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Helldivers 2 has lost 80% of its Steam player base in less than four months

Tahmid Shihab

Published: 07:50, 24 May 2024

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Sony

Helldivers 2 has lost 80% of its Steam player base in less than four months

Have Helldivers 2 players had enough of sweet Liber-tea?

Key Points from the Article

Helldivers 2, a sci-fi shooter, achieved great success but faced a significant decline in the player base since release.
The game lost 80% of its active player base in less than four months after its worldwide launch.
The main reasons for the decline include a lack of planet variety and abrupt balancing changes, which have left players with a narrow weapon pool.
Unnecessary gameplay balancing changes, such as reducing patrol units and introducing Warbond releases, have also contributed to player dissatisfaction.

Have Helldivers 2 players had enough of sweet Liber-tea?

Dark days lie ahead for the ones who fight for liberty, as Helldivers 2 has lost 80% of its player base in less than four months since launch.

Sony brought home the bacon with Arrowhead's co-op live-service title Helldivers 2, which made a huge leap of success thanks to its engaging gameplay loop and immaculate developer support.

While everything was going great for Helldivers 2, Sony decided to anger the community on PC by adding mandatory PSN account linking, which resulted in the game being delisted in 177 countries on Steam and massive outrage from the player base. Fortunately, Sony rolled back these changes, but the damage was already done.

Helldivers 2 is now facing a new, perhaps even bigger, issue at hand. The game has lost 80% of its active player base in less than four months after its worldwide launch on PC and PlayStation 5. This is a massive decline for a multiplayer game so let's take a deeper look at what is actually going on with Helldivers 2.

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Helldivers 2's unfortunate player base decline

Aside from Sony's PSN account debacle, Helldivers 2 is facing a plethora of issues that have contributed to the player base decline.

If you take a look at the game's player count charts on SteamDB for the last week, Helldivers 2 reaches around 65,000 players on a weekday. The situation is better during the weekend when the player count reaches around 95,000 but this is still far from the massive player count that the game had on launch and in following weeks.

SteamDB

Helldivers 2 player count on Steam since the game launched back in February 2024

Helldivers 2 had an all-time peak of 450,000+ players 3 months ago and averaged around 200,000–350,000 players on a daily basis during March and the first half of April. Today, it's far from that.

Some of the main reasons behind such a decline are the lack of content variety and dev updates. Players argue that the game lacks planet variety while the abrupt balancing changes have proven to be quite unpopular among the community.

While the lack of planet variety is an issue that can be overlooked, the balancing changes are what players are frustrated about the most. Arrowhead has made too many changes to the majority of weapons in the past few months, which has led to players being left with a narrow weapon pool.

In one of the Reddit posts in the Helldivers 2 subreddit, a user commented on the unnecessary gameplay balancing changes such as the cutdown of patrol units in all maps that have taken away the chaos factor of Helldivers 2. The comment has nearly 3k upvotes. Others added that the game has over 100 planets but keeps rotating the same ten planets over and over again.

Players comment on why Helldivers 2 is losing its player base.

In addition, players highlighted the Warbond release which led to additional weapon balancing changes, rendering many weapons useless. Players are convinced that the abrupt weapon nerfing is an obvious move to push the sales of Warbonds.

While Arrowhead has stated that they will be slowing down on updates for a while, it's imperative for them to focus on adding content variety and providing players with a wide range of weapon selections with higher efficiency. Helldivers 2 still has the potential to become a generational game, but only if future updates are planned to cater to what the player base really wants.