UPDATE: Helldivers 2 may come back to the Philippines after being removed from Steam soon as PlayStation will not move forward with the PSN account linking update.
The original article reads:
Following the controversial news that Helldivers 2 will require players to link their STEAM accounts to a PSN Account to continue playing the game, we have been able to confirm that Helldivers 2 was removed from Steam in the Philippines.
As posted by Too Much Gaming on Facebook, they noticed that Helldivers 2 can no longer be purchased from the Steam PH storefront.
The Philippines is one of many from a huge list of countries / territories where PSN Support is not available. The list of “Purchase Restricted Countries” was taken from SteamDB showing a changelog for Helldivers 2 made less than 10 hours ago as of writing this article and the list is pretty large. Of course, if you already have the game, you can still play it. We have reached out to PlayStation for a statement regarding this but we have yet to get an official response.
Community sentiment for the game has been amazingly negative ever since news of the required PSN link came out. This has led to the review bombing of the game on Steam with Helldivers 2 now with over 100,000 negative user reviews. Some even claim that they will stop playing the game until this issue has been resolved or will straight up ask for a refund. With this new development though, we can only assume that the sentiment will only get much worse. While we haven’t been able to fully confirm from our end, there have been reports that Steam is allowing refunds for the game even if you’ve already played beyond the usual 2-hour gametime limit.
While it’s mere speculation from our end, we think that there may be a chance that this will be addressed or changed in the coming days. After all, it was only recently that Gamesradar reported that Spitz, a community manager from Arrowhead Studios, stated in a Discord message that “If a better solution isn’t provided for players who are in regions without PSN coverage, I’m assured that we won’t be making the requirement mandatory for those players.”
Stay tuned for more updates as this story develops.