Much fuss was made about Palworld’s rather fast decline from being the second most concurrently-player game in Steam history with 2.1 million players to dropping to 23,000 nightly players now a few months later. But it’s not a live game in the traditional sense, does not have frequent updates and it’s possible run out of stuff to do in time. Helldivers 2? That’s a bit different, but we are seeing a similar trend now.
Helldivers 2’s playercount has continued to decline and almost nothing the game has introduced since its original high has reversed that. It’s still doing well enough, 81,875 peak players as of last night, but it’s routinely outside the Steam top 10 now where it was once a fixture. And the overall trendline is continuing downward.
One main issue here is how Helldivers 2 issues content. It does not have traditional seasons that might spike interest. Instead, it slowly rolls out new tech to earn and new enemy types and new warbonds. There aren’t indicators that individual, major expansions are coming like we sometimes see with other live games.
If you look at the chart, there is really only one significant spike of players in the last two months, which was an early April plot twist where a huge fleet of Automatons invaded the top of the galactic map after seemingly being eradicated. That resulted in a surge of players briefly, but there have been no similar spikes since then. From that 345,000 peak, the game is now down to a quarter of that less than two months later.
Helldivers 2
I also think part of this is the story/major order structure in which there are few significant events, where everything just seems like a sort of push and pull of taking planets, losing them, and repeating that forever. It can feel a bit like shoveling sand in the desert. The mass Automaton invasion was cool, but it also felt like it just instantly undid a few weeks of progress.
In my mind, there are probably two major things that could result in a playercount surge to turn things around:
The arrival of the Illuminate – This is the alien enemy faction from the original Helldivers that have been glimpsed in the files already, and seem like they have a lot of prime real estate to take over in the south of the map. An entirely new faction seems like something that would definitely get a lot of players to return, provided there were cool new rewards to match.
The invasion of Super Earth – I thought this was where things were going with the Automaton fleet, but they were held back. An event that ends up being the literal invasion of Super Earth itself, complete with brand new maps (cities?) to fight and defend in would be a pretty epic event. It feels like it will happen someday, but it’s being saved for a rainy day.
It’s true that many games endure playercount declines over time, but given that Helldivers 2 is a live game with ambitions of staying around for the long haul, this trend of the line only going down and down is not where the game wants to be. I do think the Illuminate are coming soon, and we’ll see if players do in fact return when they show up.
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2024-05-28 12:36:45Z
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