It has gotten more fun grinding at extreme for samples, and helping out lower level players, since the buffing patch. The endgame is just kind of flat.
(edit): The article doesn’t go into how and why there was a decline, how Sony and Arrowhead kinda shot themselves in the foot with account linking. I think this would still be a fast moving train had they not tried to do that, and had the man power to focus on bugs, balance and battles at the same time.
Account linking happened May 6th. It is on the graph as point “A.”
There is a small increase in the decline of the player count, but you had already lost almost 200,000 players since the last peak on April 1st!
So between April 1st and May 6th the game went from around 370,000 players to around 170,000 players, and the current player count literally can’t drop the same level because that would be less than zero.
So, the bigger drop came way before account linking, friend. The game was already dying, and the account linking just firmly put it out of its misery.
You make mostly good points but its stupid to call the game dead or dying. They don’t currently have a bunch of players they never expected to have in the first place. They still sold their product to those people which makes it a huge net win for them. It’s a wildly successful game by any reasonable metric you can choose to evaluate it against.
Yea this is pretty much it. I meet online weekly to play something with some friends, after the third or fourth session I was just completely done with the game. It doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot to do after you’ve tried every mission type.
I hate how every game want to compete for current playtime.
I got way more than money’s worth out of this game, but I haven’t played in over a month. I hope that when I go back to it, there’s still a playerbase.
But like, the developers planned for at best to get 10% of what they did…
If they dropped that extra 90%, I don’t see why that should spell the end of the game. It’s the playerbase the game was designed for.
There’s just this weird “first or worst” mentality with a lot of studios. I hope this game is just given the room to stretch it legs over a decade or so. Something people might not always keep installed on their console, but still download once or twice a year to get some games in.
Games like that can be a success. Just because a lot of people burnt out doesn’t mean they’ll never play again.
It’s just games like that don’t maximize investor returns. They want to churn out hits that people play exclusively for 3 months then drop, only to buy the new one next year.
The game has lot of shitty online only mechanics, so while it would make a solid co-op game, it has the live service model and live service games need to keep a playerbase or they get shutdown. These types of games exist for one reason: microtransactions. They want to sell you bullshit.
That's why they need to compete for playtime. Their next game might not go viral, so losing a massive chunk of your playerbase like this is a problem.
But honestly fuck live service games and people shouldn't expect anything from them. They are made to milk your wallet.
Yeah, but their battle passes never expire, and you don’t have to spend real money to get one.
They never expected it to go viral, they budget to go at least a year of story driven campaign and they probably made enough to pay for that times 10 already.
They don’t need to nickel and dime the user base, if anything they can sell less premium shit.
I’ll put my two cents in. I never bought the game because of the invasive anti cheat. I was still tempted until they required PlayStation account linking.
I didn’t get it initially because it looked very repetitive and cheesy (in a bad way). Some of my friends played it which made me look into it and by the time I may have gave in and tried it they introduced account linking and I full noped out of it.
Sony didn’t go through with account linking in the end. However you cannot purchase the game in the (numerous) countries where PSN isn’t allowed. If you had already bought it (and didn’t refund), you can keep it.
Like every PvE game which does not have hundreds of people working to churn out content, its playerbase will dwindle until only those who do not get bored by its gameplay stick around. Whether it’s Left 4 Dead, Payday, Deep Rock Galactic or Vermintide, those types of games follow this pattern…
And I for one, see no fucking issue with that. It’s a great game, people play it until they have had their fill and then move on. Helldivers 2 is only an outlier because of how hard it hit at launch. It absolutely does not have the content pipeline to keep a large playerbase engaged, so yeah it will not keep printing a lot of money, just a little bit every now and then.
Now excuse me as I go and spread some managed democracy.
That’s a good point. An online game can be successful while having a limited shelf life. Make your money and shut it down (or just ramp it down for the smaller audience if it’s worth the effort)
Basically this. Anyone who is surprised by this has been paying literally zero attention to how these things usually go. The majority of the time when a game explodes that much, this happens. Sometimes to a lesser extent, sometimes to a greater one. A good chunk of the people who buy the game in the first place buy it to play with their friends, and when their friends move on to another game, they will too.
While you will have games that are the exception, such as PUBG which has had massive a player count for forever. they are indeed the exception.
Because PvP is basically infinite free content for people who like the game loop. I’ve had friends who love that sort of thing and they can play forever because they’re putting their skills against real people who aren’t just basic AIs.
Yeah, most players will play a game for a bit and then move on. It’s rare to get attached to a game and play it forever, and if you do, you likely only have one game like that. There’ll be people who play Helldivers 2 for years, but it doesn’t seem set up like an MMO so is unlikely to get the same long term traction.
Without any real sense of progression, I just couldn’t find a reason to play unless I had a friend who was already online and playing. Unlocking new weapons and whatnot is fun until its not, and when I don’t have the minutia that comes with an MMO or the randomness that comes with a rogue-like, I don’t have anything to look forward to from the next run. There was no surprise to the game, and the initial luster faded pretty quickly when I realised what the treadmill was going to be. If there had been a more single player focused bit to it, I may have lasted longer, but being so heavily reliant on a party meant it was a group of friends, or some randos that are going to waste my time.
