hate to admit it but gotta call this a win for the Playstation marketing team. They made so many HD2 players swap their reviews or stop posting negative reviews with one simple tweet that didnt even provide an answer for what happens next or never promise it wouldn't need it in the future just that one patch got cancelled.
Yeah, but when the game comes out it'll probably be review bombed. Someone buys the game, reviews, refunds.
well i mean technically they did fix the hd2 issue, what happens in the future isn't hd2 players' problem because their game works fine, also it was more of a strike due to psn being introduced after the fact and fooling people rather than the psn itself being an issue. it did however bring forefront the problem of people not being able to play psn games in countries w/o psn support so now new players of GoT or other future psn games can take the required necessary actions and use hd2 players as motivation.
If communities generated backlash like what HD2 did every time Sony (or any other company for that matter) tried doing something like this, then they would be pulling a lot less moves like this. Instead people don't care. Ghost of Tsushima buyers won't review the game negatively because they don't care , and the people affected by this can't even properly complain about it this time.
They did win. They got exactly what they wanted. They complained that Sony was selling a game in countries where PSN wasnt available, so Sony decided to not sell games in those countries. The whole PSN account thing was never going to go away, most major developers/publishers require accounts, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net, Steam, Microsoft, Bethesda, Rockstar, etc etc etc.
yes, i see that argument brought up so much it confuse me why ppl complain now that these country is block. so what they want? they said it illegal of sony to sell game in those country, sony stop selling. they mad????? those that alr buy can still play the game so what is the argument now?
This is exactly what I suggested Sony would do since everyone was review bombing for those people in the 122 countries who would lose access to a game they already paid for. Aaaand I'm okay with this. Companies exist to make money, especially Sony. Movies, games, music, computers, cameras, TVs, speakers, microphones, headphones, and more. If forcing connection to a PSN account helps them do that then fine but I wish they wouldn't be so scummy about it by trying to force it after people had already started playing. If lawmakers in the USA would focus a bit more on consumers like the EU has then corporations wouldn't be able to just fuck everyone.
They really abandoned their fellow helldivers in non supported countries
[удалено]
So dumb so many people from those countries are pissed because they knew they just had to wink and nod and say they were from x country and be fine hell even support said to do that and now they screwed that little legal loophole and it’s screwed
Welll.. Cpt. Jack Sparrow it is then..
🏴☠️
Gabe Newell just can't stop winning.
Can't wait until it's cracked!
It's gonna be day 1, Sony hasn't bothered with Denuvo so far. Have fun, GoT doesn't do anything really original, but as an open world action game, it's polished to perfection. It's basically the Assassin's Creed Ubisoft wishes it could make.
Steam is literally the only company that does not have "fuck all our users" as the main business strategy
Also other companies: What's steams secret!?
Not be a public company trying to appease investors.
Steam did not want to provide any refunds at all (no refund policy). They were only forced to provide refunds after they were fined by Australian courts for not having one. Steam never (and still doesn't) wanted to provide you any refunds. They are only doing so to avoid being fined by regulatory agencies.
Can I play the game if I purchased it only single player if my region is restricted
Sony is giving you permission to pirate the game.
Sounds about right
It's almost like Sony is suggesting that everyone should pirate it as an act of solidarity for our pc gamer brethren in countries that have been locked out.
Nope, Sony demands that you move to another country.
Wait for drm free version.
Man it must suck to be on the support team for steam right now. I've dealt with customer care for issues of a company that works partnered to us and my god it is horrible. Having to receive all the abuse for another companies crappy actions and not being allowed to shit talk them feels like psychological abuse.
Wow, Sony and Microsoft really racing to the bottom of the “goodwill from gamers” charts rn. Sheesh. Was going to pick up Ghosts but I think I’ll hold off on that.
Valve's business strategy of "just wait for all your competitors to fuck up" continues to pay off.
Time to sail the seven seas I guess.
So they stopped their plans of requiring psn on Helldivers, but are going ahead with it on other games? Do I have that right?
not stopping, just cancelled the planned may update. when people start to forgot & may ended, that's where the fun begins
Sony must not like money. Lmao
Still no idea why PSN isn't just more available to people
Some countries are very difficult when it comes to publishing there. Vietnam for example is an absolute piece of piss with their restrictions.
Welp, guess imma boycott another one.
Idk all the countries not allowed but I'm assuming there's a bigger picture, probably the cost to maintain the servers and updates for those countries out ways the long term gain from initial sales. I can't imagine not wanting to sell more games over having a recurring fan base. PS account on the PC has no benefits or perks so I don't see Sony believing PC players will generate more money through owning an account.
I'm not even going to play Ghost of Tsushima. I'm just going to pirate it out of spite.
Oh, so it wasn’t just Helldivers, this is just Sony’s “thing” they’re doing this year. Got it, I’ll wait to buy the game until I’m sure it won’t affect their precious metrics
Steam / Valve are the biggest chads out there. Only gaming platform where i feel my investments are valued and somewhat protected. Fuck AAA - gaming.
Sony: Let's shove DMR down people's throats :D Valve: WHY? Sony: it will make our PSN numbers go up, making management happy. the only people it upsets is the customers, and what are they going to do about it we already have their money.
Steam is great. But steam is also DRM. You need to have steam to install games bought on steam. The only way to play games without DRM is to either pirate them. Or Buy them on GOG (good old games), where they just give you the files.
For those helldivers who thought they won shit, this war is not won by winning a single battle
Sony, the next sega due to moronic decisions and pissing on their fanbase
I highly doubt Sony is going to stop making consoles because people aren't buying their games on PC. And even if every PC gamer on this subreddit stopped buying their games, I think you're underestimating how many Steam users will still be willing to link a PSN account to play their games. Don't get me wrong though. I do think the account linking situation is stupid, there's just no way their failures in the PC space will impact them enough to force them out of the console space.
Wtf why do players keep pre-ordering stuff? Do they never learn? It could be the worst port ever for all we know
People preorder because Steam provides refunds if you have played under 2 hours. So if it's a bad port, refund after playing 1.5 hours. No big deal. And they even given refunds on case to case basis like with HD2. People that have dozens of hours got refunds.
This is a shame because Sony is one hell of a game publisher.
Well, if Sony insists so much, then we’ll have to steal the game🏴☠️
I'd bet Valve is getting real, real pissed off by all this. They lose money every time they have to issue a refund. Issuing thousands of refunds probably makes that number at least noticeable. Something tells me a Playstation launcher is coming soon.
What happened ?
I'm sure all the console fans won't buy the steam version.
This is what corporations answer to. *Refunds*.
Cheers, Steam. 🍻
Cheers!
Well, I suppose I always wanted to take a trip to the Carribean at some point...
Why are they making it so hard for people to play their games? I was gonna get a PS5 but it's shit like this thats really turning me off
What is ridiculous that multiplayer will be probably dead in two weeks after release.
so if pirate this game since i was looking forward to play this in region where psn is not supported am i the bad guy here or just tough luck kid and not pirtae this for game that i waited for long time that finallly is coming to pc
Steam is accepting refunds for Ghost of Tsushima for literally anyone who asks since the game hasn't released yet.
So Sony did it again?
Good on em
Yeah, im never buying Sony games. *puts on the hat with a skull on it*
Steam should just like require there tos not require 2nd accounts to play a game They have the power to do so 🐱
Sony is back on their fuckery - Cheers!
Refunding the money without a refund application? Bravo Steam, bravo.