Helldivers 2 in a few weeks he achieved such success that he had exceeded everyone's wildest expectations: of the public, of the specialized press and even of the Arrowhead Games Studio authors and of those who hold the IP rights, namely Sony, which in its strategy devoted to GaaS perhaps he hit the mark with one of the first projects without even doing it on purpose.
But let's go step by step. On February 8, 2024, Helldivers 2 was launched simultaneously on PC and PS5, immediately recording excellent numbers and even beating those of titles from PlayStation Studios' famous franchises such as God of War and Marvel's Spider-Man, despite the marketing the game didn't seem to have been pushed that much, except with a few posts on the PlayStation Blog and a few fleeting appearances at PlayStation events. And there wasn't even who knows what driving force from the previous game in the series launched in 2015, if we think that on Steam it never went beyond 7,000 contemporary players, practically a tenth of those recorded by the sequel in the first few hours.
However, it was in the following weeks that the real surprise arrived. While multiplayer titles usually reach their maximum peak in the first few days after launch, for Helldivers 2 it was necessary to wait two weeks to reach the record of concurrent players on Steam of 458,00 users, truly excellent numbers which remained more or less similar to today's ones. Not without a few too many hitches: Arrowhead Game Studios had to increase the maximum server capacity limit several times, which was initially set at 250,000, proving that not even the authors themselves expected similar success. Even more surprising are the sales data from the USA and UK, where we are talking about sales that increase rather than decrease physiologically from week to week, a case that analyst Matt Piscatella summarized as a “rare and surprising achievement.”
To sum it all up, Helldivers 2 in the first hours of launch achieved extremely positive and widespread word of mouth within the gaming community, subsequently amplified by the press and content creators. The same recently happened also for Palworld, albeit on a larger scale, but with an important difference: if the Pocketpair phenomenon lasted a few weeks, Arrowhead Games Studio's shooter continues to grow after a month, grinding out constant numbers and for the At the moment it doesn't seem to show any signs of slowing down. And this is perhaps the most important result of all: cementing a solid base of players in the first few weeks is the first step to true long-term success, which is what really matters for a live service title. Clearly, now we will have to see if the game will be able to capitalize on this start with a bang in the long term.
The glass half full and the glass half empty
With hindsight, the success of Helldivers 2 seemed already written: an immediate and simple cooperative game in its dynamics, even playing with complete strangers, but also equipped with a surprising depth in its dynamics and a perfectly calibrated progression system, capable of pushing players to spend hours on hostile planets fighting insects and ugly, evil robots.
Yet, as already mentioned at the beginning, no one expected similar results. And if on the one hand the amazement on the part of the public and critics is understandable, on the other I wonder why within PlayStation Studios apparently there has been no real awareness of the game's potentialas demonstrated by the slow marketing before launch, despite the company's strategy now giving great importance to GaaS, so much so that it has started the production of a dozen titles of this genre and acquired Bungie for 3.6 billion of dollars practically for his know-how on the subject gained with Destiny.
So if on the one hand the high poppies of SIE are certainly smiling at the success of Helldivers 2, on the other the doubts on the part of the players are confirmed on the fact that perhaps Sony's PlayStation division has thrown itself too recklessly into this new strategy based on live server games, perhaps without having very clear ideas about what actually defines the success of this kind of production and what doesn't. In this sense, the hope is that the “stroke of luck” had with Helldivers 2 and the projects closed in recent months, in particular the multiplayer of The Last of Us and the project of the defunct London Studios, are a lesson.
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial team and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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