Helldivers 2 surpasses GTA 5’s highest player record on Steam

Helldivers 2 The second weekend saw a repeat release as the PlayStation-funded co-op shooter reached new levels of popularity and its servers struggled to keep up with demand.

On Steam, Arrowhead Game Studios’ homage to Starship Troopers had been attracting more and more players throughout the week, reaching a peak of over 155,000 concurrent players on Sunday, February 11th. Then the number of players suddenly skyrocketed over the weekend. peaked at 409,367

on Sunday, February 18th.

To put it in perspective, this is higher than Grand Theft Auto 5is the highest player count ever on Steam and sits just outside the current top 5 games on the platform, behind it Apex Legends. It’s a huge success – albeit a far cry from the 2.1 million concurrent players recorded by Palworld on Steam three weeks earlier.

Palworld has since declined to daily highs of around half a million players, but Helldivers 2 could reach even more people – not least because Arrowhead is able to limit the number of players who can access it to keep the servers stable.

On Saturday, as players surged, Arrowhead warned that its efforts to increase server capacity were once again overtaken by player numbers, causing login issues for many players. Early Sunday, the developer published a post on Helldivers Discord

that the number of concurrent players has been capped at 450,000 – presumably on both Steam and PlayStation 5 – to improve server stability and prevent failed mission payouts and player disconnects. “We are still struggling to keep up with the scale required to accommodate all of our Helldivers,” the studio said.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Arrowhead released a new patch for the game, which, in addition to bug fixes, also made some crucial balance adjustments. The difficulty of the defensive events that had frustrated players since the start of Automaton Enemies has been reduced. But the missions “Suicide”, “Impossible” and “Helldiver” became more difficult, and in “Eradicate” both the mission timer and the difficulty level were increased.

Helldivers 2 was a huge success for Sony in its first experiment with releasing a PlayStation Studios game on Steam and PS5 simultaneously. With its wildly entertaining co-op gameplay, it’s designed for virality and could achieve serious success. Sony has insisted that its major first-party franchises will appear on the PlayStation first – but when it comes to releasing live games, its experience is mixed Helldivers 2 could force a rethink.