I don’t have this opinion lightly.
Arrowhead executives knew for 6 months before launch that this would be a mandatory PSN required situation. That happens when you take a deal with the devil and you take Sony’s money.
By removing that requirement for 3 months at launch, they created a situation where many hundreds of thousands if not millions of players purchased a game they can no longer play at the end of this month. I don’t blame them, they did what they thought they needed to do, and a very scrappy startup way, to get things working. But it was a failure of executive leadership to put them in a position where they’ve locked their own players out of the game, and their own money, and their progress.
I 100% believe this is a failure of the Arrowhead executive leadership. Their decisions have created this public outcry, and Sony is ostensibly taking the blame, because they’re enforcing their contractual terms.
I predict Sony will back down, and allow an exception, at least for players who’ve already purchased the game in PSN blocked regions. But they’re only going to do that to prevent themselves from getting dragged into regulatory quagmires around the globe.
From an executive position the Arrowhead CEO has completely failed, he put his financiers in a position where they are the public bad guys, and then when the heat turned up, the organization as a whole redirected the blame to the publisher, when they should have been the ones at fault. One might say this was a 4D chess move, to get their game free of the PlayStation Network requirements, but even if that’s what falls out in the end, other executives looking at this performance will not appreciate it. Especially when it comes to them negotiating another project.
I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this - it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn’t talk about it enough.
We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.
I can see where you’re coming from but you have to understand:
- arrowhead never wanted Sony integration. Publishers always do this and force devs to add services to games that don’t need it.
- arrowhead had to disable it for people to be able to play the game due to the server issues.
- arrowhead is not responsible for the distribution of the game. Sony handles the publishing, including which regions the game is available in. Arrowhead didn’t choose to sell the game in regions without PSN support.
- the developers were and still are under immense pressure for something nobody wanted but Sony execs. The attitude and franticness at the studio would have been intense and confusing. I know this because I work in a game studio, that has a publisher, and I’ve had to implement this kind of stuff in our games and I can guarantee that most of the choices and sensibility are well out of the studio’s control.