Sony, the company behind PlayStation and major game titles, has lifted the regional restrictions on several of its PC titles on Steam in over 100 countries, including the Philippines.
The ‘silent’ unlocking of PC games through Steam was first discovered by Wario64 and shared on the microblogging app Bluesky. However, Sony has not yet made official announcements regarding the removal of regional restrictions.
The games whose regional locks were lifted based on the database changelogs include the following titles:
- God of War Ragnarök
- The Last of Us Part II Remastered
- Marvel’s Spider-Man 2
- Helldivers 2
If you remember, regional locks were Sony’s way of limiting the sales of its games in certain countries. They required players to link their Steam accounts to the PlayStation Network (PSN). Consequently, countries that didn’t have access to PSN could not access those games.
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Recently, Stellar Blade was initially supposed to require PSN, but it was eventually made available to non-PSN regions following criticism from the community and a direct request from the game’s developer, Shift Up. This opened the floodgates to nearly 200,000 players in its opening week.
The opening of the four games to non-PSN countries is a great start, but some Sony game titles, like Ghost of Tsushima and Until Dawn, are still heavily restricted.
While still unofficial, the opening of these game titles is good news for Filipino gamers who used VPNs as a workaround to access such titles.