Helldivers 2 is slowly being made available in previously banned regions

As you may be aware, Helldivers 2 went through an extremely tumultuous period in May of 2024, thanks mostlꦺy to Sony on the technical🔥 side of things. This entire mess resulted in Helldivers 2 being taken off sale in over 130 t𒁃erritories worl𝓰dwide, but that may be changing now.

More specifically, Helldivers 2 players have caught wind of the fact that the game’s Steam backend is actively being updated with new information about which countries the game is restricted in. As per an update from January 21, someone has been mucking about with regional availability in Helldivers 2‘s Steam backend, which may suggest that big changes are afoot. The reason why I’d still recommend keeping a pinch of salt at hand is that almost all of the referenced territories are rather small regions of entire countries, and there may still be something else going on, instead.

Is Helldivers 2 about to be available worldwide (again)?

For those who lack the context, Helldivers 2 was heavily review-bombed back in May 2024, when Sony announced that it was going to enforce its PlayStation Network linking policy. The original plan was for Helldivers 2 to enforce PSN linking from launch-day onwards, but this fell through due to network instability and other assorted problems. Instead, the “feature” was postponed, only for the community to push back against the late enforcement of 🔯the policy in the end.

Now, Helldivers 2 obviously doesn’t enforce its planned PSN linking at this time, as Sony and Arrowhead caved in to the community’s request at the time. However, the flip side of the equation is that Sony also took Helldivers 2 off sale in all the territories PSN did not officially support at the time. The tricky bit is that Helldivers 2, an always-online live-service multiplayer game, was being sold in countries and regions where Sony didn’t have the regulatory support for continued operations. To alleviate this issue ahead of potential legal blowback, Sony simply took the steps that it did, and that left us with a grand total of 176 countries (and territories) blocked worldwide.

Of those 176 territories, the list that’s being edited over on SteamDB includes only 43 of them, and they’re mostly fairly minor regions at this time. Territories such as Gibraltar, Greenland, British Virgin Islands, and Norfolk (Island), just to list very few of them. Still, the reason why I think this is exciting is that there’s something happening on this front at all, and it may well be a sign of things to come at a later date.

Once again, none of this should be taken as an official confirmation that something’s happening with Helldivers 2‘s spotty regional coverage, it’s just that someone is clearly fiddling about with it. Another thing to keep in mind is that Helldivers 2 was simply taken off sale in the 176 mentioned territories worldwide: if you live in one of the affected regions and purchased the game before the unlisting, you’ve been able to play Helldivers 2 just fine all along.

It’s a complicated and tiring topic, for sure, and hopefully Sony and Arrowhead will be able to resolve it as soon as possible.