There's a bit of a feud going on at the moment between PC players who don't want to sign into PSN accounts on top of their Steam accounts and Sony, a megacorporation that almost certainly will not budge on the issue. The latest move to get rid of PSN was from a modder who tried to make it possible to circumvent the sign-in progress in God of War: Ragnarök's PC port, but the workaround has now been taken offline.
"We've noticed that the popular PSN-bypass mod for God of War: Ragnarök has been removed from our site by the author, and so we've reached out to find out why," Nexus Mods said in a tweet on Thursday. In a reply, Nexus Mods later confirmed that the modder, known as iArtoriasUA, decided to remove the mod as it got too much traction, and they didn't want to get into hot water with Sony.
"That was my personal decision because the mod has got too much attention (even IGN and PC Gamer) wrote an article about it," iArtoriasUA told Nexus Mods. "Thus, I thought that it would be better to remove it from the public to avoid any potential threats from the Sony side (even though the project never modified anything in memory related to Sony products, but better safe than sorry). I am sorry that it happened, but I cannot really put myself at risk since it was unclear. Hopefully, you understand. Peace!"
But this is the internet, so nothing's ever truly gone. Even though iArtoriasUA took the mod down, a few replicas are popping back up on Nexus Mods. Bypass PSN Login — No PSSDK Restored was uploaded yesterday, shortly after the original was taken down. "Re-upload of the deleted mod," an anonymous modder says in the description. "I am NOT the original author."
Some players took to reviewing bombing the new God of War: Ragnarök PC port on Steam because of frustration surrounding the PSN requirements; it got down to a mixed rating at one point. But now things seem like they are evening out, as it's currently sitting at mostly positive. "Sony is stupid to force players to be online for a singleplayer game," one positive review reads. "But Santa Monica Studio made one incredible game! A must play!"
Regardless of whether or not the current PSN bypass mod will stay up or if there'll be more gracing Nexus Mods' pages, it's highly likely that Sony will carry on requiring its PC ports to be compatible with PSN. So far, the only game that the studio has budged on even a little bit was Helldivers 2 after it got badly review-bombed by some disgruntled players. But since then, Ghost of Tsushima has also required a PSN account, so PC players should probably get used to signing into Sony's service if they want to play future PlayStation's PC ports—or perhaps wait to see if they get bypass mods like Ragnarök's.
