If any country was allowed to have a PS account, would this controversy subside?

I cant imagine caring enough other than the valid point it screws over people who bought the game and live in a country with no psn

Doubt it. It'd just be "PSN bad," but Sony would stay committed to the update.

In their defense, Sony's cyber security is ass for how much personal information they store.

They still did the very terrible move of proofing everyone how good Helldivers 2 works without linking at all for months, but then demanding it.

Like, if EA does Battlefield 9001, and the game needs an EA Account from day 1 (as usual), because they never implemented any kind of Steam account management / API at all, then it still sucks that I need an EA account after buying the game on Steam, but I can still easily say "nope", and the developers can still say "well, you need an EA account, because we don't want to handle two different kind of accounts".

For Helldivers 2, we know that their handling of Steam accounts worked perfectly. Linking accounts was never needed at all, and I was still able to add friends and play with everyone, even cross-play to Ps5 players.

Their argument of "but we would have to ask Valve to ban people" sounds fishy too, when they have all my account and login data and can just block me within the login screen.

Phanir posted...

In their defense, Sony's cyber security is ass for how much personal information they store.

This is probably the only other portion of this problem that would have gotten people up in arms. And it still would have been legitimate, Sonys security is horrendously bad as you noted. Even worse is that part of Sonys argument for requiring PSN accounts is that its for security purposes, and theyre rightfully getting reamed for that. Its making it even more obvious that theyre trying to force this issue for something like data harvesting, not out of any legitimate requirement.