As noted by Wario64 on Twitter, Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has stated on its official Discord that it is capping the game’s concurrent players at 450,000 while it resolves issues related to mission payouts and dropped connections.
We reported yesterday that Helldivers 2 more than doubled its peak player count from its first weekend online, and that’s only increased to a whopping 386,000 players at the time of writing.
The community has taken to saying that Helldivers 2 is “suffering from success,” what with Arrowhead not anticipating the tide of players and the game’s online infrastructure suffering as a result, but even with the headaches it’s brought for both players and developers, the general mood still seems buoyant. Helldivers 2 is so good, its success so unexpected, and its monetization so inoffensive that it’s become a bit of a $40 people’s champion.
Arrowhead doesn’t specify, but since Helldivers 2 supports PC-PS5 crossplay, I interpret the 450,000 player cap as applying to both platforms together. With nearly 400,000 of those players being on PC, it really puts the nature of Helldivers 2’s success in stark perspective: we have yet another example of PC gamers as tastemakers.
This smash hit simultaneous launch certainly seems to have caused some recalibration among Sony’s top brass, which has long remained doggedly committed to PlayStation exclusivity—a series of PC ports released 6-12 months after their initial launch in recent years has already been seen as a major softening of that stance.
Talking about Sony exclusivity just makes me feel the ache of an old wound, one that always seems to act up when it rains. That’s right, I’m talking about the gamer nightmare weighing on the brains of the living, Bloodborne on PC. I’m never letting that one go.
Whatever my own bitterness over Sony’s PC strategy in the past, Helldivers 2’s success has been exciting to follow, and with Arrowhead bulking up its dev team and servers in response, the game’s best days seem to still lie ahead.
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