Arrowhead responds to the complaints.

PC players of Helldivers 2 have just been told (again) that it will be mandatory to link their Steam game to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account in order to keep playing. Players will have until early June to make sure the PSN account link happens.

Players are either "whatever" about the requirement or super incredibly "I'm gonna fuck shit up" mad about the entire situation. Helldivers 2 was supposed to have a linked PSN account when it first launched. However, this requirement was pushed back by several months due to a myriad of technical issues.

Having to use a secondary login for games released on Steam aren't all that uncommon. EA often does it for their games as does Ubisoft. Just recently, I had to tie the Steam release of Dead Island 2 to an Epic account due to its use of Epic Online Services. Microsoft even requires it for many of their Steam releases, such as for Sea of Thieves.

Many of the people complaining say that they don't want to make a PlayStation Network account. The core reasons being that they don't own a PlayStation, nor do they have PlayStation games (I suppose they're ignoring that Helldivers 2 is published by PlayStation). Another reason people are upset is because they don't feel as though their information will be secure with Sony, due to some of the security woes that hit PlayStation Network years ago.

There is one more group of PC Helldivers 2 players that have the biggest issue of them all: They live in countries that don't have any sort of access to PlayStation Network. As there does not seem to be any sort of workaround for this little oversight, what are these players to do then?


As you expect, the Steam reviews for Helldivers 2 have taken a massive nosedive. While the average of all reviews remains at "Mostly Positive" it's the recent reviews that show the shift towards "Mixed." Looking purely at the most recent reviews, it's pretty easy to tell just when this news first started to make the rounds.

Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt took to the hellscape of Twtter to make a brief statement. Pilestedt says that all questions should be directed towards PlayStation Support, offering a link to a page on how to sign into PSN when playing on PC. The current version of the page says that linking PSN from PC is optional, which hasn't exactly made fans any less understanding, or happy, about the entire situation.

The Steam page for Helldivers 2 does say that a PSN account is required. The information saying that Helldivers 2 required a third-party account, in this case PlayStation Network, was added to the Steam page back in December 2023. A notice of "PSN account required" was also said in several pre-release news posts made to the Helldivers 2 Steam page.

That is to say, this should not be coming as a surprise to anybody, but alas.

So far, there hasn't been a PlayStation published game released on PC that requires logging in to PlayStation Network. Even the upcoming PC release of Ghost of Tsushima makes it sound like a PSN login is optional, unless you want to play the Legends game mode online and with cross-play. Legends can still be played solo if so desired.

In the short term, the negative reviews keep pouring in for Helldivers 2 on Steam. What this means for the long term remains to be seen.