Arrowhead Game Studios was working on Helldivers 2 for a while, and though the co-op third-person shooter is clearly an ambitious follow-up to its top-down predecessor, few would have predicted that it would go on to enjoy the success that it has seen in the immediate aftermath of its release.
On PC in particular, Helldivers 2 has attracted a sizeable audience. Heaving peaked at over 155,000 concurrent players on Steam, it has become Sony’s biggest launch on the platform, exceeding the numbers of the likes of God of War and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 Remastered. But how has it fared on PS5?
As you’d expect, it’s attracting a healthy number of players across both platforms. Taking to Twitter, Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilestedt recently revealed that across PC and PS5, Helldivers 2 recently exceeded 360,000 concurrent players, which, based on the game’s aforementioned peak on Steam, would suggest that it hit a little under 200,000 concurrent players on PS5.
Explaining some of the game’s technical and connectivity issues in a message published on Twitter, Pilestedt wrote, “To speak in technical terms, our services, as well as our partner services, have a rate limiter that denies connections beyond a volume per minute to prevent the entire system from failing. We managed to increase the rate limit from 10,000 [logins] per minute to 20,000 per minute, and the total capacity of concurrent players was increased from 250,000 total to 360,000 total. This was, however, still not enough, as the player count jumped to 360k after five-and-a-half minutes.”
In other words, Helldivers 2 is too successful for its own good. That’s certainly a good problem to be facing, from Arrowhead and Sony’s perspective. Pilestedt recently also revealed that the game was “blowing through” internal estimates and had already sold around a million copies.
Our review of Helldivers 2 will be going live soon, so stay tuned for that.
A message to the community in regards to our latest server update. @helldivers2 @ArrowheadGS #Helldivers2. pic.twitter.com/lwriSFbBbK
— Pilestedt (@Pilestedt) February 11, 2024
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