Arrowhead Game Studios has shared an important update for Helldivers 2.
As shared by Wario64 on Twitter, Arrowhead shared this message on their Discord:
“Hello Divers!
Earlier tonight we had server related issues with a concurrent player spike. This lead to some mission payouts failing, some players being kicked to their ships, or being logged out.
Our teams is working around the clock to solve these issues, While we’ve been able to mitigate some of the causes, we are still struggling to keep up with the scaling that is needed to accommodate all our Helldivers.
Therefore we’ve had to cap our concurrent players to around 450,000 to further improve server stability. We will continue to work with our partners to get the ceiling raised.
If you have progression related issues, please restart the game in order for things to sync back up. Thank you for your continued patience.”
Helldivers 2 is at the point where they are suffering from success. Which is to say that a AA game priced appropriately at $ 40 is experiencing more success than Arrowhead Game Studios wasn’t ready to deal with.
In other words, they have had to scale up their servers in the past week because they were prepared for a smaller base of players than they have right now.
As of this writing, SteamDB indicates that Helldivers 2 has reached a concurrent player peak of 409,367 players on Steam over the weekend. That puts them at the top 24 titles in the highest concurrent player records on Steam.
Now, just to put this in context, Helldivers 2 is live on both Steam and PlayStation 5. SteamDB’s numbers makes it looks like the cap should be enough to satisfy the playerbase. But if you factor in the PSN players, there are actually a lot of players who aren’t getting in to play.
In fact, Helldivers 2 players are all sharing an extra dimension to their playering experience; waiting hours on queue to get their turn to play. At least for now, the game is hype enough that players are willing to deal with the inconvenience. But if Arrowhead Game Studios wants to maintain that active player base, they will have to ramp up their servers to accommodate more players, and they should probably do it sooner rather than later.
With all that said, Helldivers 2 must be that good a game, for players to be waiting hours to get in.
