As someone who frequently tracks game performance on Steam due to the fact it’s the only place where this kind of exact data is freely available, it’s easy to see what’s doing well or poorly, though often that depends on the genre (single-player Starfield has lost 95% of its players since launch!).
But one game in particular continues to impress me, Helldivers 2, which has shown remarkable player retention since its launch in early February with yes, some level of drop-off, but nowhere near enough to boot it out of Steam’s top-played games list, where it routinely hangs out inside the top 5 at peak hours. On PlayStation, it remains the fifth most-played game as we speak, behind only eternal staples like Fortnite, Call of Duty, NBA2K and The Show.
On Steam, Helldivers peaked at 458 concurrent players toward the end of February, but it still retains 250,000 concurrents nightly. And now the game has shown that big “events,” like a recent mass Automaton invasion of the map, can cause huge surges. That latest development spiked concurrent players to 345,000 last week, over a 50% increase overnight.
I believe one of the core reasons for retention, other than it being you know, a very good game, is the way it handles its live content, which is both unpredictable but constant. Helldivers 2 does not launch “seasons” in the traditional sense. Rather they are frequently adding new enemy types, new cosmetics, and lately new weapons, stratagems and ship modules. They trickle out, but there’s always something to come back and grind for, reasons to keep playing outside of pure fun. But of course, there’s a lot of pure fun to be had.
The game remains the singular validation of Sony’s increased demand for live service game, but this is a level of success no one, even Arrowhead or Sony, could not have predicted, and we’ll see if they can make lightning strike two or three times like they need to. I do wonder how overall revenue may be for the game, as it is cheaper than most other games and its microtransactions are relatively easy to earn in-game. Great for players, but I wonder if Sony has an eye on long-term revenue goals to squeeze players a bit more than they’ve been squeezed so far. We’ll see.
For now, this remains one of the biggest success stories of the year. It debuted incredibly close to another miracle, co-op survival game Palworld, but it has retained players far better, though Palworld too is gearing up for significant new content later in the year, so we’ll see. Helldivers feels like the next thing other developers are going to try to ape, but it’s absolutely not going to be easy to replicate this kind of unique success.
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