Sony learned nothing from the Helldivers 2 shitshow.
When it was on sale recently I didn’t buy it. Instead I removed all Sony games from my wishlist, knowing they would require PSN even for single player games.
Let’s not forget that the PSN integration reduces performance, as in: deleting the PSN stuff from Ghost of Tsushima results in higher FPS.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2215430/discussions/0/7093810588821950373/
I bought the Ezio trilogy on sale late last year on steam. When I installed it on deck and tried to play, I couldn’t because my Ubisoft account was originally made on console using an outdated email, so account confirmation is impossible, and I need to make a new Ubisoft account from scratch and forfeit whatever value I had accumulated with the old one. I figured I’d make a new one eventually, but here I am, nearly half a year later with still no interest in doing so.
Same exact thing happened with Rockstar and red dead 2 on deck.
I’m sure most pc players won’t even care that they need to slap together a quick PS account too play a great game, but sometimes it can be just enough of a hassle to keep people from playing at all.
Aw, I was looking forward to this one. But also, meh, my unplayed backlog is huge.
I’m gonna put on my casual-observer-business-analyst hat real quick: it seems weird that Sony is making so many decisions that they know will piss off customers with their brand lately. Microsoft has been striking out hard with underwhelming exclusives, whereas at least Sony has had a few hits. Sony could take advantage of that and use this generation to crush the Xbox brand pretty hard. The payoff would be huge later on.
Business execs always fancy themselves as military generals; I’m sure they’ve heard that Napoleon quote, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Instead, they seem to be taking advantage of Microsoft’s blunders to just knowingly make their own blunders.
Like, even from a cutthroat business exec mindset, there is a profit-motivated reason to just chill out with the anti-consumer stuff right now. Your biggest competitor has been absolutely unloading a clip into their own foot for like two years. Quit drawing attention to yourself.
The answer is that corporations absolutely resent customers having standards.
In an ideal world, to them, you just hand them your paycheck and passwords and keys to your house directly in exchange for nothing.
That’s what enshittification is: the slow, inevitable frog boiling rise towards that reality where consumers have absolutely no standards, and are completely comfortable with being an exploited resource, even thankful for the opportunity to be exploited. You already see that shit with Games Cash Shops as a service. All you have to do is put the skeleton of a game in there and you will instantly have a conditioned audience of goobers willing to die for you.
This is no different than what Ubisoft, blizzard, etc are doing with their own launchers.
People will get used to it and will then become complacent with the new expectations for another account.
