- Helldivers 2 peaked at more than 700,000 players across both PlayStation and PC platforms.
- Arrowhead states that it predicted just 150,000 maximum players.
- During a recent conference, Arrowhead explained how it dealt with the influx of players at release.
Helldivers 2 has undeniably been one of the biggest releases of the year. Not only has the game been a major success on PS5, but it has also created a new era of PC hits for Sony, leading to over 12 million sales in total.
Discussing the recent success, Arrowhead Game Studios’ founder revealed that the co-op shooter reached over 750,000 concurrent players across both PS5 and PC.
Why it matters: This success became both a blessing and a curse for the team. Initially, the studio was not prepared to deal with so many players.
During a presentation at the Nordic Game conference, Arrowhead Game Studios founder and Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt revealed more about the team’s latest release.
He confirmed that the studio expected no more than 150K players. However, the concurrent player counts quickly ballooned to over 750K players at launch across both PC and PS5.
We had a predicted peak concurrent user count of around 150K, and the actual concurrent users were 750K.
-Johan Pilestedt
This was a major reason this game faced such an uphill battle at release. Since Steam’s concurrent player count peaked at about 450K players, the PC platform contributed more than PS5 to the overall sum of 750K active players.
Johan Pilestedt further explained how Arrowhead Game Studios solved the problem. The studio created what became known as “The War Room,” a place for focused discussions and problem-solving between the people who could most help this situation.
The director also thanked the studio’s backend team for doing their best under stress and pressure.
The founder further revealed that the development of Helldivers 2 took much longer than anticipated.
However, Sony was quite helpful during this process. Not too long ago, the company also stated that it does not plan to be acquired and wants to become the next FromSoftware of the industry.
After a rocky start, Helldivers 2’s journey has been mostly smooth.
Recently, the game ran into a few bumps after new PlayStation requirements were suddenly implemented. This has led to declining player counts, but the community is still far from done with the fight for democracy.
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