Sony’s game publishing arm has done a 180-degree turn on a controversial policy of requiring PC players to sign in with PlayStation accounts for some games, according to a blog post by the company.
Sony hasn’t lost hope that players will still go ahead and use a PlayStation account, though, as it’s tying several benefits to signing in.
The change is a major about-face for a handful of single-player titles after Sony faced considerable backlash from many angry PC players about the PlayStation account requirement to play the games.
I really hope other publishers will be inspired. Just yesterday I had an hour to kill on a train ride, and wanted to play some Mass Effect on my SteamDeck. It took 25 minutes just to get started, because EA updated their required launcher, which couldn’t be bypassed because it required Internet connection, and then forced the update (which of course bugged out, and had to be redone thrice). A 25 minute boot time for something that doesn’t affect the game the slightest is a terrible user experience.
Valve should use it’s position on the market for something good and straight up not allow single player games to use external launchers. I’m buying the game on Steam so I just want to play, not make yet another 3rd party account and then pray the 3rd party launcher will work fine on Linux.