Arrowhead CEO on negative reviews: "I guess it's warranted. Sorry everyone for how this all transpired. I hope we will make it up and regain the trust by providing a continued great game experience."
If this is about the new PSN requirements, I don't even think Arrowhead should take the blame. That was obviously something that came down from the publisher.
Arrowhead, as the developers and artists who worked to create the game, deserve little to none of the blame. Arrowhead, as the business entity who voluntarily entered into an agreement with Sony to have this requirement in their game in the first place, definitely deserves the blame. Whatever project lead thought this was an acceptable concession to make in order to secure funding from Sony was definitely not on the same page as the rest of the team who actually made the game.
Seeing a lot of parallels to the Cyberpunk 2077 launch; beautiful game created by a passionate team who loved their craft, massively damaged by short-sighted, greedy decisions by studio execs.
This is a lot of words to say "I'm angry and I want to blame a hardworking creative studio, instead of the massive, famously consumer unfriendly, publisher that's actually at fault".
Does the game on Steam deserve the downvotes? Yes. 100%. The game on Steam is a direct result of the developers work and Sony's publishing. But it's not the developer's work that is causing problems, but Sony's publishing decisions that have negatively impacted the experience for huge numbers of people.
So does the developer Arrowhead deserve blame for accepting a contract to produce a game for Sony's IP? No, they did that and did their jobs as contracted. Sony is the only party here that deserves blame for enforcing an asinine account policy that they're competitors (i.e. Microsoft), do not.
This might be true but this one title's success will have a bigger impact on the developer's (≈100 staff) future prospects than Sony (≈113k staff).
Sony could simply ignore the issue and they wouldn't be losing any sleep.
On the other hand this game is the only title the studio has released since Helldivers in 2015, they have the most incentive to protect the reputation of the new title, the IP, and the studio.
I've heard that their community manager was caught shitting on people who were upset about the announcement. That kinda suggests that it wasn't a publisher decision, or at the very least, that their community manager(s) are handled by Sony. It's possible they may be trying to court Sony into buying the company, or that Sony gave them an offer they couldn't refuse.
This is definitely the work of Sony, not the developer. There is no motivation for the developer to require PSN signups for the game and all the motivation in the world for Sony. In addition, anything dealing with how the game is distributed is solely within the purview of the publisher- the developer almost never has any say in what happens in that case.
As far as the decision behind the policy goes, the game’s community manager said on the game’s official Discord server that it was a Sony decision, not Arrowhead