A variety of sources are reporting and confirming that the PC release of Ghosts of Tsushima: Director's Cut is being pulled from Steam, but more specifically in non-PSN countries. Earlier, developer Sucker Puck confirmed that a PSN account would be needed to access the game's co-op and multiplayer features, but playing the single player campaign would not require a PSN account. After Sony walked back linking the ability to play Helldivers II to a PSN account on PC, Ghosts of Tsushima became delisted in all countries that do not have PSN support as the game draws near its May 16th release date. It still remains unclear if Steam, Sony, or developers Sucker Punch have elected to pull the game from non-PSN regions. It could be that creating a workaround for the PSN requirement in select countries and regions presented too much of a technical hurdle, but we simply don't know. As it has been mentioned elsewhere, an alternate solution seems to have been to make the multiplayer and co-op features DLC that's only downloadable in countries where PSN is supported.

All of this news comes shortly after the Helldivers II PC-PSN debacle. However, there's a slight update on that situation after Sony decided to waive its PSN requirement for PC Helldivers II players. Helldivers II is no longer purchasable in Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. All three are prominent EU countries that do not have PSN support.

With Sony's PC efforts being a mixed bag in general, do you think this is the future when it comes to how they release their bigger games outside of the PS5 ecosystem?

With this being two high-profile releases in quick succession, it certainly does seem to be the future. At least the PSN requirement for Ghosts is only for the online functionality. I haven't played the game myself, so I'm not sure how significant that is, but I've never been much for multiplayers in those types of games.

I guess it makes sense for Sony to try to get more people into their ecosystem. Still, can't say I'm in love with this development, and it especially sucks for people in all those countries that now can't buy this game. As you say, it seems they could still offer the single-player parts to non-PSN countries, yet they're not doing that. One wonders what the rough percentage of prospective sales would be for the delisted countries; maybe it's so small that Sony doesn't see it as worth the hassle.

I'd hope the countries Helldivers 2 was withdrawn from had no owners, I don't believe Sony will sell games outside the PSN regions.

I think that Sony should drop the PSN requirement at least for those countries, or expand access.

That being said, what's truly baffling here is that they apparently didn't plan for this.

THEY BUILT THEIR PC PLAN WITHOUT NOTICING THAT IT WOULDN'T WORK IN 170 COUNTRIES!

This isn't like "oh actually we can't launch this game in a couple small territories because it would need to be censored" this is "hey you know the majority of the countries in the world? They don't have a required service to play this. Is that something we should have thought through ahead of time?"

Yes. Yes it is.

Yeah, we knew Sony was going to go about this whole Helldivers 2 thing in a bitter way after what happened. Instead of the big time guys doing the right thing, they find ways to be petty and screw people another way. And like Gertmann said, they eventually are still going to force a PSN requirement in the future, they are just looking for a more clever way to do it.

I was pretty interested in all this, so I decided to see if I could go and find some numbers that would help me understand it better.

Unfortunately sales data per country is just not a thing that's publicly available. The best I could do was locate this list of Steam users by country. Number of users isn't a perfect metric to understand revenue percentages, but it's the best we've got.

I stuck all of this in a spreadsheet and then went about highlighting the PSN countries to separate them out using this list (the same site has a corresponding list of non-PSN countries). Note that the numbers don't fully jive here. This site lists 70 PSN countries and 121 non-PSN countries, for a total of 191 Steam countries overall, whereas the site where I got the user numbers shows 226 countries. And all the articles are saying it was 170 countries in which one can no longer buy Helldivers 2 or Ghost of Tsushima, and yet when I separated out the PSN countries I was left with only 156 non-PSN. I'm too lazy to compare it against the SteamDB change list, but suffice it to say that the data I found isn't all complete.

With that being understood, here's the top-line summary I came up with:

• There are a total of 97.25 million Steam users worldwide.
• 86.39 million users are in the 70 countries with PSN, or 88.8% of all Steam users. The average number of Steam users for PSN countries is 1.23 million.
• 10.85 million users are in the 156 countries without PSN, or 11.2% of all Steam users. The average number of Steam users for non-PSN countries is 70,000.
• This means that, on average, countries with PSN have about 17.5x the number of Steam users as non-PSN countries.
• The country with the most Steam users that does not have PSN (by far) is the Philippines with 2.1 million. Runners-up are Vietnam, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, each with between 550k and 600k Steam users.
• The four countries with the least Steam users that do have PSN are Nicaragua, Malta, Bahrain, and Oman, each with between 20k and 27k Steam users.

