Helldivers 2 had a repeat of its launch on its second weekend, because the PlayStation-funded co-op shooter soared to new ranges of recognition and its servers struggled to maintain up with demand.
On Steam, Arrowhead Sport Studios’ tribute to Starship Troopers had been steadily amassing more and more gamers by the week after hitting a peak of over 155,000 concurrent participant son Sunday, Feb. 11. Then participant numbers out of the blue leapt up over the weekend, hitting a peak of 409,367 on Sunday, Feb. 18.
To place it in perspective, that is larger than Grand Theft Auto 5’s all-time peak participant numbers on Steam, and nestled simply exterior the present high 5 video games on the platform, behind Apex Legends. It’s a massive hit — albeit a great distance off the 2.1 million concurrent gamers recorded by Palworld on Steam three weeks beforehand.
Palworld has since tailed off to each day peaks of round half a million gamers, however Helldivers 2 might but attain even more folks — not least as a result of Arrowhead is in the place of getting to cap the variety of gamers who can entry it, to maintain the servers steady.
On Saturday, as gamers surged, Arrowhead warned that its efforts to extend server capability had been being overtaken by the variety of gamers once more, resulting in login issues for a lot of gamers. Early Sunday, the developer posted to the (*2*) that it was capping concurrent gamers to 450,000 — presumably throughout each Steam and PlayStation 5 — in an try to enhance server stability and stop failed mission payouts and participant disconnections. “We are still struggling to keep up with the scaling that is needed to accommodate all our Helldivers,” the studio stated.
In the meantime, on Saturday, Arrowhead issued a new patch for the sport that, in addition to addressing bug fixes, made some essential stability changes. The Defend occasions that had been irritating gamers because the onset of the Automaton enemies had their issue lowered. However Suicide, Unattainable, and Helldiver missions had been made more durable, and Eradicate had its mission timer elevated in addition to its issue.
Helldivers 2 has been a large hit for Sony in its first experiment with publishing a PlayStation Studios sport concurrently on Steam and PS5. With its intensely fulfilling co-op gameplay, it’s constructed for virality, and will have critical legs. Sony has been adamant that its massive first-party franchises will launch on PlayStation first — however on the subject of reside sport launches, its expertise with Helldivers 2 could pressure it to rethink.
