Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilestedt has explained the status of Helldivers 2.
Helldivers 2, based on Sony’s twin stick online multiplayer shooter, became a third party team shooter with live service elements. It released last February 8, 2024, on Windows and PlayStation 5.
Sony and Arrowhead did not provide review codes for the title well in advance, so we were not able to report on its metascore or previews. The title seems to have been received well at launch. Steam has 28,149 reviews showing the game has received mostly positive reviews.
SteamDB shows that it has reached a peak of 155,926 concurrent players since yesterday, but that metric has been uneven, presumably because of server issues. As of this writing, it shows 87,118 concurrent players.
Pilestedt shared this message to players:
“Thank you for your patience during the server maintenance. With it we deployed three “rapid-fixes” aimed at improving the situation with rewards often not being handed out properly, login-issues, and server capacity.
To speak in technical terms, our services as well as our partner services have a rate limited that denies connections beyond a volume per minute to prevent the entire system from failing. We managed to increase the rate limit from 10,000/min to 20,000/min and the total capacity of concurrent players was increased from 250,000 total to 360,000 total. This was however still not enough as the player count jumped to 360k after 5 ½ minutes.
As such, the issue with login remains. If for any reason you get the “Failed to connect to server” issue it means that the maximum number of login requests for that particular minute is exceeded and/or that the servers are full and will require someone to log out before allowing new players in. As mentioned above, the increased capacity should require less retries to get in.
As for the reward issue, the fix was mitigated but not resolved. And without additional server maintenance this will still not work as intended. If you get the issue you can try rebooting the game to increase the chances of it being reset. This is due to the high traffic on the servers leading to rewards not being tracked correctly by our servers.
I know the progression issue is frustrating, especially for newer divers that want to unlock sweet gear. For now, please once again accept our sincere apologies for the issues you’re facing and rest assured, we’re doing our utmost to make it right. In order to do so, right now it is crucial that our team gets some sleep and we will be back at this again in a few hours.”
In spite of its current issues, Helldivers 2’s early success is a positive sign for Sony. As many fans point out, they should take this as a sign that Sony can see more sales for their first party titles if they release their games on PlayStation and PC day and date.
We don’t know if Sony would do this for their scheduled ports of single player, frequently open world titles. But this will likely be how they will handle their other live service games in development, namely, Marathon, Fairgame$, and Concord. Which is likely for the best, as they are more likely to find fans in PC than on their own dedicated PlayStation fanbase.
