After Initial Success, Helldiver’s 2 Has Lost 90% Of Its Players With No Signs Of Recovery

There is always some annoyance when playercount declines are brought up in the gaming space, but in this case, it’s a fairly significant story. We’re not talking about Starfield losing 90% of its players since launch as a single player game. Rather, this is Helldivers 2, which was meant to be Sony’s big proof of concept it can make a big impact in the live space.

But a few months after launch, the game has seen extremely steep declines, and despite new additions and galactic war plot turns, nothing is reversing course.

The simultaneous release of Helldivers 2 on PlayStation and PC helped make it a huge hit, especially on PC where it hit 458,709 concurrent players two weeks after launch. But that was indeed the peak, and it has declined 90% in four months, down to 44,093 peak concurrent players. As such, it is routinely outside the top 10 list, and is #58 in top sellers on the service. The most-viewed Twitch stream of the game at this moment has 56 viewers.

This is important because this is a live game. This is the type of game that Sony wanted to make an impact and become an ongoing success, not just an initial one. Sony can sell plenty of copies of single player games and it’s fine if the playercount significantly drops off rather quickly once players are finished. But there is no “finishing” Helldivers, which is constantly adding new gear, cosmetics, Major Orders and new fronts of the war. Players most recently have been complaining that higher levels were too punishing to be fun, but after a large-scale buff patch, it barely moved the needle.

Looking at the numbers, there has been no significant surge other than a brief spike when a mass Automaton invasion happened, but interest fell sharply after a week, and since then the game has continued to shed players quickly.

The other issues here are format, both in terms of content, but also monetization. This is not a game that has announced any major expansions, like other live PvE games might. The timeline of what is added and when is a surprise, and even a major event like the introduction of a new enemy race to fight (the Illuminate will arrive at…some point) will not cost anything to participate in. In addition, Helldivers 2 has one of the most player-friendly monetization systems out there with premium currency easy to earn in-game. Great for us, not ideal for Sony where the entire point of this format is significant recurring revenue, and even less ideal with 90% fewer players than at launch.

I am not calling Helldivers 2 a failure. Its big launch should still be considered a hit and it surpassed all expectations back then. But this is not a trajectory you want to see for a live, ongoing game. The game has not been among PlayStation’s top 10 most played list in a long time, as that list remains almost entirely years-old live hits, Fortnite, Call of Duty, GTA Online, Overwatch 2 and Roblox. But Sony wants their own live game to be big on that platform. It was always bigger on Steam, but it’s declined significantly with no signs of recovery there.

Helldivers 2 was viewed as proof of concept that Sony really could break out and move into the live space with great success. But the last few months have proven how hard that success can be to maintain for even a short amount of time, given the well-established competition in these spaces.

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