Sony somehow managed to remove both Helldivers 2 and Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition from sale on Steam in the UK yesterday, although the company says it is working with Valve to put them back.
Both games disappeared from the British Steam store on September 16. I checked their pages from here in the UK and neither could be purchased, although some of the Helldivers 2 DLC continued to appear in searches. Anyone who already owns either game can reportedly continue playing as normal.
The disappearance was not simply Steam having a funny five minutes, either. SteamDB records show that the purchasing restrictions for Helldivers 2 were specifically changed at 7:11pm UTC, adding the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the Isle of Man to the list of places where the game cannot be purchased or activated.
Horizon Forbidden West’s package was updated around one minute later with the same restrictions. In other words, this was an actual change to the countries where the games could be sold rather than a broken Steam search or temporary problem loading their store pages.
People immediately noticed and began wondering if this was a deliberate move by Sony, since the company has been backing away from PC support. This wouldn’t make much sense, but it does show just how much of Sony’s reputation has been eaten awahy lately.
Sony has confirmed that the removal wasn’t intentional. In a statement provided to VGC, a spokesperson said: “We are aware of an issue affecting the availability of select titles on Steam in the UK.” Sony added that it was working with Valve to address the problem and apologised for the inconvenience.
That makes the whole thing less mysterious, but perhaps slightly more baffling. Country restrictions presumably don’t change themselves, so how two major PlayStation games had three British territories specifically added to their blocked lists is an interesting definition of an “issue.”
It could have been a mistake made through an automated publishing system or somebody selecting the wrong regional configuration. We simply don’t know, and there’s currently no evidence that Britain was deliberately targeted or that this has anything to do with new legislation. The fact that the multiplayer Helldivers 2 and completely single-player Horizon Forbidden West were affected together made a regulatory explanation fairly unlikely anyway.
At the time of writing, both games remain unavailable to purchase through Steam in the UK. Which is even more baffling because surely this should be a pretty straightforward thing to change back, right?
Hopefully reversing the change proves easier than accidentally exiling an entire country from Super Earth.