More accurate to say that the initial success surge has calmed down to their core audience.
That 10% or fewer depending on if it’s still shrinking will be the rock and stoners that keep this game running well into the future.
You’ll probably see a similar spike then fall off then consolidation when The Forever Winter releases. That core community revenue is probably going to be what FunDog is planning on using for future projects and to cover the maintenance costs of TFW. I mean either that or they’ll power the servers by kidnapping the playerbase and harvesting their organs and bioelectricity but it was really their own fault for not being able to get out of sight before nightfall.
Naturally there is always going to be a certain amount of player decline over time, but I have to wonder how much of this could have been saved had Sony not created a PR nightmare for the game with the required PSN account linking.
That said, I'm sure there's going to be a sharp spike in players very soon, as Arrowhead should be releasing a new enemy faction into the game very shortly, which is going to bring a lot of players back again for a while. Hopefully they'll find a way to keep those players interested again.
All games like this have massive daily player drop offs a few months after release.
To be honest despite the publicity, most players don’t actually give a shit. Most players don’t read gaming news. And many players don’t care, either because they already have a PSN account, or they just don’t care about making another account to play the game.
I wouldn’t be surprised if over half the players had never even heard of the PSN controversy at all. The SteamDB player chart actually indicates when those shenanigans were compared to player numbers, and the daily player numbers had already been declining at that same pace for a month up to that point and continued at about the same rate after.
All games like this have massive daily player drop offs a few months after release.
This makes me feel super old, because I must have played Quake 1 daily for 8 straight years. Same with Counter-Strike. I’m still not used to people changing games every few months.
Of course. I’m not an idiot, clearly there are people affected.
But even if EVERY Helldivers 2 sale were affected, of the 1.85 BILLION estimated PC gamers in the world, we would be looking at around 0.6% people affected. It’s a tiny sliver, despite Helldivers having over 12 million sales (and that’s both PC and console).
The fact of the matter is this doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme, and most people have likely never even heard of the game still even with the controversy. The industry is unfathomably massive and one game is tiny, even one with 12+ million sales.
The player base was always going to decline significantly.
It doesn’t have the same kind of slow grind and wide open maps with tonnes of things to interact with that kept up the populations of a game like WoW or Overwatch, so it was going to naturally decline anyway as most people got their fill of the game play and move on to the next game. Anything that is comparable either had a ton of content that was drip fed or has random loot boxes to keep people playing. This game lets you earn enough to play even the highest levels of play fairly quickly, with getting everything taking a bit longer.
The remaining population is actually pretty high for this kind of game, and it is far from dying. I play randoms when friends aren’t on even though I have unlocked all the upgrades to earn myself medals, but also to help out the other players because the game does promote team play even with all the accidental team kills. I never have to wait when there are more than 1,000 players on a planet, and the there are often several planets with several thousand even when people aren’t grouped up for major orders.
The community is engaged and while there will certainly be more of a decline as time passes, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game gets a significant bump in player activity (old players coming back) when they introduce the next faction. Probably not double whatever population is there when it hits, but maybe 50% increase as people come to check out the new content. I think the rapid release was their original plan to keep the player base going and I’m happy they slowed down to address bugs and do quality of life improvements for a bit.
This game also has the most friendly, or at least least antagonistic, player base I have ever experienced in an online game. Although most random games don’t have anyone speak up unless I do first, people help each other out, attempt to get everyone out, and there is often hugs on the ship after extraction. I have only had one player grief in dozens of random games and one match had someone who was rude. Far, far fewer negative experiences than any other game I’ve played.
It may get down to 3% of the highest number of players and will still be alive and kicking for those that do enjoy the game play.
Maybe this will get lost as Just Another Comment but…
I feel like subscription services should actually serve as a true platform for those kinds of games. Something like joining a party playing Game X, and while you play your round(s), Game Y, or a slice of Game Y is downloading. When you finish your round of Game X you get switched to Game Y and it goes on and on, with some kind of voting on the next game.
There is a whole infrastructure dedicated for this required, and nevermind the multiplatform issues.
It just feels like the interactive nature of gaming would deliver one the one issue of streaming services where “there’s nothing to watch”. The cynic in me sees this as just another place to cram ads.
To be honest, the nerfs killed it and the buffs didn't go to the things we enjoyed playing with like the quasar. It went to a lot of other things, but we came back and it still felt awful
Not to criticize something people enjoy but I bought it and hated the hell out of it. I genuinely consider even its temporary popularity a sign of the decline of shooter gaming as a whole (that or I’m just bored of the genre after playing entirely too much Destiny)
I also learned that the PS Store doesn’t let you do returns anymore, even if you’ve only played about twenty minutes, so fuck off forever Sony, I guess.
Point is, I wonder how many of these players were actually that active in the first place? I bought it because it was basically going viral, and simply could not return it, unlike Palworld.
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