There is no business reason to cut down your own market unless it comes with additional expenses due to technical reasons. I'm pretty sure someone weighed these numbers again after the game's huge upgrades in infrastructure due to its unexpected success and decided differently this time.

Maybe somebody at Sony needs to push those PSN user numbers up to get ahead in the rat race.

How would removing players from steam push their numbers? Especially since it is obvious from the charts that the removed countries contributed almost nothing to the active playerbase?

Every Helldivers 2 player on Steam needs to create a Playstation Network account now, even if they don't own a Playstation. Without PSN account Steam users won't be able to play the game in a couple of days.

Yes, that is what is happening. But it is not an explanation for why, because by itself that action is going to reduce SIA's market and thereby revenue. There must be a technical/legal reason and other comments have already pointed out how the current system is both trashy for developers and legally risky.

Doesn't matter if different people are responsible for number of accounts and from revenue... One will push for this and other one likely have not even noticed...

Not obvious at all, so far

> look at steam charts, the player count did not take any obvious hit

> the actual impact won't be fully visible until May 30th or June 4th since that's when they will start blocking access to the game for players who didn't link their accounts

Considering the 100k+ bad reviews already left in the past 3 days, it seems there is no impact beyond that.

There would be no impact if this game was some MMORPG or mostly singleplayer title.

Helldivers is PvE game-as-a-service and it's model works best when network effects are strong. Basically a lot of people are playing such games because their friends are playing it. And the most opinionated and active people are the ones who bring their friends into the game.

So even if relatively small percent of active playerbase will leave the game they'll likely to take some of their friends with them, etc.

Come on, they want this to be a PlayStation exclusive because it boosts ps5 sales and everyone wants to have the “hits” only on their platform. they just can’t easily get away with it.

Suuurrree, there are rumours about Xbox (https://insider-gaming.com/sony-helldivers-2-on-xbox/) but I’m gonna go out a limb here and say there’s sweet duck all chance in hell of that happening now.

If they wanted it to be a PlayStation exclusive they never would have launched it on PC to begin with.

Helldivers 2 seems to be a bit of a surprise hit, that might have influenced some post-launch decisions.

I like how people on here act as if corporations are not run by humans with personal flaws and huge egos

There is a good technical reason behind that. As far as I can see crossplay doesn't work well at all in the game right now. Mostly issues where inviting friends to play is broken. This isn't surprising when you do not have a common identity system to fallback on for all players.

There are constent issues, but I have a large number of hours spent playing on my steam deck with a PS5 player.

Most of the reasons reported are around moderation. I think it's simply much easier for Sony to ban an account on their system (and revoke all of its content licenses as punishment) than it is to manage and wrangle steam account bans.

PSN accounts are subject to their own, malleable ToS whereas they are somewhat limited in their reprisals against a steam account, beyond simple bans.