Highlights

  • As of Feb 20, Helldivers 2 managed to surpass Counter Strike 2 in concurrent players on Steam.
  • Arrowhead continues to struggle with server capacity as player numbers grow rapidly, leading CEO to advise against buying for now.
  • Despite surpassing major player milestones, ongoing backend issues are starting to lead to mixed user reviews on Steam.

Even with ongoing login and server capacity issues, Helldivers 2 continues to grow, this time passing a new concurrent player total and overtaking the immensely popular shooter, Counter Strike 2. The immediate success of Helldivers 2 has been both a blessing and a curse for Arrowhead Game Studios, who has struggled to adapt to the massive player numbers attempting to log in. While the studio and team are happy to see the game become a major success, becoming the most concurrently played Sony published game on Steam, the backend issues have continued to hold the experience back.

While Arrowhead continues to work on increasing server capacity behind the scenes, it has gotten to a point where studio members are suggesting fans stop buying the game. Recently, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt responded to a fan wondering if they should buy the game, suggesting that Helldivers 2 is worth waiting for until the servers can support the current capacity. However, it seems most players can't wait to drop in as the concurrent numbers on Steam continue to rise, even bypassing a game that is consistently at the top of the charts.

helldivers 2 update 1.0 notes
Related
Helldivers 2 Releases Important New Update

Arrowhead Game Studios releases a new update for Helldivers 2 featuring fixes for matchmaking problems, game crashes, and much more.

According to the SteamDB charts, on February 20, Helldivers 2 hit another massive concurrent player milestone, coming in at a peak number of 457,649. As the player numbers continue to rise, potentially compounding an already rough server capacity issue, this latest achievement is significant in that the all-time peak number for Helldivers 2 was enough to unseat Counter-Strike 2 from the top spot at that time of the day, something which just typically doesn't happen. While recently updated to be a full-fledged sequel, the former CSGO is consistently near the top of the player charts, so to see another game bypass it entirely at any point in the day was surprising to many in the community.

Just How Many People Are Playing Helldivers 2?

As many made mention in the Reddit thread, the other element to this is that these numbers are only from the Steam side of the game, so there's no way of knowing specific player numbers over on the PlayStation Network. Clearly, the game is pulling in massive numbers, as Helldivers 2 has already passed many significant milestones, including overtaking Destiny 2's all-time concurrent peak on Steam as well as outperforming PSN stalwarts Fortnite and Call of Duty.

Unfortunately, some of the goodwill that the community has afforded Helldivers 2 during launch week appears to be slowly wearing off as many issues continue to persist. In fact, Helldivers 2's user rating on Steam has dropped to Mixed, as more and more players are leaving more negative based reviews and opinions related to the ongoing capacity and login problems. It's likely these opinions will change once Arrowhead can put an end to the current issues plaguing the game, but until then, things may continue to get a little worse before they get better.