This keeps coming up, and it is wild because it proves the Helldivers 2 saga wasn't a fluke. Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls — yes, another Sony/Arc System collaboration — has been blocked in over 105 countries on Steam alone. That means people playing this already in Brazil (Sao Paulo news outlets have reported on it), Canada, Germany, Japan, the UK, and Australia cannot even download it because of PlayStation Network login requirements. The number is so massive that Sony actually had to publish through multiple regional distributors for a single global launch — Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe handles some regions, while others are split between local partners.
Worse still, the game has been excluded from Russia and Belarus via Epic Games Store entirely as well, and the South Korean release path is tangled in its own web of Sony's publishing restrictions that're messying up the rollout there too. Each of these is a separate gate keeping players out by design. The irony is that this was predicted by the community months ago — after Helldivers 2 launched with nearly identical language about crossplay requiring PSN login, people already knew Sony would repeat it and they called it out in every pre-launch thread. It's not an accident; it's a strategy that gets deployed almost as soon as new multiplatform releases are announced, and it keeps getting worse instead of better.
I am honestly so tired of this cycle — first Helldivers 2 with sixty-eight countries locked out, now Tokon with over one hundred. It destroys the open platform promise of PC gaming when you can't play a crossplay title because your IP isn't in Sony's approved list. What Sony has to do is make PSN optional for third-party titles on Steam and let independent games ship without any gate, but instead they just keep baking these requirements into every new launch like it works fine — which it doesn't. We need the community to push back harder this time because if Tokon sets a precedent of even more exclusions than Helldivers 2 did, we won't get anything less in future releases. Let me know what you think and whether Sony should be held accountable for doing exactly what they do every single launch.
Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/marvel-tokon-blocked-in-132-countries-and-it-looks-like-psn-requirements-are-to-blame
Worse still, the game has been excluded from Russia and Belarus via Epic Games Store entirely as well, and the South Korean release path is tangled in its own web of Sony's publishing restrictions that're messying up the rollout there too. Each of these is a separate gate keeping players out by design. The irony is that this was predicted by the community months ago — after Helldivers 2 launched with nearly identical language about crossplay requiring PSN login, people already knew Sony would repeat it and they called it out in every pre-launch thread. It's not an accident; it's a strategy that gets deployed almost as soon as new multiplatform releases are announced, and it keeps getting worse instead of better.
I am honestly so tired of this cycle — first Helldivers 2 with sixty-eight countries locked out, now Tokon with over one hundred. It destroys the open platform promise of PC gaming when you can't play a crossplay title because your IP isn't in Sony's approved list. What Sony has to do is make PSN optional for third-party titles on Steam and let independent games ship without any gate, but instead they just keep baking these requirements into every new launch like it works fine — which it doesn't. We need the community to push back harder this time because if Tokon sets a precedent of even more exclusions than Helldivers 2 did, we won't get anything less in future releases. Let me know what you think and whether Sony should be held accountable for doing exactly what they do every single launch.
Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/marvel-tokon-blocked-in-132-countries-and-it-looks-like-psn-requirements-are-to-blame