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After Initial Success, Helldiver’s 2 Has Lost 90% Of Its Players With No Signs Of Recovery
[REMOVED][R3: Low Effort]I can't keep playing the same game forever.
Yeah, the lack of variety of everything was part of it for me. The landscape, the weather, the lighting, the missions, the weapons, all of it. The other part of it is that what you have is just depressing, it’s all grey hellscape. Like why are we fighting for this shitty rock, ain’t nobody wanna live here! Let’s try this, just hear me out…nuke them from orbit!
Having the same gameplay in abandoned urban areas could be very cool tho
I never liked mindless horde shooters. It's like , you do the same thing over and over again with no variety. Just different environment.
Needs something to do, like story missions mixed with combat , exploring and stuff. But yeah...
Remember Left 4 Dead? Pepperidge Farms remembers...
Guess live service game doesn't fit for you.
Edit: Just said that live service games require lots of time and he said he don't want to spend much time on 1 game so I said it doesn't fit him.
I don't know why I get downvotes, I'm not even play Helldivers 2.
I played Deep Rock Galactic for about 400 hours. Give it a try!
Rock and STONE brother!
I pressured three of my co-workers to buy Helldivers 2, and now all of us got bored of it at 10-15 hours mark, we haven't touched it for two months.
Desperately need a new co-op game, would I enjoy DRG if I don't really enjoy Helldivers 2? Any notable differences, pro, or cons?
Pros: You get to be a Dwarf
Cons: None
There are too many good ones. I mained Destiny 2 for years, but that game required all of your time.
I like the ones you can dip in and out of - I play Helldivers couple times a month now, but there are too many unplayed games in my catalogue to carry on playing a game just to play it.
If a live service game sees a spike in engagement and spending when they release new content, that's fine, but to expect people to play nothing but their game is just too much.
Maybe it's just me but I only play 1-2 games at the same time. It's also a benefit for me that when I get bored of those 2, I still have time and opportunity to try other new and fresh games that I didn't have any chances to play them before.
I’m pretty much the same way. I have a decent backlog of games but I take them 1-2 games at a time and that keeps me entertained.
Things is, a lot of games nowadays are live service and they all want you to keep playing it forever.
But that's just not feasible in the long term.
Reddit is a harsh mistress.
Haven't played helldivers 2 in a while but isnt the only thing they add are new guns and skins?
Would like to see some more levels and enemies
The gameplay loop is boring after a little while so this isn't surprising
I quit after about 20 hours waaaaaay back because doing the same thing over and over with a slightly different gun and a slightly different explosion isn't fun in the slightest
I have played it only 3-4 hours and my only question was, “is this it?” And responses from everyone was yes. It really seems like the game is very much the same thing over and over again.
game is very much the same thing over and over again.
That's all that's necessary if the gameplay loop is fun. A lot of multiplayer games are like that.
You are correct. I’m not sure why it feels repetitive when I can play the “same” football game over and over or used to play the same cod/halo/etc game over and over. Maybe I just don’t love the gameplay loop so that is why it feels repetitive.
Hey I put like 60 hrs into it but at some point doing the same thing over and over is fruitless. Each new war bond is like "here's some crappy weapons"
Player count is only a problem if you want to sell microttansactions.
You think Elden ring has retained 10% of the people after people finish the game?
They can do maybe 2 playthroughs, but then they'll go play something else.
It's as good as saying number of theaters running infinity war is now 0, so it's a failed movie.
Why are you comparing live service game with single player game?
hell divers wasn't that reliant on playercount to earn money. It's not a free to play game that needs to recover costs by selling a lot of microttansactions.
For a paid game, long term microttansactions revenue from active playerbase isn't that big of a deal.
That's not true at all. If it's a live service game, the entire point of it is an ongoing revenue stream. Not only that, but as the article rightly points out, this was Sony's first opportunity to show they can make a live service game work.
If you want live service and microttansactions filled games to work, you make it free to play to invite people.
You're just not targeting the same market segment if it's a paid thing.
