No. I fundamentally disagree with the idea of changing the TOS after sale. That’s some grade A bullshit, and if we had decent consumer protection laws doing that would be illegal without an opportunity for a full refund. It blows my mind how many people seem to be okay with this in general. It’s not the Sony account that’s the issue for me, it’s Sony changing the terms when it clearly was not a requirement at release. Sony isn’t the only one guilty of this, but they are the most recent example.
The balance changes are fine. There's a lot to legitimately criticize here, why bring that up? Playing the game in its own right is amazing fun, in fact, the game being so good is why all of these surrounding problems hurt that much more.
In Australia, we'd call it the Bradbury strategy, named after a speed skater who won a gold medal when the 4 or so skaters in front of him fell over on the final lap. Keep doing your thing and wait for everyone else to fuck up.
And even if we accept that it was always intended to be PSN-only and they decided to launch before PSN integration was done, the fact that multiplayer is entirely dependent on them providing a service is troubling. That's how we lose games.
I can still launch Rainbow Six 3 and play multiplayer with my friends because it has the server built in and allows direct connect via IP address. You can't do that with a live service game; once the official servers are down the game becomes (partially or completely) lost media.
Might not end up making Sony any money, but I'm sure an executive is getting a well-deserved bonus off the back of that nice-looking bump in PSN account numbers.
It is free. But they can gather data, get you into their ecosystem, hopefully making it more likely you buy a playstation or other playstation published games. Eventually maybe they want to have cross progress between pc and playstation or have playstation achievements on pc, maybe their own steam like client.
Ultimately these countries are probably responsible for less than 5% of their total sales. Most of them are either tiny or poor or both. It does have countries like Egypt, Albania, Serbia, Morocco and Algeria but most of the banned countries are irrelevant in terms of sales.
It's clear Sony is a garbage company since at least the 2011 hack in how they conduct themselves. How they have treated so many of their studios terribly. Late implementation of 2FA. Treating people like shit with customer service if you were hacked, or need repairs. Can't implement basic features with each new console Gen. Can't be bothered to support their own goddamned handheld. On and on.
Because whether it is a country or not the researchers working there need an outlet. It's either games or kill each other. And the PSN isn't available.