
Helldivers 2 is the 2024 hit no one saw coming – well, at least since Palworld, anyway. The game just keeps getting bigger and bigger on PC, where it’s now surpassed Destiny 2’s all-time peak players total by attracting 333k concurrent users overnight. It’s worth noting that with PS5 owners added in, the game’s highs are even higher.
In fact, such is its success that it’s now gaining on the aforementioned Palworld. Obviously, interest in the Pokémon-inspired survival game has dipped a little bit since its unfathomable highs, but it was doing about 535k users on Steam when Helldivers 2 was hitting the records mentioned above, so the gap is closing between the two – even if they are ultimately radically different games!
Arrowhead has said it’s ramping up recruitment as it looks to expand its post-release plans, and it’s going to be interesting to see if Sony moves to acquire the Swedish studio, seeing as this is the first effort in its new live service strategy and it’s already become a colossal hit. Obviously, the platform holder’s placed Bungie in charge of its overall GAAS initiative – but Helldivers 2 is bigger than Destiny 2 right now.
[source store.steampowered.com]
Comments 39
Imagine being as arrogant as Bungie and getting ran over by a random swedish team.
The community narratives on social media about the imbalance in troop deployment are hilarious too. "Malevelon Creek is f****d! Release it on XBOX! We need reinforcements!" sent tea out of my nostrils.
I tried to log on last night but kept getting the servers at capacity message. All I could think was, I'm not even mad. That's amazing.
So much for these types of games being a saturated market.
Having to play solo right now as matchmaking is well not working right now.
Perhaps the Live Service Center of Excellence or whatever it's called should be run by Arrowhead instead of Bungie
Interesting, in the context of Sony's comments about April 2024 - March 2025 I wonder if perhaps this year ends up being PS5's Splatoon moment.
For context, Nintendo 1st party lineup slowed down in 2015 regarding big existing IP as Nintendo started focusing on creating a very strong lineup for the Switch but that gave smaller and new IP the chance to grow. The new IP Splatoon (released May 2015) benefited the most from that approach and is currently one of Nintendo's biggest franchises.
It could probably do about 500k on Steam today but Server space is capped at 450k across steam and PS5 unfortunately since the servers can’t currently cope with more people.
Anyone playing today will be doing a lot of queuing
Seriously need to open up more server space.
Couldn't play at all last night, let me spread some democracy to those pesky robots gosh darn it!!!
@Shad361 I would say it is a saturated market, but Helldivers 2 sets itself apart by not being predatory with microtransactions and battlepasses.
And I know many games say this in bad faith but after playing it I can confirm you can absolutely get a lot of the "premium currency" by just playing the game.
And they aren't doing any kind of pvp.
And the team is very transparent and interacts with the community.
They're just doing everything right in a time where most companies are seeing just how much greed they can get away with.
@RawnDawn The problem seems to be coding bottlenecks, or something similar, and not availability of actual server space.Theoretically they should be able to expand physical server capacity easily.
Cool.its getting bigger.glad its going well.word up son
Sony, buy Arrowhead. Have them reboot SOCOM.
Think I need to buy this game 🎮 🤔
Good! Any game that beats Bungie in anything I consider a giant win! Bungie needs to be brought down to earth with the rest of us and also perhaps Sony should put Arrowhead in charge of their live service games if they acquire them.
Always like seeing sleeper hit games like this take the gaming community by storm.
Hopefully Haven and Firewalk are taking notes on all of this for their games.
I had 2 buddies manage to get in last night and we were able to run some missions and clap some insectoid cheeks and it was a gotdamm blast. I haven't had this much silly joy playing a game since probably Rocket League's debut.
It just feel so refreshing. Rare is the shooter that has stuff like friendly fire and incredibly hard ramping difficulty yet manages to consistently make me laugh and giggle like a kid when the ***** hits the fan instead of making me angry and upset.
When failure is hysterical, not frustrating, you know you've struck the right chord.
I wonder if the automatons understand the amount of democracy they're about to eat for causing the server issues.
I’m dropping a turret. You figure out where not to stand.
I would be worried that if Sony acquired Arrowhead that Bungie would somehow get involved with how they are running their game! The sooner the Centre of Excellence gets disbanded the better because I wouldn’t want Bungie anywhere near this game!!
Excellent game. I've been jumping in and out all weekend and it's the most fun I've had online for a long time. Provides some truly hilarious laugh out loud moments and that intro scene is just killer.
Glad to see they succeeded. However, I wouldn't say nobody saw it coming, Sony was advertising aggressively (as I assume they knew what they had on their hands). It's just that most media didn't take it seriously and laughed at it during all those State of Play events.
