Sony has once again quietly region-locked another PC game even though it currently doesn’t require a PSN account.
As detailed at SteamDB and spotted by the eagle-eyed folks at ResetEra, Horizon Forbidden West is the latest game to be unceremoniously locked down, ten full months after it debuted on Valve’s digital PC platform, restricting purchase in dozens of places like Albania, Latvia, and Bangladesh.
Whilst some of the restrictions are likely due to political sanctions – North Korea, for instance – other territories with regional pricing may have been locked down due to local exchange rates that make games disproportionately cheaper when compared to US or European prices.
“Sony is so embarrassingly bad at this,” said one unhappy player. “Frankly they don’t even deserve PC customers if they’re going to keep pulling these kinds of stunts.
“I know Steam (the storefront) will never bother to push back on them because they’re a libertarian hellhole run by a laissez-faire asshole, but the userbase should just flat-out reject future PlayStation games if this is the way Sony wants to act.”
“It’s all about active PSN users in the quarterly report,” suggested another, although – as others point out – PSN isn’t technically required for Horizon Forbidden West as it is for games like The Last of Us Part 2 and Helldivers 2.
Earlier this week, we learned an MMO based on Sony’s Horizon IP had reportedly been cancelled.
Other than job listings shared in 2023 which appeared to confirm the Horizon MMO was in development with the codename Project Skyline (with the initial codename being Project H), little else was known about the project… and now, it appears the MMO has been cancelled before it was even officially announced.