Let me first say, I have really enjoyed and will continue to enjoy Helldivers 2. I am not a game's journalist, but I have enjoyed the fake drama from the industry almost as much as I have enjoyed playing the game itself.

While I would love to tell you all the reasons I love this game, in and of itself, Helldivers 2 does not have much to do with Resalient....except for the change in TOS to require a PSN account.

There is a lot about this specific change that everyone should be watching.

While Sony will claim that the provision was always in the TOS (and serious, who reads those?), the issue for consumers is that unless this provision was front and center at the register requiring a customer to acknowledge it prior to purchase, it was a bad move for Sony.

A number of companies have been changing their TOS and unilaterally demanding consumers accept the change or else lose access to something they have been enjoying.

Roku recently forced an illegal arbitration agreement on users (and sad for them, the provision makes them more vulnerable to lawsuit rather than less.)

In Roku's case, the forced change in TOS is because they know they had been caught doing something that could land them in civil court. (Roku Data Breach) Under the circumstances, Roku's change is to attack its consumers proactively before the consumers attempt to find fault with Roku for an injury caused by Roku. Good luck to average consumer proving tort from a data breach...

However, this article isn't about Roku's unethical behavior but about Sony's really bad move.

Immediately following the change, the Steam Helldivers 2 page was hit with over 200,000 negative posts for a game that was sitting closer to 90% user recommended the week before. Again, for anyone curious, I have thoroughly enjoyed this game and recommend it on PlayStation with a microphone. (Have no fear, no one would sponsor a post like this.)

Why might Sony have made this change?

My suspicion is that Sony is not stupid. The most likely case is that the requirement for the PSN account for one of their most popular games was a move to bolster numbers and investor confidence by showing the strength of their brand and people directly tied to PlayStation (rather than inference of indirect link through Steam.)

A few years ago, the bank JP Morgan Chase was scammed out of $175,000,000. While the scam likely was a case of money laundering between connected families, the official justification was the bank had believed based on the number of "active" users in the database that it was buying access to millions of potential new debtors...I mean customers.

One has only to do a brief search to see that a company's valuation can skyrocket based on the perception of active users. Look at the supposed net worth of DJT from "Truth Social." The perception of it's value is based on active users and the ability to influence them easily for less than it would take to advertise separately to an equal size audience through multiple vectors. (Isn't advertising and social engineering interesting?) Reddit's perceived value is the same situation, however, as Elon Musk discovered, most of the users online are either bots or come from overseas troll farms.

So, in the best case, Sony's poor decision was to influence perception of its brand to shareholders in a legal and "honest" way to demonstrate active accounts and to use a massively popular title to get near free pressure from the gaming community.

Although unlikely, I love a good conspiracy theory, and the less flattering narrative is that Sony was pressured to kill it's golden goose because it was proving that a small studio could outcompete AAA game studios. It was fairly common to hear gamers online say that Helldivers 2 was what "Halo Infinite" could have been.

How does this relate to Resalient?

I would love to say "we have a universal login system." For me, the importance is to remind myself that as a consumer, I hate the bait and switch. My personal philosophy on development is that additive features may add different interactions. If someone later has legal access to a v1.0 of this application, I would need to find something worth adding to a v2.0 that adds benefit.

In Sony's case, imagine how easily they might have earned those PSN accounts from the Steam community if they had either offered in-game currency or rewards for everyone who signs up.

But what do I know? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