Ahead of , players have been greeted with the dreaded yet expected message: Some people won't have access to the PC release as it's region-locked in 130 countries.
The [[link]] full list of countries that won't have access to Stellar Blade's PC launch can be found on , with six countries—Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Philippines, Russian Federation, and Vietnam—having no price set. While all the other countries outright prevent the game from being activated or purchased.
The list also includes three Unknown country codes: AN, FX, and XD. AN stands for the Netherlands Antilles, but Dutch players can simply use their NL accounts to purchase the game. While FX represents Metropolitan France and XD is for Dubai, but again, players can just use their French accounts or UAE accounts, respectively.
This list of countries lines up with PSN availability despite the developers' Shift Up previously saying in a that "PSN connecting is entirely optional and never required."
But this wouldn't be the first time that a game is restricted by PSN despite not actually requiring its use. Earlier this year, PlayStation added a 10 months after its release, despite the game having no internet connection requirements.
🔸️We are closely discussing the region lock issue with the publisher and are doing our BEST to resolve most of it as soon as possible.🔸️As shown in the test chart below, the DRM has been hard [[link]] tuned to maintain the same average frame rate, with even higher minimum frames in… pic.twitter.com/JDimvKiKte
PSN requirements are pretty controversial among the gaming community. It properly kicked off back when , and in response, players review-bombed the game, . Since then, Sony has tagged a PSN requirement onto all its PC releases like , which then too.
Needless to say, it's not a very popular practice, so why won't Sony let it go? [[link]] Despite saying that to use, this only applies to those in countries where PSN accounts are available. PCG's all the reasons why this is the case, but in short, it's likely due to exchange rates. If a game is much cheaper in one country than another, there's more of a chance of key resellers taking advantage of the price difference and selling cheaper keys on the grey market.
Regardless of the reasons behind it, it's still an annoying practice, and one that the developers are going to try to fight against. "We are closely discussing the region lock issue with the publisher, and we are doing our BEST to resolve most of it as soon as possible," Shift Up says in a .
It seemingly took a lot of haggling for just the , so there's no telling whether the Stellar Blade devs will be able to pull this off, but it's definitely worth a try.