Phew! What a time it’s been for Helldivers 2. More specifically for publisher Sony. If you’re not caught up with what’s been going on, basically Arrowhead Games’ third-person shooter became the subject of severe review bombing when, last week, Sony announced it was going to force PC users to link up a PlayStation Network account in order to play the game.
The backlash was immediate, to such an extent that the game went from having a pretty good reputation among the community to gaining an “Overwhelmingly Negative” review score on Steam. Tens of thousands of players registered their outrage over having to sign up to a PlayStation-specific account just to play Helldivers 2.
Fortunately, Sony saw the error of its ways and has backpedaled on the idea. Within a day, things have managed to take a turn for the better, and it looks like the game’s good standing is being restored.
Democracy wins!
At the time of writing, Helldivers 2 is showing a pretty respectable “Mixed” on Steam for recent reviews and “Mostly Positive” overall. A lot of the comments from users are celebrating the victory, as many beam over Sony having to kowtow to what the fans actually want, which in this case was not to have a PSN account forced on them.
Whether you like Helldivers 2 or not, you can’t say it isn’t impressive to see just how quickly things can turn. If you blinked over the last few days, you could easily have missed what was going on.
It’s worth saying at this point that Arrowhead’s CEO did offer an apology regarding the controversy. However, most would probably agree that this was likely a publisher decision rather than something the studio was pushing for.
Despite over 154,000 negative reviews over the last few days – according to SteamDB – we’re starting to see scores go up again.
