Stellar Blade Unplayable for Thousands of Players Because of Sony

Last year’s surprise PS5 hit Stellar Blade is coming to PC, which should have substantially widened its audience. However, like many of Sony’s PC ports, the lauded action game won’t reach as many players as it should, as it is unplayable in over 100 countries.

Stellar Blade on PC is unavailable in 130 countries

As spotted by ResetEra user Jaded Alyx, Stellar Blade’s PC release seems to be unavailable in 132 countries, according to its SteamDB page. This is typically an issue with Sony games that require its online service PSN, which would make sense as Stellar Blade is a Sony Interactive Entertainment published game. However, when X user @Saki_fua posted about the game being unavailable in their region, the official Stellar Blade account confirmed it did not require a PSN account. This seems to indicate that the studio was unaware of the restriction.

It seems very odd for Sony to essentially region-lock the game to locations that have PSN despite the service not being required to play Stellar Blade on PC. It also seems like developer Shift Up was blindsided by the restriction.

SIE has yet to announce anything regarding the region lock. However, the official Stellar Blade X account has put out a statement. It confirms it is discussing the matter with the publisher and is doing its “best to resolve most of it.” It also confirms PSN is entirely optional and was never required.

The most infamous case of the PSN restrictions occurred when Helldivers 2 was released last year. It caused quite a stir, and even cost the game’s community manager their job after encouraging players to review bomb the game.

Stellar Blade will release for PC on June 11 and costs $59.99. There is also a Complete Edition that costs $79.99, which includes both the Nier: Automata and Nikke collaboration expansions and much more.

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