It looks like the release of Helldivers 2 has become the latest major PC game release. Even more surprisingly, it was published by Sony. This sci-fi third-person shooter from developer Arrowhead Game Studios was recently launched on Steam, along with the PlayStation 5 console, by Sony"s PlayStation Studios.
One day after Helldivers 2 hit Steam on February 8, the game quickly became the most popular PlayStation Studios-published title ever on Valve"s service, with 81,840 concurrent players. This weekend, the popularity of Helldivers 2 increased. According to SteamDB, the game brought in nearly twice as many concurrent gamers with 155,926 at its peak.
By comparison, the first Helldivers game, which was released in 2015 as a top-down shooter, had a peak concurrent player count of just 6,744 in October 2017, according to SteamDB. That game, by the way, was the first-ever PC title released by Sony Computer Entertainment for Windows.
At the time of this writing, Helldivers 2 is still the number one best-selling game on Steam and is the fifth game with the most concurrent players.
As we reported a day after the game"s launch, Helldivers 2 did have a number of release date issues, specifically with game crashes and matchmaking. Arrowhead released a patch on Steam Friday to fix some of those issues, and it did the same for the PS5 version on Saturday.
Arrowhead Game Director Mikael Eriksson said the following on the game"s official Discord channel this weekend (via Eurogamer):
The most important thing to highlight is that we"ve made additional improvements to matchmaking. A full matchmaking solution is in the works but will take a few more days to test and deploy. Thanks for your patience as we work through the last details.
Arrowhead has already revealed it has lots of plans for post-launch free content for Helldivers 2, although details about those additions have yet to be announced.