We talk a lot about peaks and flashes in the pan and player dropoffs in gaming, but Helldivers 2 is doing some pretty weird things to what we traditionally think of as a normal game sales curve.
Circana’s Mat Piscatella reports that after three weeks on the market, Helldivers 2 is actually still increasing in sales, making it an “honest-to-goodness inverse decay curve” at this point.
Sounds like fancy “I work for the NPD” jargon, but it’s really just defying the basic logic of how most games sell. Big at launch, then quickly trailing off as time goes on. But Helldivers 2 launched big and is still getting bigger. Even if that eventual dropoff is coming, it has been floating in the air like Wile E. Coyote running over a cliff. And even then, it’s still probably going to gently sail down back to earth.
That lines up at least somewhat with what we’re seeing from trackable playercount numbers on places like Steam. Helldivers 2 peaked at 458,208 players on February 24, but now? It still peaked at 440,473 players this past weekend. It may not be surging past those initial numbers but its “hold” is positively wild, indicating that even as OG players may expire, they are being replaced with fresh new ones all the time. Wait that sounds sort of familiar. But yeah, that’s just a 4% drop from its peak.
I got yelled at for pointing this out a while ago, but Palworld ended up losing two-thirds of its playerbase from its peak after two weeks. That was fine and good given that it had just set the record as the second-highest most concurrently played game in Steam history and it’s still widely-played, but it does show a contrast with Helldivers 2, which is much more focused on long term play and a constantly changing battlefield in a way Palworld is not. Both are considered major surprise hits this year, but Helldivers 2, even if it is not close to matching Palworld peaks, has a stranglehold on its playerbase since launch and sales of the game are actually increasing in time.
This is also before Helldivers 2 drops a major content update which will include mechs and a bunch of other new tech and toys. And eventually, another enemy faction to contend with. It’s a “live” game but without being annoying about it, which is also working to its advantage.
We will see how long Helldivers 2 can hold these sales and playercount figures. But what it’s done so far is extremely impressive and very rare to see.
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