Helldivers 2 Community Manager 'Spitz' is seemingly no longer with Arrowhead Game Studios following outings he did over the now-canceled mandatory PSN account linking update.
As covered last week, Helldivers 2 was planned to receive an update that would require PC players to create and link a PSN account to the game in order to keep playing. Although Sony and Arrowhead already announced that this would happen earlier this year, this didn't sit too well with the PC community. Thousands of negative reviews followed, and Valve issued refunds - even for those who played the game for more than two hours. To spice things up, Helldivers 2 was also made unlivable to purchase via Steam for non-PSN countries. Eventually, Sony seemingly caved and canceled the planned mandatory PSN account-linking update.
As it turns out, however, things haven't gone so well for former Community Manager 'Spitz', who initially was quite vocal on the matter, pretty much saying that people shouldn't make such a big deal of the PSN account linking. In addition, 'Spitz' encouraged players to leave negative Steam reviews. "It’s not like this is the first or even the fourteenth mainstream game to require a third-party account that takes a couple minutes to create, but if it’s a dealbreaker to have to take 120 seconds out of your day to enter an email and password and then forget about it, change your Steam review and make your displeasure known on a platform where it matters", 'Spitz' initially wrote on Discord before adding, “Players making their displeasure known through reviews, refunds etc. gives us more pull in the discussions with Sony. They don’t read our Discord. It hurts to see the game’s popularity suffer in ratings, but discussions are ongoing and our team is on the side of the players in this fight. It’s unrealistic to expect people to make PSN accounts in different regions to get past the account linking requirement. We’re aware of that. Discussions are ongoing.”
Fast forward a couple of days, and on the same Discord, 'Spitz' has now posted that he's no longer working at Arrowhead. "Generally it's not a good idea to tell people to refund and leave negative reviews when you're a community manager. TIL," the former Community Manager wrote on Discord. "I appreciate all the support and I appreciate even more that everyone can play the game again without restrictions. I knew I was taking a risk with what I said about refunding and changing reviews. I stand by it. It was my job to represent the community, that's what I did."
He also said, "I wanted to work for Arrowhead because they're my all-time favorite studio. I got that chance. I'm thankful for that opportunity. I'd happily continue working for them if I had the choice, but that isn't up to me or anyone else in here. I can walk away happy and I don't want anyone causing trouble on my behalf, especially not to people I still have a lot of care and respect for."
In his defense, 'Spitz' earlier acknowledged that he wasn't aware that there are numerous countries that don't have the ability to make a PSN account. "Yeah, I was completely unaware how many countries didn't have the ability to make a PSN account when I made that statement, Spitz wrote earlier. "I deeply regret implying that it was so easy for everyone to just sign up and not have to worry about it. It's absolutely not our intention to force people to break Sony ToS or just not to play the game if they're in a restricted region. There needs to be a better solution."
Arrowhead hasn't officially commented on the situation, but going by Spitz' wording, it appears that he hasn't left the studio voluntarily.
Helldivers 2 is available worldwide now for PC and PS5.
About the author: Passionate gamer since the NES era and begun writing about games in 2014. Joined Wccftech gaming section in 2015. Has owned every console since then. Can never make up his mind on what console to play. Weird sense of humor but can be funny from time to time.
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