Is Helldivers 2 going downhill? One thing is certain: the number of players is shrinking. But that is less dramatic than it sounds.
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Currently, headlines such as “Helldivers 2 loses 90 percent of its PC players in just five months” are circulating on numerous gaming websites. »End of the hype« There is even talk of.
So is the shooter now over and done with? Is no one suddenly interested in the big surprise hit that broke records in February? No.
While the numbers are absolutely correct per se, they lack important context. And so a distorted picture of the situation with Helldivers 2 emerges.
Good numbers, bad numbers?
First of all, it must be said: Yes, Helldivers 2 is now far from its all-time high at release. At the time, up to 458,000 PC users were playing at the same time, but according to Steamdb.info, this number has now dropped to 45,000 – statistically speaking, only about ten percent of players remained.
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But to interpret this as the end of Helldivers 2 would definitely be wrong. even with its 45,000 players The title remains in the top half of the 100 most played Steam games in the world.
This means that Helldivers 2 is still one of the largest Steam communities ever.
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Helldivers 2 achieves what others only try!
Then there are, of course, the PlayStation users who do not appear in the statistics at all. There are no concrete figures for this, but as of March 2024, Helldivers 2 the most played PSN title worldwideeven ahead of Fortnite and CoD Warzone.
Losing players? Completely normal
The fact that games reach a peak at (or shortly after) release and the number of players levels off in the following months is also a very common phenomenonwhich can be observed at almost every major launch. Once fans have played the existing content, a part of the community always migrates to new games and waits for fresh content, for example in the form of DLC.
And here the developers of Helldivers 2 recently consciously stepped on the brakes. In the future, they want to provide significantly more extensive content updates, but with lower frequency A third enemy faction, for example, has already been confirmed and should lure many Helldivers veterans back in front of the screen.
How big the rush for such new content can be, Total War Warhammer 3 proved this in Maywhen Thrones of Decay gave the game its biggest player spike in over a year.
»Read beyond the headline«
Even the most successful games experience more or less significant declines as the initial magic wears off and everyone waits for new content. Counter-Strike 2, the undisputed biggest Steam game on the planet, lost 20 percent of its players in the first month after release.
And the Steam giant Palworld even shrank to just three percent of its initial player numbers from January to April 2024. Here a developer responded the monster hunt very clearly on farewell headlines in the press:
This discourse about “Palworld has lost X percent of players” is just very lazy. But it is also a good opportunity to say that it is totally okay to take a break from games. At least for people who can read beyond a headline.
Bucky, Community Manager at Pocketpair
They don't mind the players investing their time in other and new titles, that's completely normal. At the same time, they just need a certain amount of time to get new content for Palworld underway. The parallels to Helldivers 2, which also comes from a relatively small studio, are obvious here.