In an amusing twist, fact that nobody is taking it to seriously is exactly why it's working that great 😃
I don't think it will reach the Palworld ground (I would be happy if they do tho) BUT if we think about other legendary franchises with online it already surpassed Halo Infinite peak. Halo may not be what it was but every time there is a new one (even more now that Infinite multi was free) thousands of people go back to the franchise looking for the same feeling it had in the 360 era.
The fact that more people are giving this so called "generic coop game" a chance it's outstanding.
After seeing what this team is capable of that 3 billion for Bungie gotta hurt. At least there were clauses in the buyout that Sony could essentially "hostile takeover" something they own...weird I know but a very good clause. At this point I'd buy this dev. Can the heads of Bungie and give some Arrowhead peeps some love, raises and promotions lol
This game is an absolute blast. Nothing like accidentally nuking your team during extraction because you didn’t know your friend loaded one into the artillery cannon.
Fantastic game. Had some good matches with a couple of the guys on here yesterday. Just pure fun, even when your dying. Tonight the the servers are completely crippled. Cant even get past the title screen and on to my ship due to server overload. Next they will be giving us another 50% more xp as a good will gesture for the 50% more xp weekend good will gesture not working 😂
383k current when I checked before. They said they said they had capped it at 450k for stability but put in another request to up the server limit to their server provider yesterday.
@ChrisDeku Good to know, hope they get it fixed since I still have to wait 15 minutes to enter wich is better than yesterday at least.
@Sequel I’d love for them to go back to Killzone, they were such great games.
@Hesse diehard Socom fan here. Socom 2 was the pinnacle of the series. But I have waited for Socom reboot or new game for just too long now. May sound crazy but when I feel need for Socom. I load in to ghost recon wildlands PvP. I truly feel it is what Socom would have evolved into. Especially player movements. On ps5 if we could remove drones. Have 8vs8 and little smaller maps it would be Socom. Sandstorm insurgency is like a first person Socom with one bullet kills. In fact on pc it has some Socom mods with maps and all. I may get steam deck to play those on my tv. But what I’d love now is a full blow remake of Warhawk. These guys could make a new Warhawk easily. Maybe a little help from bungie for the ships and air combat. But these guys could make the ground combat with troops tanks trucks and all ground weapon mounts and all. A new fully funded Warhawk on ps5 would be mind blowing. Starhawk was ok. It lost some of Warhawks soul I felt at the time.
@IOI I don't think Sony would've funded the development for 8 years if they had no faith in it or would've put it in multiple state of plays to aggressively promote it. Remember these are the same people who cancelled TLOU Factions after more than 4 years in development despite the high cost.
They also said a million times that Live service games will be day and date on PC to build a strong player base, it isn't there fault that gamers rush to the comments and spam nonsense instead.
@Shepherd_Tallon Trying to log in right now, went afk for almost an hour and it still says "Servers at capacity". lol
@DennisReynolds I didn’t realise there was a solo option. I might buy this then.
Dear Jim Ryan, your efforts are paying off. Thank you
@SoulChimera it will take longer playing solo as the any sifficulty above medium would be nigh on impossible on your own. The difficult doesnt scale to the ammount of people in a party but based on a full squad of players. Playing with randos isnt bad at all tho, i come across no idiots so far and it feels like you could just be playing with a squad of cpu.
@Kidfunkadelic83 Thanks for the info, much appreciated. I do like that look of it, might just talk some of friends into buying it. Haha.
Had a few times over the weekend where it wasn't possible to get on because of server capacity issues but I'm sure they will have fixed that soon. The guys at Arrowhead sound like they are putting in all the hours under the sun to get things sorted and they deserve plenty of credit for that as well as producing an amazing game in the first place.
@Kidfunkadelic83 Those were some good games the other night, had a blast
@SoulChimera plenty of people on here to game with mate. I was gaming with @render and a couple of others for the first time the other night. Some of the best online fun ive ever had, despite my lack of skill on the battlefield 😂. Some of those missions on the tougher difficulty are quite long too.
I agree that not only is the game so much fun (even if missions have the same objective, nothing is ever the same with what can happen), but the community is good too. I have only had one bad experience in many plays where this loser kicked me from the game literally as I was about to get on the extraction ship, so no XP or anything after 35 mins. So annoying.
Beyond that though, been great, meeting people all over the world, loads of fun and it seems the devs are primed to add new sections to the ship and game to keep it interesting.
Leave A Comment
Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...