'Operation Clean-up' begins for Helldivers 2 players as Sony's PSN plans lie in rubble, with over 70,000 (and counting) positive reviews landing on Steam

pcgamer.com:

Helldivers 2 players completed what I can only describe as their first real-life Major Order over the weekend. After Sony revealed that it would be going ahead with its initial plans to require the monstrously popular co-op shooter's Steam players to link themselves to a PSN account, an uproar of furious divers retaliated with military coordination.

The major thorn for most players? The requirement would shut out around 177 countries unable to make a PSN account under this returning rule of law. Over 200 thousand negative reviews later, Sony backed down. Cue the fist-bumps, the chest-bumps, and the hoo-rahs. It's a vindication of one certain community manager's suggestion to make their upset known via a 500kg review bomb—one that 'almost, but not quite' had them fired. 

But when you drop a bomb, you're left with rubble. While I'm sure the many screengrabs of red lines circulating the internet—threatening one of Sony's biggest PC wins ever—absolutely contributed to the reversal, they also left a red mark on the game's review score. 

However at the time of writing, its «Overall» review score is now Mostly Positive, while its «Overwhelming Negative» recent review score has climbed back up to «Mixed». That's because of an initiative the community's calling «Operation Clean-up»—with over 70,000 of divers flipping their negative reviews back to positive so far.

It's a fun twist in the narrative, for the better—in Helldivers 2, the soldiers of Super Earth glass entire planets willy-nilly, not caring about either the local ecology or the destruction left in their wake. Here, players are setting to work repairing some of the damage they did to the game's reputation.

As for why they feel the need to do clean-up work, that's simple—while Arrowhead Games certainly isn't blameless, having had plenty of opportunity to communicate a change it knew was coming for months, it also doesn't really have control over how its game is sold. It's said it takes two to tango, but this whole