God of War Ragnarök will require a PSN account to play on PC

An image of Kratos from God of War Ragnarok sat in a frigid cave, while his son enters stage left with a deer.

(Image credit: Santa Monica Studio)

During the State of Play conference, Sony announced that popular prestige-action sequel God of War Ragnarök would finally be coming to PC in September. The PC version will have unlocked framerates, upscaling, super ultra widescreen support, and will include the Valhalla DLC as well as the New Game+ mode added post-launch, as Sony's blog post explained.

And then, in a footnote at the bottom, it added "Account for PlayStation Network is required." The Steam page and Epic page corroborate this, saying: "PlayStation Network Account required, subject to the PlayStation Terms of Services and User Agreement." They then link to the PlayStation Network terms of service.

This presumably means God of War Ragnarök will be unavailable in the 177 countries and territories where PSN can't be accessed, as we learned when Helldivers 2 was delisted en masse following Sony's requirement of a PSN login (a demand that Sony subsequently backed down from).

Since then, we've seen Ghost of Tsushima end up in a similar pickle. The PC version was likewise delisted in those 177 countries and territories because its co-op multiplayer mode requires a PSN sign-in to access. Oddly, Ghost of Tsushima doesn't demand a login if you're just playing the singleplayer mode, and yet God of War Ragnarök—an entirely singleplayer game—for some reason will.

It'll be out on September 19. At least, for some of us.

PRODUCTS

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.