By Daniel Manetin

Arrowhead Studios, a small Swedish development team known for its hit cooperative action games, has recently gained attention as it’s found itself as the center of a back-and-forth debate within the gaming community. With its content growing in popularity, community support grew with players favoring their communication and updates, but the tides quickly changed when Sony, the publisher of their most recent co-op hit, announced an update that brewed controversy among players.

When games are released on multiple platforms, different restrictions and requirements can occur depending on the demands of the platform; most games release on one platform at a time for this reason. PC players are known to have the most lax requirements, especially on the well-known platform Steam, but this can conflict when partnerships are made. As the publisher of Arrowhead’s game, Sony authorized it to release both on Steam for PC and on PlayStation, allowing cross-play with PC users needing only a Steam account and PlayStation users needing, of course, a PlayStation Network (PSN) account.

However, the mutual peace broke quite quickly in May of 2024, when Sony announced that Steam players of the game would soon have to create a PSN account, limiting players’ Freedom in order to improve data compatibility between platforms. While this typically would not be a problem, PSN in particular has been known in the past for having a poor performance with security and public image. This caused an outrage that spread like a wildfire throughout Arrowhead’s community, with PC players pointing fingers and protesting the change.

Despite this, Arrowhead Studios’ response remained the same; as Ethan Hemphill [11] stated that the studio “just wants to make gamers as happy as possible… For example, for one of their biggest updates, they reduced the file size by about five times when they did not have any incentive to do that.” When Steam players flooded the game’s reviews with negative ratings, tanking its public rating in days, they stayed open to their community. “Transparency is very important,” Ethan mentioned, saying that the studio “openly stated that their hands were tied and that Sony was to blame for it,” which helped to ease the criticism; but the anger still remained.

The concerns about how the situation might affect public perception spread, as Nathan Gish [11] mentioned that Arrowhead has “had some controversy surrounding them that kind of… brings down some of the public opinion on them.” He also pointed to the same decision made by Sony as a major source of backlash, stating it happened “when they were trying to require all their Steam players [to] create the PlayStation network accounts… to actually play the games.” While the situation generally created frustration, he also mentioned that “It’s not very secure… but it wouldn’t have been that much extra work for someone to do.” Regardless of how favorable or not the situation is, though, ignoring player concerns is a crucial mistake for studios, and developers who do so “are just gonna end up failing as a studio.”

Many players, both in and outside of the community, made a point that the reaction to “review-bomb” Arrowhead’s game was extreme, even if it was intended as a protest. The peace between Arrowhead Studios and its loving community seemed to have shattered, and with the game’s biggest platform rating now listed as “Overwhelmingly Negative,” it seemed like it should have been the end for the studio. However, it was quite the opposite; the players had created such a large protest that Sony almost entirely backed out of their decision with PSN. Just a few days after the conflict began, both Sony and Arrowhead Studios announced that Steam players would not be required to link a PSN account to continue playing, restoring player Liberty as many of the area restrictions were lifted. Players of a cooperative action game cooperated together to push a company to going back on a decision, and the results even spread across other Sony-published titles on Steam.

Of course, this could be seen as a stroke of luck, but in reality, it’s much more centered around a game studio that chose to listen to their community and their concerns. Arrowhead ended up hardly suffering in the process, as Steam players deleted their negative reviews as fast as they were written, and the players had the first sense of Arrowhead’s dedication to making their players happy; an idea that, thankfully, hasn’t yet left their motives.

With the video game market seeing no shortage of new titles, it’s absolutely crucial for studios to get a sense of what their players actually want, and not just what they think they want. Video game players have no shortage of motivation when it comes to voicing their opinions, and they don’t voice them to complain; they voice them in protest to improve the games they enjoy playing. Fans and community are the roots of modern creative media, and turning them against their favorites is a quick way to collapse any studio. This is and will remain true for the video game market; after all, players will only want to play that which they enjoy experiencing, and studios can only guarantee their Prosperity by accommodating those whom they rely on.

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