Helldivers 2 launched on PS5 and PC on February 8th and has had the most successful debut of any Sony Studios game on PC to date based on its peak player count.
UPDATE: Helldivers 2 has now managed an impressive 144,392 concurrent players, and looks like it may continue to grow.
ORIGINAL STORY: The relevant data comes from SteamDB which tracks all sorts of handy stats from Steam. According to them, Helldivers 2 hit a peak player count of 81,840 within the first 24 hours. That’s the highest concurrent player of any game Sony has published on PC, beating out God of War which previously held the record. No doubt these numbers will have been helped by Helldivers 2 launching day and date on PC, while Sony’s other games have typically come to PC years after debuting on console.
It’s also beating the recently released Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League which achieved just 13,459 players at its peak.
This is the current ranking of Sony-published games on Steam:
- Helldivers 2 (81,840)
- God of War (73,529)
- Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (66,436)
- Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition (56,557)
- The Last of Us Part I (36,496)
- Days Gone (27,450)
- Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (13,539)
- Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (10,851)
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (8,757)
- Helldivers (6,744)
Helldivers 2 is also holding the top sales spot on Steam as well.
In most cases, the player count will drop after the first few days of sale, but the recent Palworld has proved that isn’t always true. Arrowhead Games will be supporting the game with free content over the next year, though microtransactions are also in the game. It’s unclear if it’s intended to be a live-service game that runs for years. If so, it will be looking to find a consistent player count over the coming weeks and months. Currently, though, Helldivers 2 looks like it might be a more traditional co-op experience with a finite lifespan, which I fully support. Not everything needs to last forever.
We can also safely assume that it’s seeing a larger player count over on PS5.
The launch hasn’t been without issues however, a common occurrence these days. Server issues and crashes have plagued many players and are a large part of the reason Helldivers 2 has a ‘mixed’ rating on Steam. Thankfully the developers have already managed to push out a patch that seems to have helped alleviate some of the issues, and the review ratio is slowly leaning toward more positive reviews.