Helldivers 2 is so popular, there's a concurrent player cap to deal with its server issues

For video games, the month of February has belonged to Helldivers 2. The sci-fi third-person shooter from developer Arrowhead and publisher PlayStation Studios has continued to gain popularity on the PC and PS5 platforms with more and more players buying it and going online.

On Steam, the highest concurrent player count for Helldivers 2 was hit on Saturday with 333,827 gamers online at once. It remains the top-selling game on Steam at $39.99, and even its more expensive $59.99 "Super Citizen" bundle edition, with some extra in-game items, is in third place. There's no word on the player counts for the PS5 version.

However, Helldivers 2 continues to deal with overloaded servers, as Arrowhead clearly didn't anticipate the popularity of the game. On Saturday evening, the developer announced on the game's official Discord channel (via VG247) that a surge of new players online has resulted in "some mission payouts failing, some players being kicked to their ships, or being logged out."

While the team says it is fixing some of these issues, it also added that it is "struggling" to get its servers scaled up to deal with the influx of players. It added:

Therefore we've had to cap our concurrent players to around 450,000 to further improve server stability. We will continue to work with our partners to get the ceiling raised. If you have progression related issues, please restart the game in order for things to sync back up. Thank you for your continued patience

Arrowhead announced on X (formerly Twitter) earlier this week that it decided to increase the amount of player XP that can be earned by 50 percent this weekend. This was an attempt to make up for a bug that caused some players to not get their rewards properly at the end of missions. It also added some new and very hard Defense Missions this week where players are battling AI-based Automatons.