Helldivers 2launched earlier today, and despite being considered a rather niche title in the run-up to launch, it’s already managed to pull in some impressive numbers. After less than 24 hours, Helldivers 2 has already managed to surpass games such asBaldur’s Gate 3,Call of Duty, andPalworldto top Steam’s Top Sellers list, only being outdone by Valve’s Steam Deck.
Helldivers 2’s popularity is only made more apparent when youcheck the game’s SteamDB page. At the time of writing, the game currently has at 24-hour player peak of 64,183, which is an incredibly impressive number of people when you consider it’s a school night and only has a chance of growing even further when we get to the weekend.
With this player peak, Helldivers 2 is also the third-biggest launch for PlayStation Studios on PC, overtaking the likes ofHorizon Zero DawnandThe Last of Us Part 1. OnlyMarvel’s Spider-Man RemasteredandGod of War(2018) have managed to rack up more players, which are in second and first place respectively, and Spider-Man’s silver medal is in jeopardy with only a few thousand more players than Helldivers 2.
Unfortunately, the launch of Helldivers 2 hasn’t been all roses, as the game has been smacked with a “Mixed” rating by fans. This is apparently due to some players experiencing almost constant crashes and issues with anti-cheat, with hundreds of negative reviews on the game’s Steam page. Some are also accusing Helldivers 2 of being pay-to-win despite it being a cooperative game, as the premium Battle Pass contains weapons instead of just cosmetics.
The game’s lead producer Alex Bolle has been responding to these reviews, explaining that the team is “doing our best to try and resolve the issues” and urging people to submit tickets to the game’s support page to try and pinpoint major problems. It also appears that developer Arrowhead Game Studios may have also squashed some of the main bugs causing problems, as director Mikael Erikssonreleased a statement on Twitterexplaining that a big patch was recently pushed out.
Fortunately, it doesn’t appear as though the PlayStation version of Helldivers 2 is experiencing as many issues, so you may want to consider grabbing it over there if you have the choice, or just simply waiting a week or so for Arrowhead to smooth out launch issues. Eriksson has explained that the team will continue working on any issues that crop up, so hopefully things will start picking up sooner rather than later.
