Helldivers player numbers increase by 86% after latest update.
- Thread starter Jim Ryan
- Start date
It didn’t add much content but the game feels more fun to play IMO.
I'm part of that 86%, played last night for the 1st time in weeks, it was soo fun.
Imagine if they actually added an actual content drop. I'm really baffled by this studio but I'll give them till the end of the year to get their shit together
I don’t think they have the resources to produce content fast, because they’re small and never thought the game would be such a hit.
They want to stay independent though, so good luck to them trying to catch up to people’s expectations.
They made a shit ton of money they can afford to outsource the first major content drop while they get to working on the 2nd content drop which will set them up pretty good.
But the ex CEO was too busy sucking off PC players on Twitter to do his job, good thing he stepped down
What were the numbers before and after?
An 86% increase of three players isn't that impressive.
An 86% increase of three players isn't that impressive.
it crossed 100k concurrent for the first time since april
The day they added the Warbond, which includes plenty of cool stuff (including knives to throw, for the first time skins for the shuttle, Hellpod or mechs and the first armor where you see the skin of your character) they also released a huge update with a ton of buffs, improvements, minor additions and many fixes.
In a longer term view, we see that instead of drastically losing most of their CCUs a few days after launch Helldivers 2 shown a great user retention and slowly decreased until reaching a few days ago somewhat stable daily peaks of 50-60K CCUs daily peaks, where it seems started to stop its decrease and where it's going to stabilize for years (I'd bet around 40K CCU daily peaks).
This update made it (temporally) get higher CCU peaks of 75-90K CCUs, which may be bigger today or tomorrow because people plays more during weekends:
The update was the 14th:
The update made it jump in sales too, going back to be top 11-12 (right now it's top 12 but if not counting F2P, DLC and Steamdeck and we only count paid games, right now it's top 6 in Steam sales).
In the most played games, counting only paid games it's top 8 (some of the ones above it are due to heavily discounted in Steam sales).
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The update was a move in the positive direction for sure, but they somehow broke the spawn rates so now we're getting ridiculous amounts of enemies everywhere.
Apparently, this was unintended. What the hell is wrong is Arrowhead's QA team?
This is just another proof how that Alexus Kravchenko dude with his terrible balancing politics has probably caused the loss of many millions in mtx and new sales to Sony and Arrowhead. The game definitely lost all that momentum from the first couple of months.
Apparently, this was unintended. What the hell is wrong is Arrowhead's QA team?
Rather they're willing to return once the balancing is done to make the game more fun to play, instead of making it more frustrating.
This is just another proof how that Alexus Kravchenko dude with his terrible balancing politics has probably caused the loss of many millions in mtx and new sales to Sony and Arrowhead. The game definitely lost all that momentum from the first couple of months.
For some reason it feels like sometimes they or their shitty engine just inserts negative numbers into some variables. Like when explosions sucked you in instead of pushing you away, definitely the wrong sign on some force vector.
I know people want major content drops and more frequent, Sony would need to acquire them to give them that kinda support. Arrowhead is a small independent developer that wishes to remain independent.
It's that kind of catch-22 that sometimes works out or sometimes results in you never really accomplishing full potential.
They want to be independent and bet on themselves, but in order to do that, they really need to put every dollar they're making back into the business and grow themselves to scale, but even the money they're making probably isn't enough to scale the games content.
Building off of the existing engine is going to really hamper them moving forward. Rebuilding the game in a new engine or building Helldivers 3 in a new engine as quickly as possible would probably be in their best interest for long term growth.
Ultimately, you have to ask yourself if you're going to be tied to Helldivers in the future or if you want to take a bet on a new property outside of Sony.
If you're going to stick with Helldivers, you might as well sell to Sony and let them help ramp up the studio and rebuild the game from scratch in something like decima engine or unreal. Decima can be run on iOS and MacOS, though not sure how well.
Sony should ramp up their efforts around building decima as a multiplatform engine, which is what they'll almost certainly be doing and probably a reason why herman got promoted.
Hopefully the owners sell to Sony especially if they are feeling financially content after this game being such a smash hit that they didn't expect.
Either they want to stay independent (which is what it sounds like) or they're waiting for a bigger payday.
Ultimately, the answer here is to give the company a percentage of ownership into the brand and go from there.
Helldivers 2 has been such a hit that I assume Sony already signed with them Helldivers 3 and started early work to make a movie/tv show adaptation.
I assume they'll continue growing to at some point being able to work at the same time in Helldivers 2 and 3, but seeng they had issue growing maybe they may wait and for a while they may only work in Helldivers 2 until some point.
If Helldivers 2 post-launch monetization is successful enough, onsidering that in the future will expand to mobile too I'd design Helldivers 3 since the start as a PS, PC and mobile (which now also includes Mac) F2P game.
Regarding them being acquired or not, we know Totoki wanted to pause the acquisitions to resume them a few years later once the market conditions improved, and also wants to complete paying the related costs of the previous ones to improve profitability. Plus they will also get extra cash from selling the banks late next year.
So who knows, maybe around late next year or in 2026 may consider the acqusition. Or who knows, maybe they really want to continue independent even so many years after working only for Sony.
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the problem with them is that their dev pipeline is a mess and it seems to shift goals weekly and overreact to feedback and or whims of the creative directors, which seems to have persisted throughout the dev process which is why it took 4 years longer than intended, and also why their code seems to be made out of pure spaghetti. also they just started hiring more people in february so integrating the new people should only start showing results around now or even in a couple months. At some point I think they should take like 6 months off of updates and just refactor all their code to not break as soon as you touch it.