There was no confusion around who delisted it
this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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There was a lot of speculation and no confirmation, this is confirmation
There's been confirmation for 7 days.
This is steamdb change list for HD2. This is a developer update.
The "speculation" was just clickbait. There are multiple articles confirming it over the last week.
Why would Valve delist a game? Can you elaborate on what kind of speculation was made?
I had thought Valve might have been pre-emptive owing to the refund requests tbh.
Most people blamed valve
I love the petty envy Sony displays here. "Fuck! Microsoft is getting all the bad press attention! Quick! Do something!"
More like "Microsoft is fucking up. Quick, do something that is shitty but isn't as bad as closing studios. Account registration requirements? Perfect! Fuck those poors in unsupported countries."
That's because they already did, Jim Ryan closed japan studio years ago.
You would think that when a company like Microsoft is catching so much shit, a company like sony would think it's a good move to do something good to look even better. But somehow they see it as a challange to be even worse somehow
I think their though process is more along the line of:
Hey, Microsoft is getting all the bad attention ATM, let's see how much shit we can sneak in while people are distracted.
No matter how poorly thought Sony's international release plan is for PC, that's far easier to assume brief incompetence than malice around. Firing people who made a GOTY is a whole different level of evil.
They did it a second time, so what is it now? Dependable incompetence?
What did they do twice?
There’s been one debacle based around PSN, as a service, only being available in certain countries, and Helldivers initially launching in others to simplify their launch.
As of yet, I could believe there are Sony execs that didn’t even realize such a gap existed for their PC releases, and are still deciding what they can legally do. (Premiering their service in new territories isn’t simple, and a lot of their PC investment, plus their multiplayer workings, might be based around the account expectations)
Does this mean that Sony will try to push the account requirement again on HD2, now that countries without PSN access are delisted?
I'm not sure what the future holds in regards to whether they will try to pursue this again or not, I certainly hope they won't. This information doesn't change anything that is going on right now.
Here is the reason I posted it, I think it will help: There were people online saying that Valve may be the ones who delisted HD2 to protect themselves legally, instead of sony being the one's who delisted it. This is primary source evidence that it was in fact Sony who delisted it, not Valve.
We can try to draw conclusions from it and I think it is very strange that Sony hasn't re-enabled purchasing in these countries now that the PSN requirement has dropped, companies typically try to sell products to as wide of an audience as possible.
I know that doesn't directly answer your question but unfortunately I think only time will tell.
Up until this point I personally haven't seen Valve or Steam make direct comments as to who exactly made this choice. I may have just missed it but I always look for something directly from the company. I also don't have knowledge on how steam pushes changes, I think if you have intimate knowledge on that it was obvious? This is also just pulled from a post on Reddit, so it could also be 100% bullshit. To me though this was the first thing I saw that allowed me to start forming an opinion to your above question, without giving Sony the benefit of the doubt. I hate to give that to Sony because I hate what Sony did, but for arguments sake I personally don't ignore things like that.
These are my reasons for sharing.
They delisted them before they announced that they wouldn't require accounts after all.
So then why not relist them and sell your game on a bigger market? The answer is probably because they will try again.
Perhaps. Or perhaps they're a giant behemoth where 1 hand doesn't know what the other is doing, and the person with the authority for this hasn't bothered.
I don't buy that.. I would have when this just started.. just a stupid decision made by an MBA that only thinks of his MAU and DAU (Monthly /Daily Active Users) metrics for the playstation network.
But once shit hit the fan, some big shot corpo started making central decisions from the comfort of his volcano base while petting his white cat.
I think the answer is because they don't believe they need that market, they were obviously okay with losing that market share in the first place due to the fact that they put the requirement in there. As their announcements have said, requiring a PSN account is something that gives them more control over abuse (and ofc data) and allowing more players that are in countries where they are not currently allowed to have those accounts are counterproductive to what they are currently driving for
I'm not surprised they didn't reverse the region locks they believe it's something for the best and that's not something that the consumer is going to be able to change, regardless of the reviews or protest, worst case scenario for them is they just go back to being fully console exclusive if the PR pressure gets too bad
Honestly sounds like Sony need to just add those places to their list of supported countries.
A lot of them are just piddling little islands. It's not like they need to open up a regional office on the fucking Isle of Man.
Sony are a lot bigger than Valve. This is very easily achievable.
No no no…
Support techs do not have access to insider industry information. They deal with dozens of region-blocked game support issues a day, and in 95% of cases that block was placed by the publisher. The tech is likely just using that term out of assumption and familiarity.
I’m not saying it’s impossible that Sony are the culprit, but a random support reply to an individual is not how we’d find out. It’s happened before that a Valve official puts out a correction to something support says.
EDIT: Seems like I was right.
They should have been part of the original restriction and it was noticed when the restriction was put in place for Tsushima. This was noticed and executed independently by Valve.
Sony is just trying to follow Nintendo's example of generally shitty behavior.
The funniest shit is Ghost of Tsushima on steam not being able to be sold in japan, California really ruined PS.