Ghost Of Tsushima: Director’s Cut launched on Steam today, May 16, 2024 and immediately shot up to the top of Steam’s global sales charts.
It’s mostly been a positive launch, with the game clearly starting to sell well and players in the reviews mostly enjoying their time. According to SteamDB at time of writing, there are 53,878 people playing the Director’s Cut on PC. It’s peak player count is currently 57,934.
All of this seems to point to a solid launch for a PlayStation Studios game coming to PC. There don’t appear to be any massive, game-breaking bugs causing the game to be a farm for memes like when The Last Of Us Part I arrived on PC.
Where the negative slant on this launch is coming from are plenty of negative reviews that all bemoan the fact that players are required to link their Steam account to a PlayStation Network account to get everything out of what they purchased.
The game’s main campaign and Iki Island DLC are both playable without account linking. The multiplayer Legends mode is a different story, and players will be required to link their accounts should they want to play Legends. This requirement also prevents Legends from being playable on Steam Deck.
There’s also the fact that due to this account linking requirement for one multiplayer mode in a game that’s otherwise a completely single-player experience, Ghost Of Tsushima has been delisted on Steam in 180 countries.
The backlash Sony received around trying to require all Helldivers 2 players, and the continued attempt at pushing account linking even in mostly single-player games seems to be forming a cloud that will stay with all future PlayStation games coming to PC.
Players are clearly keeping an eye out for these requirements. It’ll be curious to see if more ports of PlayStation games are marred by negative reviews continuing from players directly calling out the account linking requirements.
Source – [SteamDB, Steam]