Sony Keeps Requiring PSN Account For Offline Games, Modders Mod It Out
There’s that well known adage that if you want to teach a child not to touch a hot stove, just let them touch it once and that will be all the teaching needed to have them never do so again. Whoever came up with that saying obviously has never met my children, for starters. And it appears that Sony just can’t help but continue to touch the stove.
Earlier this year we talked about Helldivers 2, a Sony title that went cross-platform. That part is all well and good. Less good was that well after the game became a hit, the developers announced that the game would be patched to require that anyone playing on their PC also sign up for a PlayStation Network account, or else the game would be unplayable. While the patch came from the developer, it was done so as a planned requirement by Sony. And it was Sony that eventually rescinded that requirement after the backlash over it was extensive.
Which makes it all the more strange that Sony then decided to do the PSN requirement thing again, this time for the PC port of God of War Ragnarok. This resulted in all kinds of backlash again over the requirement, as this is a single player offline game that required an online connection communicating with a PSN account or the game wouldn’t run. In other words: a game that has no online component and is a standalone PC port of a game was saddled with online and PSN requirements that aren’t needed and that nobody but Sony wanted.
Fortunately, an enterprising modder out there has already created a mod that removes the requirements.
The NoPSSDK mod, hosted on NexusMods, promises to “fully strip the PlayStation PC SDK runtime requirement for God of War Ragnarok.” The open source mod makes use of a simple Microsoft Detours library to get around the game’s calls to the PlayStation Network API without “touch[ing] or modify[ing] any original game code.”
The mod, which has already seen one update related to simulating offline mode, has been downloaded just under 2,000 times as of this writing. “I will try to maintain the tool even if something changes, but hopefully nothing crucial happens,” mod author iArtorias wrote in a NexusMods post.
If you’re about to go click on those links and get the mod yourself, don’t bother. The creator of the mod has already pulled it down out of fear of reprisal from Sony. And I don’t blame them. My first thought when I started looking into all of this was to wonder whether Sony would DMCA the mod over anti-circumvention concerns. It appears that it didn’t have to. Merely the fear it might do so was enough to get the mod creator to do the takedown themselves.
t was my personal decision to remove the mod since it has become way too popular and people started promoting it on Steam forums as well thus generating tons of attention.
“I just wanted to avoid the possible threats from the Sony side, even though the code has never touched any of their products in memory. You never know and it’s really a grey area to me.”
So, let’s summarize. While Sony was very upfront on the game’s store page that a PSN and internet connection would be required to run the game, the fact of the matter is that nobody except Sony wanted any of that. Then a modder came along that made the game operate in a way that the public actually did want, likely making that game more attractive for purchase to more people. Then that modder voluntarily took the thing that made people happy down out of fear of reprisal from the same Sony that was pissing people off.
Everything is bad about this. Sony’s anti-consumer behavior is bad. The chilling effect that previous enforcement has had on the modding community is bad. And the fact that buyers of this game are saddled with these requirements they don’t want is bad. And now the press’ coverage of this is bad for Sony.
Is having people get PSN accounts really beneficial enough to Sony to make up for this ongoing giant headache?