Game stores are refunding Ghost of Tsushima pre-orders in non-PSN countries

Steam Refunds Director’s Cut Pre-Orders The Ghost of Tsushima for buyers residing in countries without access to PlayStation Network. This is despite the fact that arguably the most important part of the game is still playable without PlayStation Network account linking. The news comes after Valve abruptly removed the game yesterday.

The Ghost of Tsushima only requires linking a PSN account for its Legends multiplayer mode, a requirement from which the single-player campaign is exempt, the game developer said in a recent post. Steam, Green Man Gaming, and the Epic Games Store each have warnings stating the same thing. In theory, this would mean that if you didn’t care about multiplayer modes, you could still play, but in practice, not so much.

You receive a refund for a game you pre-purchased – Ghost of Tsushima. The publisher of this game now requires a secondary account to play certain parts of this game – and this account cannot be created from your country.

As frustrating as it is, the situation with Tsushima feels cut and dry compared to that of Helldiverse 2. Earlier this month, Sony announced that it would add mandatory linking with a PSN account. Helldiverse 2, which had already been available for purchase in non-PSN countries for almost three months. Steam quickly restricted where the game could be sold to only those countries where PSN was available. The players were not happy.

Following a review campaign that caused the game’s Steam rating to go from “extremely positive” to “extremely negative” within days, Sony reversed the change. Despite this, Steam has not removed the sales restrictions.

Yesterday, three more countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – were added to Steam’s list of restricted countries. Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt said on Discord that he was not informed of the newly added regions, only discovering them through the game’s Discord community.

He later stated that this was because Valve noticed an administrative error and that the countries were supposed to be there from the start.

Pilestedt said he was trying to get PlayStation and Valve to reverse the sales restrictions. That this decision was made by Sony seems plausible, given the situation with The Ghost of Tsushima on several game store platforms. However, since neither Sony nor Valve responded to The edgeUpon request for comment on this situation, it is impossible to say for sure if this is true or if stores are removing Sony games themselves.