Sony isn't giving up on PSN account requirement for PC games: Company president says it's necessary so people can 'safely' play its games

pcgamer.com:

It's fair to say that Sony's insistence on requiring a PlayStation Network account for PC versions of its games is not widely popular. Don't expect Sony to back off on it anytime soon, though. Speaking in today's investors call, Sony president, chief operating officer, and chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki said PSN integration is necessary in order to ensure everyone can «safely» enjoy its games.

«We have learned a lot,» Totoki said. «The way to face the issues regarding PC, for instance, the PlayStation accounts that we have offered—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 game safely, we need to create [an] environment conducive to that, [and] of course enjoying the game freely.

»Having some restrictions—[we] may not call it a rule—but to ask the users and gamers to follow the manner and [that] balance is very important. We have to continue to seek the best way to achieve this."

The quote was translated from Japanese to English on the fly (by a human translator, to be clear) and is a little rough, but the point is clear enough: Sony wants to maintain some kind of control over its games, and the PSN requirement is seen as a way to do that. And maybe it is, but it's also tremendously unpopular with PC gamers.

The most obvious example of that is Helldivers 2, which launched without a PSN requirement because of «technical issues» and enjoyed tremendous success until May, when Sony announced that the PSN-free "grace period" was over. The blowback was furious, to the point that Sony was forced to back down, although not after first trying to power through it, and doing untold damage to the goodwill Helldivers 2 had enjoyed up to that point.

Any thought Sony might drop the idea completely went out the window very quickly, though. Just weeks after the Helldivers 2 blowup, Ghost of Tsushima's PC port was delisted on Steam in nearly 200