Rewrite this title for a blog post. Remove any site names from it The title is: Sad news for the hit game, democracy in decline?

Launched on February 8 on PC and PS5, Helldivers 2 has enjoyed truly explosive success, rising to become one of the biggest hits of 2024. But this brilliant ascending star now seems to be entering its downward phase, following numerous less than happy developments for the excellent co-op game from Arrowhead Games published by Sony.

The democracy of Helldivers 2 in serious danger?

Helldivers 2 turned out to be THE big surprise of the beginning of the year. Launched the same month as the behemoth FF7 Rebirth, this much less ambitious little game developed by Arrowhead Games ultimately turned out to be the best-selling game published by Sony of all time in such a short period of time. The cooperative title has indeed exceeded 12 million copies sold in the space of three months. It has thus dethroned God of War Ragnarök, holder of this prestigious title before it. On Steam, it occupied the sixth place of the largest peak of players on the entire platform, i.e. nearly 460,000 players connected simultaneously. Nothing seemed to be able to stop this phenomenon as dazzling as it was unexpected.

Since then, however, the situation has taken a much less encouraging turn for Helldivers 2. According to SteamDB, the title thus lost 90% of its players, with a peak now amounting to “only” 45,000 democracy fighters. Main cause of this rapid decline: the controversy following the imposition by Sony to link its account to PSN. Despite backpedaling to save the furniture following a massive wave of review-bombing, the damage was clearly already done. Worse still, the game was delisted from Steam in the 177 countries where PSN does not exist, despite the publisher's change in strategy. Another complaint from the community against the Arrowhead Games title: too many patches of only relative interest. The studio has since wanted to raise the bar in this area. But that wasn't enough to bring back players who were sulking about Super Earth.

Can Super Earth return to its former glory?

If Helldivers 2 is taking a hit on PC, the situation is a priori less alarming on PS5, although we do not know exactly the number of active players on this platform. Let's bet that Arrowhead Games is working on future additions that could motivate the fighters of the Super Earth to return to service. Whether this takes the form of new equipment, stratagems or even new factions to face, the mystery remains for the moment.

At the same time, a serious competitor to Helldivers 2 could be rubbing its hands in the shadow of its decline: Starship Troopers Extermination. Expected on October 11, the adaptation of the film that greatly inspired Arrowhead Games could well steal its place as the most popular alien extermination co-op game among gamers, at least on PC. Unfortunately, not everyone can live forever, as Johnny Rico would say.