It is definitely different, and we have no idea if Sony considers this a successful live service game or not. But the point of the game is ongoing revenue, not just one time launch revenue. We have definitely seen a lot of these types of games fail, though.
yo bro, you want some new weapons with unique abilities? fuck you we're removing the unique ability a week later. Looking at the liberator concussive, eruptor and slugger, or the knives that still alert enemies when thrown.
there's too many games out their already doing the same co-op horde shooter and most do it better without demolishing the fun with nerfs a week after they release.
The Eruptor is best gun and I don't care who says otherwise. OUR LOVE IS PURE AS MOUNTAIN SNOW.
Yeah, that's normal
Maybe not ideal for a live service I guess. A successful one at least. Am sure Sony expects at least Destiny 2 levels of stable player base.
Well maybe if idiots from Sony didn't stop selling the game in over 190 contries...
Sony has been avoiding these countries as long as there've been PlayStations, they just don't enforce measures against illegitimate registrations and sales done through neighbouring countries.
No need to put extra work in translations, judicial compliance, payment services, still as much profit.
It was the Helldiver PC players that forced their hand on Steam by whistle blowing.
AFAIK the latest Sony game that's they don't sell in over 190 countries was their biggest release yet, so they don't have an incentive to care about those countries...
Because obviously countries like Zimbabwe are massive gaming hubs. Dumb Sony.
Ah, yes, Zimbabwe is the only fucking country you could come up with for your argument. China? Hello?
But you can play helldivers 2 in china.
It still has around 40.000 concurrent which is still a pretty big market.
It's doing fine, people are getting fed up with live service grinds demanding 100% of your time. This game doesn't need keeping up with the Joneses as a Destiny would, it's a lot more casual dropping out and picking it up again.
Each new warbond warrants a few days extra playing if you unlocked everything already. As long as people pay for that every other season it's enough.
Dev investment in new content is pretty minimal compared to Destiny: outside of warbonds people are amused enough with a new metagame objective, enemy type, stratagem and passive every few months.
The devs just need learn to make one of the new warbond weapons OP so people have an idea of missing out if they don't pick it up, and tune it down a week or two before the new one lands.
Lol, this game is a heavy grind if you want to unlock a warbond by just playing.
I never said otherwise, just that the game will be financially viable if players buy a warbond every so often, since content is much cheaper to make than Destiny.
No cutscenes, elaborate levels / backdrops, boss fights that are going to be obsolete when you've increased your gear score.
Also, it's much easier to jump back into Helldivers after you've been away, you never lose your warbonds, so you can cherry pick your rewards.
Yes it’s especially normal for these games that overachieve and get huge numbers at launch. Just like palworld, lost ark, etc.
Even world of Warcraft lost 64% of its players just a few months after WoW classic released.
I am not calling Helldivers 2 a failure. Its big launch should still be considered a hit and it surpassed all expectations back then. But this is not a trajectory you want to see for a live, ongoing game. The game has not been among PlayStation’s top 10 most played list in a long time, as that list remains almost entirely years-old live hits, Fortnite, Call of Duty, GTA Online, Overwatch 2 and Roblox. But Sony wants their own live game to be big on that platform. It was always bigger on Steam, but it’s declined significantly with no signs of recovery there.
Damn it's not even on Playstation's top 10. On Steam it's currently at 36-41k daily peak, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Give me a goal, or a new enemy or something. The gameplay is fun, but I'm not running in circles forever with nothing to be gained by more runs
There've been new objectives, perils, worlds and enemies released every so often. At-at's, Shriekers, Gunships, plus their bases and patrols were introduced without previous notification.
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My biggest issue with the game is feeling like the devs have this unhealthy fixation on nerfing anything that gets too popular. Not to mention unwillingness to listen to public feedback. But hey at least there's always a new warbond around the corner full of the same uninteresting armor mods, anemic weapons and broken promises of fixing something.
They reversed this trend after player feedback and buffed everything in the last big patch.
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Not everything, a great many weapons remain nerfed as before and the game's problem with needing anti-tank weaponry above anything else at 8+ difficulty remains. My Quasar is still on a 15s cd.
That and fighting bots is one of the most frustrating experiences over time. I just can't be bothered anymore.
Not enough
Also the weird hate regarding DLSS from the CEO and his unwillingness to implement that
You probably didn't notice the most recent major update. They actually buffed a huge amount of the underused stratagems, and fixed a lot of stuff, too, including the Spear.
