Sony Boss Says It's 'Learned a Lot' from PC Player Pushback 1
Image: Push Square

Sony’s decision to mandate PSN account linking with its PC ports has caused friction with the fanbase outside of its PlayStation ecosystem, but it’s not backing down.

Speaking as part of a financial call with investors, boss Hiroki Totoki said the organisation had “learned a lot” from the situation but needs to keep players safe. It’s a comment that’s obviously going to invite immediate criticism.

“The PlayStation accounts that we have offered – well actually, by offering them, for instance, sometimes that tends to invite pushback,” he said, via an interpreter. “But for the live service games, in order to maintain order of the gaming so that anybody can enjoy the games safely, we need to create an environment conducive to that and, of course, enjoying the game freely.”

To be fair, Totoki was speaking about failed first-person shooter Concord during this part of the call, so was focusing purely on live service games.

But that doesn’t change the fact that titles like Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered and God of War Ragnarok don’t have any kind of online interaction, so it’s clear Totoki is not being entirely transparent about Sony’s objectives here. In reality, it wants to make PC users part of its ecosystem, so it can track their playing habits and bolster its monthly active user statistics.

Still, we’re a little conflicted on all of this.

For starters, virtually all games require you to have an account of some sort these days, and we’ve never seen pushback on this kind of scale before. The community around Helldivers 2 almost imploded when the requirement was introduced, and while we appreciate the whole sorry saga was poorly handled, it seemed like a total overreaction from our perspective.

On the other hand, we understand PSN isn’t officially available in every country, and so it seems strange for Sony to curtail its sales like this. Surely, the solution is for it to make the sign-up process as seamless as possible, and officially roll out the service in more regions?

That issue aside, this largely strikes us as a storm in a tea cup. We understand Sony’s not being entirely transparent with its goals here, and we recognise account linking adds a level of friction that players would rather not be forced to deal with. But is it really a big deal – especially when practically every other publisher is doing the exact same thing?

[source gamesradar.com]