The censored one is probably Niger
UPDATE - special thanks to @dditty@lemm.ee for making a map showing the countries without access to PSN:
I want to live in ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️.
Looks like they censored the country Niger in their own post.
Steam censored it for them. Nobody would go and use hearts if they were to self censor. They'd use ****ing asterisks.
Niger is a known intentional misspelling of the n-word used to circumvent censorship. So this is an evolution of the Scunthorp problem.
That was immediately how I read it
Oh man, even all the small European ones are fucked. Andorra, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Monaco. Hilarious!
Wait, Luxembourg is not on this list? Wow.
I'm more surprised with the three baltic states
Sony still salty about USSR dissolution
Countries whose exchange rate likely made the game even more expensive, and you’ve taken it from them just to dox PC gamers on the PlayStation network.
This isn’t even enshittification. It’s outright fraud.
The silver lining: steam's refund policy is good enough that most of them will get their money back. Hopefully that's painful to Sony.
It launched 4 months ago. How are you assuming people who bought it and could play it are still in the 2-hour refund window?
Edit: I hear you. I hope Steam allows a special exemption refund for this issue...
The 2 hour refund window is for automated refunds, you can still make a request if you're past that - it's just going to need a human to take a look at it. I've once succesfully returned a game I've played for about 5 hours because it had game-breaking bugs and ran like crap for no reason, and it got accepted within a day without an issue.
So Helldivers owners have a chance. I'm assuming that Steam's Customer Support department is having some kind of an internal discussion right now on how to handle this case.
I'm in Finland and peering toward Estonia and wondering what the heck did they do to annoy Sony so much that you can't make a PSN account there.
My instant guess would be that Estonians are in possession of a Sony tape deck from the 1980s that still works (being a Sony product from the 1980s), and Sony is like "No! We refuse to do business there until they join the modern time planned obsolescence club."
Only playable in countries with DEMOCRACY!!! HELL YEAH!!!
Like undemocratic Republic of Estonia.
Edit: oh Latvia and Lithuanian is also on the list, has Sony taken the country list before collapse of USSR.
Wasn't Valve the one who pointed out that Russia was always pirating games not because they were inherently pirates but because the game releases had zero support for Russia lol. Hence why Valve was the first foreign developer/publisher that gained an actual foothold in the Russian market.
This is kind of like the same thing. Sony will just say something dumb like "we don't allow PSN accounts in these countries because they're full of pirates".
The second problem is absence of regional prices in other markets but Steam.
They are selling games two (!!) or so times cheaper in RU region. For example, AAA game might cost 60 dollars or 6000 rub in US but it will costs 35 or 3500 rub in russian steam.
Even though I couldn't afford games in the past and pirated them - at some point I started buying stuff just because it gives much better, hustle -free experience.
100% true. India is (or was?) also big for games just not being sold there.
Game companies shooting themselves in the foot? Never heard of it.
Isn't this illegal according to EU law? It's a common market but the Baltic states are excluded.
"Niger" is a swear according to valve?
Because it closely resembles a slur. Its one of those false positives. But the tool that replaces it likely isn't context aware.
Nigeria please that is a stupid rule
I’m not a big gamer so I’m not entirely getting this. It sounds like the issue is they want you to link your steam and PSN accounts, which people don’t want to do. And in some countries it’s even a TOS violation.
My question is, why would they have such a requirement to link the two accounts in the first place?
I don't know what a PSN account is, but I'm surprised you can get one in North Korea.
Why can't these countries get accounts? And what was the controversy?
Game is locked to PSN account system now so if you live somewhere with no PSN support, tough shit
why is one of them censored
Niger is close to a slur and is probably overwhelmingly used as a way to bypass filters as opposed to actually taking about the African country
what a funny way to racism other people. "you're just like a random country from that one place in the world"
The combined estimated total population of those countries would be roughly around 4.6 to 4.7 billion people.
Andorra
Someone must stop this cruel oppression against the ethnic group of influencers.
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