In the wake of Sony’s May edition of the State of Play, we saw great news of several new Playstation titles, as well as news that a few games that were previously considered exclusive to Sony machines like the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 will be getting ported over to Steam. Among those titles will be Santa Monica Studio’s God of War Ragnarok, as well as a remaster of Supermassive Games’ iconic horror experience Until Dawn. Both will be coming to Steam soon, but it looks like there’s a bit of a caveat: you have to have a PSN account to play these games on Steam.
As seen on God of War Ragnarok’s page, as well as Until Dawn’s, Playstation Network account is required to play either of the games. This is surprising news, especially in the wake of the recent trouble such a requirement was for Arrowhead Game Studios’ Helldivers 2, which saw a mass exodus of players from its playerbase, one that Helldivers arguably hasn’t recovered from to this day.
Though the story here is a bit different than with what occurred with Helldivers. In Helldivers’ case, it was a game available through Steam that you could play without a PSN account, until Sony decided to put that requirement into the game out of nowhere for many players. Here, the requirement is front and center, so nobody is going to be ambushed by having to make a Playstation Network account or lose their hard earned money they spent to buy a game.
That being said, one can’t help but wonder why Sony is doing this. They know that this requirement means that a good portion of the PC playerbase just won’t purchase these games, so it’s a question of whether or not padding the PSN numbers is worth the lost sales this entails.