So there's the data, imperfect as it may be. Make of it what you will. As I noted at the outset, number of users is hardly a perfect metric for revenue, as I'd expect that on average the PSN countries are wealthier and hence spend more money per user on games, so the 11.2% number is probably still high compared to actual revenue share.

I was quite flabbergasted to learn that there are EU countries where PSN is not available. Is that even legal under EU laws? I suspect that at least these countries will be soon fixed by Sony as there's no logical reason to exclude them. It's probably just been a blind spot for Sony that hasn't been worth the trouble before, but now they have to address it. You can easily buy a PS5 and any game you want in every decent retailer in Estonia so it hasn't been a problem for those customers, as my understanding is that they can just create an account into some other country and there is nothing that Sony does to prevent that. But it's not a good system and especially if you are expected to spend money in that ecosystem you have to consider that there is a non-zero chance that your account could get banned because of that, even if right now it would be hard to see Sony's motivation for doing that.

Some of the other countries on that list are less surprising and likely quite commonly blacklisted by other big companies too. As for Sony stopping the sales in those countries, it's the right thing to do if they're not going to support those countries. Can't have it both ways.

@apewins: You can't have it both ways but what's wild is that apparently nobody actually thought this through prior to the games being listed. This is basic stuff and Sony is a multi billion dollar corporation.

I'd guess that some of the EU non entry has to do with local regulations, language, and size of the market. Some of those countries are so small it may not be worth the hassle to set up whatever infrastructure you need to run there.

You can buy a PS5 in places like Estonia and setup an account from another region, its probably a language & payment vs expense issue, impacting a small number of people. It is wild though they didn't see this coming.

@bigsocrates: They're small markets but not that small. Games and software obviously don't need to be translated so if something is needed regulation-wise it's probably just a few legal documents that any law firm could create for a few thousand Euros and they'd make that back in a few months at most. I believe that there's been an unspoken arrangement where these customers just create an account elsewhere and Soy doesn't ask any questions, and small markets are just used to it.

It's not that hard to believe that Sony would have gotten away with it and Steam would have happily sold their game in those markets. But they made the mistake of upsetting the gaming community, which led to that community picking up dirt on Sony, and this is what they found. This doesn't impact them and I don't believe that they are genuinely trying to fight for the little guy. They're mad at Sony for unrelated reasons and they're using what weapons they have available. I'm not saying they're wrong to do that, it's likely that a positive change will come out of this, but I absolutely believe that if Sony had done a few small things differently, nobody would be talking about this.

@apewins: Only Steam has real worldwide support and even then it has limits, but everyone else works the same way.

I believe that there's been an unspoken arrangement where these customers just create an account elsewhere and Soy doesn't ask any questions, and small markets are just used to it.

The Xbox network is available in 42 countries, PlayStation network 70.

just got my switch today and checked the nintendo eShop. surprised to see that it is not available in our country, can I access it or is there no other way?

Xbox not available in my country

Up to 55% of European countries are not officially supported

honestly i didn't find this surprising. it truly sucks for those who don't have access due to a lack of PSN- but Sony isn't porting games because it's the right thing to do- they're doing it because there are specific business motivations. expanding and capturing data via PSN is clearly very high priority- so where ever that effort is currently blocked, i wouldn't expect their ports to be available (officially).

i don't know what's going on with those countries that don't have PSN (whether it's local tax, currency, government or ROI issues)- but businesses tend to go where there's money to be made, and avoid those where (in their perception) it isn't worth the effort. it kinda reminds me of efforts to expand broadband in the USA- there are just some regions that will never get broadband if it's left to business to figure it out, because they'll never get a return that (in their eyes) is worth it.

hopefully some of this heat they're catching motivates Sony to reevaluate their PSN availability and expand where possible- but i don't think we live in a universe where a large corporation expands into a new market without wanting to 'own' their users.

It is such a shame for Samurai fans on PC to miss out on this Action-Adventure game, well not everyone (Regardless of their video game platform) would be interested in playing games online, so I don't see a point for this single-player mode-focused game to be delisted from PC digital stores like Steam, Epic Games, etc.

@gtxforza: I guess Sony just doesn't see the relatively small amount of additional sales as worthwhile for the hassle of breaking out the online components into a separate thing?