Although, there was some issues a couple days after launch and they paused the mandatory linking. They are just now reimplenting it after fixing the issue it seems.
I played it without psn account so my experience is different from what you say. If in the first 2 hours I would have walked into this as a hard block I would have stopped and refunded.
Same is true for people unable to make a psn account but cannot because their country is not supported.
So while they indicated a 3rd party account it was not a hard requirement. If they would have shown all users a message clearly explaining that a psn account linking will be a hard requirement at some point… so better already do it… they might have had a better chance… but for me I disabled cross play in the first week also because the playstation players where insufferable mostly and it caused issues during gameplay.
Since January it’s been a requirement and has been listed on the steam store page
Although, there was some issues a couple days after launch and they paused the mandatory linking. They are just now reimplenting it after fixing the issue it seems.
Sony’s website said that PSN account linking would be optional, and they only changed the website to saying it’s required yesterday (May 3rd)
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20240503105938/https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/games/psn-sign-in-pc/
I played it without psn account so my experience is different from what you say. If in the first 2 hours I would have walked into this as a hard block I would have stopped and refunded.
Same is true for people unable to make a psn account but cannot because their country is not supported.
So while they indicated a 3rd party account it was not a hard requirement. If they would have shown all users a message clearly explaining that a psn account linking will be a hard requirement at some point… so better already do it… they might have had a better chance… but for me I disabled cross play in the first week also because the playstation players where insufferable mostly and it caused issues during gameplay.