Hell divers 2 saw a repeat of its launch during its second weekend, as the PlayStation-funded co-op shooter soared to new levels of popularity and servers struggled to keep up with demand.
On Steam, Arrowhead Game Studios’ tribute to Starship Troopers had been steadily gaining more and more players over the course of the week, after peaking at over 155,000 concurrent players on Sunday, February 11. Then player numbers suddenly jumped over the weekend. peaking at 409,367 on Sunday, February 18.
To put it in perspective, this is higher than Grand Theft Auto 5‘s highest player count of all time on Steam, and is just outside the current top five games on the platform, behind it Apex Legends. It’s a big hit, albeit a far cry from the 2.1 million concurrent players registered Palworld on Steam three weeks earlier.
Palworld has since dropped to daily peaks of around half a million players, but Hell divers 2 could reach even more people – not least because Arrowhead is in the position of having to limit the number of players who can access it to keep its servers stable.
Saturday, when the players advanced, Arrowhead warned that its efforts to increase server capacity were once again overtaken by the number of players, leading to login problems for many players. Early Sunday, the developer posted a message on the Helldivers disagreement that it was limiting concurrent players to 450,000 – presumably on both Steam and PlayStation 5 – in an effort to improve server stability and prevent failed mission payouts and player disconnects. “We are still struggling to keep up with the scale needed to accommodate all of our Helldivers,” the studio said.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, Arrowhead released a new patch for the game that not only addressed bug fixes, but also made some crucial balance adjustments. The difficulty of the Defend events that have frustrated players since the start of the Automaton enemies. But the Suicide, Impossible, and Helldiver missions were made more difficult, and Eradicate both had its mission timer and difficulty increased.
Hell divers 2 has been a huge hit for Sony in its first experiment with simultaneously publishing a PlayStation Studios game on Steam and PS5. With its intensely enjoyable co-op gameplay, it’s built for virality and could have serious legs. Sony is confident its major first-party franchises will launch on PlayStation first, but when it comes to live game launches, the experience with Hell divers 2 may force it to be reconsidered.