Yes, Concord will require you to have a PSN account on PC because cross play and progression are an "important piece" of the game

It didn't go down well with Helldivers 2 players, but the upcoming hero shooter Concord will require PC players to connect a PSN account.

Back in May, Sony made the decision to force PC Helldivers 2 players to connect a PSN account to their game. To put it lightly, that announcement did not go down well, leading Sony to walk it back just a few days later. That outrage was definitely in part because the requirement was introduced months after the game's release, and even if it was always meant to be there (it was a requirement when the game launched but was temporarily removed due to server issues), doing so when so many people have played so much of the game felt like a bad call. PlayStation didn't seem to learn anything from this though, as Firewalk Studios' upcoming hero shooter Concord will also have the same requirement, apparently.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Firewalk's director of IP Kim Kreines explained the reasoning behind needing PC players to have a PSN account, saying: "That allows us to have cross play, that cross progression, that's that's an important piece of it." Lead character designer Jon Weisnewski went on to explain that the "goal is for players to come together. And so for us to have PC players and PlayStation 5 players together, for that cross-play and cross-progression to work, that's a layer that needs to be there - just on a technical level. So the goal is we want to get players together, to have fun and play together, this is part of that experience."

It's a bit of an odd response, given that Destiny 2 developer Bungie is owned by PlayStation, and it has both cross play and progression, so it's clear that Concord could potentially allow play without requiring a PSN account. On the Destiny 2 front, those features do require you to connect your platform account to your Bungie account, so it's always possible Concord didn't want to add a hurdle of creating an entire account system when PSN accounts are right there. Whatever the situation is, Sony should probably get a bit better when it comes to communicating its reasoning behind wanting more people to have PSN accounts.

At the very least, Concord will likely have this requirement at launch, so it's less likely that there'll be that much of an uproar, but it's clear that PSN on PC is here to stay any which way.