It seems that Playstation and its parent company Sony have learned nothing from their mistakes in 2024. The company will continue to force players to connect PlayStation accounts to play on PCeven single player games like God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. The decision was confirmed in a recent financial call with Sony’s president, who listed security as the number one reason for PSN’s requirements.
The decision to continue requiring a PlayStation account won’t make PC users happy, but perhaps a more direct approach will work, as the strategy of forcing integration months after launch didn’t work very well for the PlayStation with Helldivers 2 at the beginning of this year. Either way, Sony is off to a bad start and its current strategy isn’t garnering much goodwill from PC gamers.
PlayStation account linking may be here to stay
Online, offline and everything in between requires PSN
Anyone hoping Sony will abandon forced account linking will be disappointed. According to a report from Game Radar, Sony has confirmed that PlayStation account linking isn’t going anywhere despite fan backlash in the past. Hiroki Totoki, president, COO and CFO of Sony, spoke on a recent company financial call about how the company has learned a lot from recent “resistance”But the company intends to stay the course regarding PSN requirements.
The main reason PlayStation will continue to require PSN linking, according to Sony, is player safety. On the financial call translated from Japanese to English, Totoki said: “for live service games, to maintain the order of the game so that anyone can enjoy the games safely, we need to create an environment conducive to this and of course enjoy the game freely.” This reasoning seems noble on the surface, but when used to force PC gamers who play single-player games to sign in or create a PlayStation account, it doesn’t make much sense.
PSN requirements don’t just affect live service games
Play safely, even alone
While it might make more sense for live service games like Helldivers 2 to require a PlayStation account, this argument falls apart when applied to single-player games in the PlayStation catalog. PSN requirements didn’t work well for Helldivers 2as the community collectively protested being forced to create another account to log in before embarking on their missions to bring freedom and democracy to the galaxy.
Games like God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered are popular single-player games and Sony required a PSN login for both. This trend of single-player offline games doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so the “player safety”The argument seems more like an excuse for PlayStation to increase the number of its accounts, forcing even offline gamers to sign up. Tracking player habits and data can be an important factor at Sony wanting more and more players to have a PlayStation account.
Additionally, Sony has not recognized how these account requirements prevent players from certain countries from accessing the games they have purchased. When the Ghost of Tsushima The PC port arrived on Steam, Sony announced that an account would only be required for multiplayer functions. However, due to the need to connect to PSN, more than 170 countries no longer have access to the gamecausing mass refunds and many unsatisfied players.
PlayStation needs to build a stronger future on PC
Courting PC gamers will require more from Sony
If PlayStation wants consumers to set aside their reservations about needing to use another account to play games, the publisher needs a better lineup of PC games. The PSN requirement is just another hurdle for PC users to buy a new game, so PlayStation will need to do better with its game lineup to convince them to look past it. Even main games like Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered received little fanfare upon release. Sony has already started badly since Helldivers 2 The disaster earlier this year caused the company to momentarily retreat.
If Sony wants to appeal more to PC gamers, it will have to do more than just force gamers into the PSN ecosystem. Adding features that actually benefit players and don’t just interfere with launching a game offline would go a long way toward enticing PC users to create one. Playstation account without complications. What exactly Sony could do is unclear, given that it has already lost a lot of goodwill, but it can certainly do better than promising to make gamers safe in self-playing games.
Source: PlayStation/YouTube