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If you see an advertisement for a game in your country, it’s fair to assume that the game will be sold to you in that country. Sony, on the other hand, had other ideas. Games like Helldivers 2, Spider-Man 2, God of War 2, or even The Last of Us were region-locked on the PC, essentially excluding half of the world, making it unavailable to certain gaming populations. The advent of Stellar Blade on the PC, however, has changed everything, and we likely have gooners to partly thank for that.
Before we dive into how gooners saved other countries from Sony’s questionable region-locking, we need to look at stats first. Stellar Blade has now sold more than 1 million copies on Steam alone, despite being a staggered release (the PS5 version was released more than a year ago). Stellar Blade is now also the most successful Sony game/port on Steam, eclipsing even more popular mainstream titles like God of War: Ragnarok on the platform.
At this rate, Stellar Blade on PC could be on track to outsell the PlayStation version– which, for reference, sold 2 million copies but 19 times slower. You can probably guess why the game is enjoying a popularity in PC that seems slightly different compared to its console popularity.
Stellar Blade is Even More NSFW on PC
Even a few days before the game was released on the PC, the Stellar Blade modding community was already poised with its NSFW mods. These mods basically turn an already skimpy default design for Stellar Blade‘s Eve into something more suggestive or entirely lewd.
And looking at the top Stellar Blade mods in Nexus Mods, the good old “No Clothes” mod for the protagonist is already the most downloaded file with nearly 150,000 downloads and counting. A huge chunk of those 1 million players have already turned the game into something else entirely, and it hasn’t been a week.
Of course, even without modding, Stellar Blade‘s main selling point has always been its hypersexualized protagonist. Even from the PS5 playthroughs, there’s no shortage of suggestive crotch, chest, and hip zoom-ins during cutscenes; the plethora of revealing outfits and default skins has also reinforced that this game had a target demographic: gooners.
Reception so Rabid, Sony Reconsidered the Region-Lock
Gooners, for the record, can mean several things, but in this context, we’ll refer to them as people who are overly fond of sexualized content. Stellar Blade has no shortage of that; even its creators have embraced this kind of potential for the game, and they definitely know their target audience. The game’s marketing heavily relied on Eve’s appearance.
The difference with the PC crowd is that this success was magnified to a greater extent, likely due to moddability, the PS5 version’s success, and aggressive marketing. Hence, Sony has eased up on the region-locking seemingly in response to Stellar Blade‘s success as a PC port. Most Sony games that were locked as PC ports in many countries are now available following Stellar Blade‘s massive success.
One would expect that other, more recognizable PC ports such as Spider-Man, God of War, and The Last of Us would’ve made bigger splashes for Sony as they were household names. Their DLCs were complete, PS5 versions were successful, and they were also moddable. But I daresay they made much weaker sales on Steam because they had one thing uncommon with Stellar Blade: they had no scantily-clad Eve doing the marketing to gooners.
Ultimately, it was Stellar Blade and an undeniably big demographic of gamers who “like” Eve that led to Sony reconsidering its region-locking policies. Profit is also Sony’s motive, of course, but I doubt they would’ve removed region-locking for their most popular PC ports if Stellar Blade had underperformed on Steam, and we partly have gooners to thank for such a small victory, oddly enough.
