Since its launch, Helldivers 2 has been suffering from its own success. Like Palworld earlier this year, the gaming community has latched on to another co-op game. And like Palworld, it’s a mostly polished experience at an attractive price point.
Server capacity continues to be the biggest roadblock for the team at Arrowhead. No one could have imagined the success they are having right now. Helldivers 2 hit a fresh all-time concurrent peak of 407,000 on Steam yesterday. The devs have said the split is close to 50/50 on the player base between PC and PlayStation, so around 800,000 folks were trying to play it simultaneously. Compare that to the all-time peak for the first Helldivers of just 6,691 on PC.
The decision to leave behind the top-down, isometric view of the first game for a third-person view is paying off big time. Plus, there is a shift in the gaming community right now as everyone is looking for something fresh to play. We’ve seen games like The Finals surge in popularity, but so far, co-op games are seeing better legs. Palworld surged to an all-time concurrent peak of over 2 million before settling between around 400,000. We’ll likely see a similar trajectory for Helldivers 2.
For Arrowhead, keeping the community engaged with more weapons, stratagems, missions, planets, etc., will be key to maintaining its popularity. Last week, Arrowhead’s CEO jumped on Twitter/X and pointed to the game’s success for expanding on what they originally wanted to do post-launch.
The team is working on it. Our old roadmap is very out of date in comparison to what we now want to do. #more
We do know Arrowhead has always planned to add mechs at some point. Their last trailer before launch shows playable mechs at the end of it.
Helldivers 2 is the most fun I’ve had in a co-op shooter in years. The missions are simple, but every part of the gameplay (from friendly fire to button combos for airstrikes) comes together beautifully. All in missions that last 10-40 minutes. It’s the perfect game to get a couple of missions in or sink an entire night into. All while you hilariously take out scores of bugs, robots, and friends.
