Helldivers 2 Off UK Steam Store Since Sept 16, Sony Responds

Two of Sony's biggest PC releases have been unpurchasable on Steam in the United Kingdom since September 16, 2026, and the company says it is working with Valve to put them back. Helldivers 2 and Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition both vanished from the British storefront that evening.

This was not a display glitch. According to SteamDB records cited by Wolf's Gaming Blog, the change was made to the games' sales regions: the Helldivers 2 Steam package had the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the Isle of Man added to its list of blocked territories at 19:11 UTC on September 16, and the Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition package was updated with the same restrictions roughly a minute later.

Sony Interactive Entertainment gave Video Games Chronicle a statement the same evening. "We are aware of an issue affecting the availability of select titles on Steam in the UK," a spokesperson said. "We are working with Valve to address the issue. We apologize for the inconvenience." The company did not say what caused the change, how many titles are affected beyond these two, or when they will come back.

Two days on, nothing has moved. A check of Steam's public storefront API on September 18 returned no listing for either game on the UK store, while the identical query returned both titles for the German, American and French storefronts. Existing owners are not affected: Video Games Chronicle reports the games remain playable for anyone who already has them in their library, because the restriction blocks new purchases and activations rather than access.

The scale is what makes the gap conspicuous. Helldivers 2 became PlayStation's fastest-selling game launch ever, with sales "far exceeding expectations" at 12 million copies across PC and PS5 in its first 12 weeks, according to Video Games Chronicle, which also notes the game was recently added to the PlayStation Plus games catalogue. It launched on PS5 and PC in 2024 and later came to Xbox Series X and S.

What remains unexplained is how three British territories ended up on two separate games' blocked lists within about a minute of each other. Sony has not attributed the change to a technical fault, a licensing matter or a regional pricing decision, and Valve has not commented publicly. Wolf's Gaming Blog noted that a regulatory explanation looks unlikely given that one title is a multiplayer shooter and the other a single-player game. Until Sony or Valve says more, UK players who do not already own either game have no way to buy them on Steam.