Helldivers 2 doesn’t seem to have maintained its initial player base.
As reported by Paul Tassi for Forbes, the Sony published second party game reached a player peak of 458,709 players close to its launch. Four months later, that has dipped to 44,093 players, which represents a drop of 90 % of that player base.
Tassi looks at the game design to explain this dip, as well as decisions made by the game’s developer, Arrowhead Game Studios. While Helldivers 2 acted as the game’s publisher, this is a second party title, since they do not own Arrowhead.
That gave Arrowhead room to make some decisions on the game of their own volition, and one of those decisions was to make player friendly monetization. Like other live service games, Helldivers 2 has several different currencies, designed to give you different rewards. The most valuable currency can be purchased with real money, and can give players an advantage over those who don’t pay for more.
But Arrowhead chose to make it easy to earn their most premium currency from playing the game, even more than other live service games do. To quote Tassi verbatim:
“Great for us, not ideal for Sony where the entire point of this format is significant recurring revenue, and even less ideal with 90% fewer players than at launch.”
Helldivers 2 also does not have a season pass or a laid out plan for expansions. Ostensibly, this allows Arrowhead to prepare those expansions in their own time, or possibly, not go forward with expansions and maybe work on other titles.
But this certainly looks like a case where Arrowhead could have made compromises to make their fans happy. Having a season pass where players know there is content to look forward to in the future is not necessarily exploitative in itself. Players can feel that they are being exploited if that content is being churned out so quickly and consistently that the game demands you keep playing constantly.
On the other hand, if that content was planned as part of the game release, perhaps to roll out in the first two years of the game to make those first players satisfied, that could be sufficient to keep players satisfied. That is, of course, how Nintendo plans out their Splatoon content rollout.
But there’s another issue that Tassi does not bring up, and he may not have any qualitative data to do so. Since Sony retroactively pulled Helldivers 2 from regions that do not have PSN, it’s possible that a large number of those players that stopped playing the game came from those regions.
If this is the case, than it’s really doubtful that Arrowhead can build their player base back to that number again. We do know that the PSN requirement was always intended to be there, but there is no way to see this as anything other than unnecessary damage. It also suggests that that success Helldivers 2 received early on is the most that Sony will see for their live service multiplayer games on PC; and it’s doubtful Concord or other games will even come close to that half a million concurrent player number.
