Helldivers 2 and PSN Drama: Steam Reviews Positive, CM Fired
A few days ago, players brought down the game’s ratings on Steam. We’ll tell you how the messy Helldivers 2 and PSN drama ended.
As we previously reported, fans of Helldivers 2 didn’t accept the mandatory account linking to PSN. One form of protest was writing negative reviews of Helldivers 2 on Steam. It had the greatest impact — and, of course, consequences.
Helldivers 2 Recovery after Review Bombing on Steam
After Sony agreed with the players and decided to retreat the mandatory signing up in PSN, satisfied Helldivers decided to return their positive reviews. Fans organized the “Operation Cleanup” in the Helldivers 2 Major Order style.
Players are massively returning positive game reviews to Steam or writing new ones. From May 3 to May 9, Helldivers 2 players have left over 400,000 reviews on Steam, more than 200,000 of which are negative.
Helldivers 2 Discord Community Manager’s Story
However, not everyone has a happy ending in this story. Spitz, one of Arrowhead’s Community Managers, supported angry fans on the official Helldivers 2 Discord server. He urged players to continue to review bombing on Steam to influence Sony’s decision regarding the mandatory PSN account.
Afterward, Spitz disappeared and returned, saying he had almost been fired.
“Turns out that telling people to review-bomb and refund a game isn’t a popular decision with the publisher. But I’m still here, and I’m glad that we all made a difference.”
— Spitz, Arrowhead Community Manager
However, after a couple of days, users of the official Helldivers 2 Discord server noticed that Spitz was no longer on the list of Community Managers, and all mentions of him had been erased. After this, fans decided to once again show the power of democracy and created a petition on Change.org demanding to re-hire Spitz and appoint him as an honorary general in the game lore.
“SPITZ, the outstanding community manager whose suggestion to continue the review-bombing in order to provide additional leverage with Sony, was the reason many Helldivers felt optimistic about returning to the game — and is most likely the reason many of us didn’t attempt a refund. On 05/07/2024, at or about 11:45 PST, the Helldivers discord discovered that Community Manager Spitz had been relieved of his position, and all traces of his previously held post deleted or otherwise removed from the discord.”
— Elcorvo Loco, Change.org
Conclusions
It seems that from this story we can certainly conclude that the Helldivers 2 community is very active and actually loves democracy. However, Helldivers 2 has still not been returned to Steam in 177 regions without PSN.
What do you think about this? Have you participated in review bombing and then “cleaning up” on Steam?
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