PlayStation finally drop the PSN account requirement that annoyed every PC player

Looks like they finally got the message. “An account for PlayStation Network will become optional for these titles on PC,” said PlayStation in a short and quiet blog post that includes the upcoming PC release for Spider-Man 2, and The Last Of Us Part II. It’s been eight months since PlayStation provoked mass annoyance among PC players by making a PSN account mandatory to play Helldivers 2, and later Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. They soon walked back the decision for Helldivers 2 after a rough review-bombing but the company didn’t seem to fully take the hint. It looks like they’ve now conceded that, yes, the obligatory sign-up was an unpopular move.

The post itself is brief and plain, and spins the decision as a way for PlayStation to offer “in-game content incentives” to any PC player who decides to sign in not as a requirement but as an option. “Players who still opt to sign into a PlayStation Network account will also enjoy added benefits like trophies and friend management,” they say, before showing a table of the extra goodies account linkers will get for each game.

This is similar to what the company did for open world sequel Horizon Zero Dawn: Forbidden West, which offered players a bonus outfit and spear for protagonist Aloy if they linked their Steam and PSN accounts. It looks like that may be the approach from now on. Although PlayStation don’t explicitly say so outright. They only say that all the games which so far required the account are having that requirement dropped. I guess we’ll see when Death Stranding 2 comes out.

The whole saga has been quite stupid. PlayStation dropped the requirement for Helldivers 2 after players (and the game’s developers) got supremely annoyed with the decision, but the hullaballoo resulted in a community manager losing his job. Following that, the account requirement was instituted on the above mentioned games, which many players pointed out were single player adventures, with no requirement to be online (aside from unspoken DRM reasons, that is).

The decision made the games unavailable to PC players in over 100 countries where it is currently not possible to sign up for Sony’s service (not to mention slightly annoying anyone else who doesn’t even own a PlayStation console). Most recently, they said the account would be required on the upcoming PC release of Last Of Us Part II, due out in April. But now that too won’t need a PSN account. Instead, if you sign on optionally, you’ll get an in-game jacket inspired by Naughty Dog’s new upcoming sci-fi adventure Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

God, let this be the end of it. It was a stupid decision, irritated a ton of players, and probably only benefited some number crunchers in a department buried deep in Sony’s corporate bowels. Now that it’s just an option, we can all get back to deciding if the games are actually good or not.