The Helldivers 2 debacle has reached new hellish lows as the year's best-selling game is now unavailable on Steam in over 170 countries. 

Earlier this week, publisher Sony announced that all Helldivers 2 PC players would soon need to link to an active PlayStation Network account or lose access to the game, a mandate that was once a simple option at launch and has since led to thousands of negative user reviews hitting the once widely popular shooter. 

A Helldivers 2 community manager just yesterday assured that people in countries without PSN coverage could continue playing the game and wouldn't be blocked. But now, Helldivers 2 has been pulled from more than 170 territories lacking PSN coverage, according to listings from Steam Database. While some global players won't be able to join the fight and buy the game, it's unclear if existing Helldivers 2 owners will be able to continue playing if they live in unsupported regions.  

Either way, that's a massive blow to Helldivers 2 - a game that became one of Sony's all-time best-sellers thanks to the PC version - and it raises questions about why the game was available in those territories to begin with, especially if the PSN mandate was always planned, as Sony said in its announcement note.

Ignoring its own policies, Steam stewards Valve have also reportedly been issuing refunds to several long-time Helldivers that have logged into Super Earth space for more than 100 hours. Steam policy normally doesn't allow for refunds if a player exceeds two hours in-game, but since the PSN requirement came months after launch, Valve (rightly) seems to be making an exception. 

A Helldivers 2 developer recently reiterated that the PSN change came from Sony, not the talented team at Arrowhead Studios, so issuing refunds is probably the most effective route to getting a message across, as opposed to shouting toxicity at devs. Sony also announced the mandate on a Friday, and thus, has yet to officially respond to the backlash that has escalated pretty wildly in just a few days.

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Even as members of Helldivers studio Arrowhead Games say that discussions around Sony's controversial PlayStation Network sign in requirement for Helldivers 2 on PC are still ongoing, it looks like the publisher is doubling down on the move, halting sales of the game in countries where it doesn't offer the service.

In theory, Helldivers 2 was always supposed to require players to sign into the PlayStation Network in game, but this was not required at launch due to network infrastructure limitations (remember Helldivers 2's early server woes?). Two days ago, Sony announced that it would begin enforcing that requirement in a month-long rollout. 

While merely an (admittedly odious) inconvenience for most players, PC users in countries not covered by PSN might be locked out of the game entirely. This simple fact seems to have taken even Sony by surprise, with an FAQ from the publisher in the Helldivers 2 Discord seeming to direct players to set their PSN account to a country other than the one in which they live, a violation of Sony's terms of service. Speaking to the game's rioting community yesterday, Helldivers 2 community manager Spitz framed addressing this oversight as the developer's number one priority in discussions with Sony about the requirement.

As shared by SteamDB early this morning, Helldivers 2 has been removed from sale on Steam in 177 countries and territories. Japan seems to be on the list as an outlier, with the game being replaced by a different version in the country, seemingly due to localization reasons. The rest, though, are all regions not eligible for PSN access, with this move seemingly in preparation for the worst-case scenario of a rollout where players who can't sign up for the PlayStation Network are simply out of luck.

The Steam review riot against the move continues unabated, with over 211 thousand negative recent reviews, bringing the former people's champion of 2024 to overall "Mixed" status on the platform. Almost 130 thousand of those new negative reviews were in the past day alone⁠—when I last checked in on Helldivers 2 yesterday, we were sitting at 84 thousand. Eurogamer also reports that some players are even receiving refunds from Steam despite vastly exceeding the platform's usual 2-hour window.

And Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead might just be one of the biggest victims of the situation, having its trend setting, GOTY shortlist labor of love get proverbially drawn and quartered due to myopic Sony decision making. "We are talking solutions with Sony, especially in non-PSN countries," Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt wrote on Twitter earlier today. "Your voice has been heard, and I am doing everything I can to speak for the community⁠—but I don't have the final say."

Sony has been holding its hand to a hot stove for about three days now, all in the name of capturing new emails and users into its PSN ecosystem, and while I'm just a simple country games journalist, the smart move would probably be to stop right about now. What's more, not making this change would take less effort: just keep Helldivers 2 running as it has for the past four months.

Whether Sony eventually realizes this or not, it may already be too late. Similar to how Tarkov's $250 mode controversy was allowed to burn uncontrolled for six days, potentially permanently souring its community and driving them to alternatives like Grey Zone Warfare, Sony and Helldivers 2 have sustained calamitous reputational damage over this sign in debacle. The thing is, there's just nothing out there quite like Helldivers 2, which makes the prospect of its demise or diminishing all the sadder.