Sony is making an egregious error of judgment when it comes to the biggest PlayStation 5 hit of the year.

Helldivers 2 has been a smash success on both PS5 and Steam, not only pulling down huge player and sales numbers, but also a ton of goodwill from players. The game is genuinely fun with an innovative live-service element and a great sense of humor. It’s no wonder that people keep coming back to kill more bugs.

Sony is poised to squander a ton of the goodwill the company has accrued, not just from Helldivers 2, but from all its efforts to port PlayStation exclusives like Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last Of Us, to PC.

The company announced recently that PC players would need to link their PlayStation Network accounts to their Steam accounts in order to continue playing the game. This, they claimed, was after an initial grace period where account linking was not required, but that grace period is coming to an end.

It feels like a bait-and-switch, luring players in on false pretenses. Yes, there’s a notice saying you need to link your accounts, but this was easy to overlook and since it wasn’t a requirement, many players either never noticed or just assumed it was an error or something Sony decided against.

There are several problems here:

As for Sony’s reasons, security is a lousy excuse. If they were truly concerned about security, they could require some form of 2-factor authentication (or 2FA). This would not require a PlayStation account, but would be something gamers could do in any region without opening a brand new account of any kind. It would achieve security goals without being too much of a hindrance to players.

Fundamentally, though, even 2FA should be optional or should come with some cherry on top, incentivizing players to use it rather than preventing them from playing if they don’t (though I highly recommend it because your account could be hacked much more easily without 2FA).

Obviously most Helldivers 2 players will grumble about it but then sign up for PSN. But some won’t be able to, and the community as a whole will have lost a ton of faith in Sony. A lot of the goodwill that’s been gained over Helldivers 2 will be gone after this, and that’s no small thing.

Even the developer of the game, Arrowhead Games, is expressing dismay over the change, with one community manager suggesting that players change their Steam reviews to negative in protest. Clearly Sony has badly misjudged the situation and should walk back this utterly preposterous policy before they ruin a good thing. As the saying goes: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”