Sony president, COO, and CFO Hiroki Totoki acknowledged that the company's plan to push PlayStation Network account linking on famously resistant PC gamers can "invite pushback" – rather, "offering" these accounts, in his words – but the company is sticking to its guns, insisting that it's essential to ensure that "anybody can enjoy games safely."
Via interpreter, Totoki discussed the company's learnings in the Q&A portion of Sony's latest financial call.
"We have learned a lot," he begins. "The way to face the issues regarding PC, for instance. The PlayStation accounts that we have offered – well actually, by offering them, for instance, sometimes that tends to invite pushback. 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.
"Having some restrictions, may not call it rule, but to ask the users and gamers to follow the manner, those manners are very important and we have to continue to seek the best way to achieve this." (Despite some translation awkwardness, I've kept the exact wording of this interpreted quote to avoid any potential confusion through paraphrasing, though a smoother version of Totoki's comment here might be: 'I'd maybe not call it a rule.' I would, however, call it a rule, and we're getting to that.)
There are a few things to unpack here, and we can use a few PlayStation PC games to explain them. Firstly, the Helldivers 2 community temporarily imploded over mandatory PlayStation account linking earlier this year, after months of no-strings-attached fun ironically enabled by technical issues that prevented account linking at launch.
This was easily the highest-profile "pushback" to Sony's PC praxis, and a rare dip for a game that's generally been a ginormous success for both PlayStation and developer Arrowhead. It was also a clear before-and-after moment: players were happy and the game was seemingly doing just fine, and then account linking chucked a wrench in and, from the outside looking in, nothing else really seemed to change.
Secondly, Horizon Zero Dawn remastered, a single-player game, just came to PC. Like God of War Ragnarok before it, it requires a linked PlayStation account. There's a big ol' "account required" blurb right at the top of their Steam pages.
Totoki specifies live service games in his outline on keeping PlayStation games safe on all platforms, but that doesn't hold up in single-player games like these, nor does his description of "offering" accounts that are in fact mandatory. In fairness, this may just be another translation snag. But Sony's insistence on this arrangement suggests that it wants to pump up its PlayStation Network numbers and onboard folks from other platforms however it can – an unsurprising decision for a major platform holder.
The rift between PC gamers and Sony seems to come from this sort of headbutting. Sony appears to prioritize bringing PC under its mothership over finding independent success on the platform, and it's clearly willing to piss off a few PC gamers to do it. Playing Xbox games on PC, which are generally on PC by default and at launch anyway, is often a smoother process by comparison.
Those PC gamers, meanwhile, would rather not be forced to add yet another account that they don't use to their internet footprint. I understand the argument that you only have to make a free account, link it one time, and that this isn't hard to do. But it's also fair to argue that this adds a point of friction and potential failure – hello, PlayStation server sign-in issues, my old friend – to the process of playing a single-player game on your personal computer.
Linking a PlayStation account is not quite as stone-in-your-gut bad as Steam branching off to Ubisoft's Uplay, but it is somewhere on what I'll call the PC Gaming Gradient of Inconvenience. Many PC gamers seem to want a little more focus on "enjoying the game freely" and a little less concern for how to purportedly "enjoy the games safely," to use Totoki's words.
This kind of thing is genuinely more defensible in the case of games like Helldivers 2, because as a platform holder Sony is indeed obligated to oversee multiplayer interactions, but the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn remastered muddy the waters. For the time being, I reckon Sony can continue to expect more "pushback."
