Helldivers 2 overtakes God of War to become PlayStation’s biggest Steam launch yet
It looks like PlayStation’s PC strategy is paying off. Hell divers 2the third-person co-op shooter that launched on Thursday has become the company’s biggest Steam launch to date.
According to SteamDB, Hell divers 2 has reached 81,840 concurrent players on Steam just one day after release. (The number has since dropped to about 66,000 at the time of this writing.) That’s right God of war (2018)’s previous concurrent peak of 73,529 when it hit PC in 2022.
PlayStation has been trying to expand its offerings beyond just the PlayStation 5, so it has released many first-party games on Steam months or years after the console’s launch. It wasn’t released until 2023 Recurring And The Last of Us Part 1 for PC. Horizon Forbidden West and a Until dawn remaster is also on its way.
However, Hell divers 2 is the first PlayStation-published game to release simultaneously on PS5 and PC. The first day launch on PC could explain the high number of players. Finally, God of war had already been out on PlayStation 4 for years when it arrived on PC, so there’s a lot less momentum. Still, Hell divers 2 is a bit of a niche title and is much smaller in size compared to the AAA titles that PlayStation previously brought to the platform.
Simon Carless, founder of GameDiscoverCo, which tracks and analyzes Steam usage, said the game’s success is largely down to co-op.
“I think co-op is key, and people are always looking for AAA-style co-op games that they can try out with their friends. And since the original Helldivers is another great co-op game (although more of a twin-stick shooter!) this is a great lead-in to the sequel,” he told Polygon.
Currently, Hell divers 2 has a mixed rating on Steam with just over 10,800 reviews. Like many multiplayer games, it had a rocky launch, with server and matchmaking issues. Players have also reported issues with Nprotect Gameguard (the game’s anti-cheat software) preventing the game from launching. Developer Arrowhead Game Studios has been working on solutions and released a patch. I played the game for three hours last night and, aside from a few quickplay timeouts, didn’t encounter too many issues.