What happened to the big announcement that posts regarding player count would be deleted? Did the mods realize that would be too much work?
I played this for 100+ hours in like 2 months,so i got super burnt out. The game is great and this is natural, I'll probably come back after a couple more updates now that theyve changed their approach to balancing and patching since that completely ruined the game for me and a lot of others.
Been waiting to see the cycle roll around again. Game gets unrealistically popular due to hype on release, levels out to normal counts after a few months, and then everyone starts screaming that it's dying, or overrated, or generally bad.
40K players. More than a healthy amount. If anything, I'm glad we're down to a lower playerbase since now they can balance the war requirements without everything getting instantly steamrolled.
That is the expected thing for a live service game. 40k concurrent players is very good regardless of what you think of the game.
Cudos to the devs for making such a great game.
It's normal for games to lose players over time. Some take breaks, some leave for good. The way games deal with this is to have a steady stream of new players coming in to replace them. Unfortunately, HD2 is a bit limited here since so many people don't have access to the game. I'm sure the playerbase will remain steady and not crash to really low numbers. But for now, hovering around 50k is the most realistic target for this game.
This is what you call "clickbait"
The game is an immense success, by every measure, and remains in Steams top played games on a regular basis.
Playerbase is still big enough for a healthy community. Matchmaking is fast.
This happens for 99% of games with hyped launches. Retaining players is horribly hard. Has nothing to do with Sony or Helldivers devs
Got a bit redundant after I unlocked everything I needed
I can spend 600+ hours on a game like thedivision or warframe: They have very repetitive gameplay loops, but the RPG elements and other features can keep me playing for years. Helldivers lack more solo progression systems.
I'll probably buy this game cheap once it has a lot more content.
Yeah, looks like a good game, but I’m waiting for a big sale
It's great the first 30 h or so, good fun. I got my money's worth
The June mega patch saw a massive jump to a DAU of over 90k on Steam. There’s a lot of life left in the game.
Sony should be thinking about expanding the title to Xbox.
No chance they will lol
Capital G Gamers are so obsessed with sales numbers and player numbers it's kinda insane.
it's not enough to just like a game, they have to know their media is 'winning'.
Yeah, I mean why would anyone care what kinds of games are successful and more likely to be funded in the future, or care whether a game they play still has players? Those heckin Gamers, it makes no sense!
Yeah the player number posts are boring. Why should I care that people stopped playing a game where there's no depth, no PvP, and it's running the same missions repeatedly. This would be interesting if it was an article about Fortnite but it's about a PvE game with no modding lol.
Edit: Case in point with these replies lmao. Again, player count literally doesn't matter for a PvE game like this one from a player perspective. Even with the map progression meter, you could still play this game normally with 1000000 people or 10.
It was meant to be a live service game with the same expectation of player retention as Fortnite and Destiny
For whatever reason dev didn't implement any of the things you mentioned
I have no idea where you got that from. They absolutely were NOT expecting anywhere near that kind of player retention. The devs said their most optimistic predictions for peak concurrent players at LAUNCH was around 50k, which is about what they have now, several months later. They're still well above their expectations for the game.
Do you not understand the difference between player retention and player count?
"Player Retention" is ambiguous and could refer to player count or current percentage of peak or any number of other metrics that can represent how many players stick around.
If you want to talk about what percent of the peak are still playing, then it has about 9% of it's peak numbers, beating Fortnite (currently has about 5% of its peak) and only slightly behind Destiny 2 retention between content releases (about 12% of peak).
Lmao stop bullshitting
Player retention have only one meaning: the percentage of players that still keep playing currently compare to previous time period
Just because you don't know what it means doesn't mean you can just invent shit and pretend it's true
That certainly is A copy/paste definition from some random website I've never heard of at the top of Google's search results, but not the only metric used to discuss player retention. Regardless, your original point still doesn't hold. Helldivers 2 is doing fine with player retention.
Just because you never work with user numbers doesn't mean everyone is like you lol
User retention is like one of the most basic metric in any business
And no, it's not doing well. Even Helldivers dev knows that
What are you, a high schooler?
Ok, I'll say this again: by that metric it's about on par with Destiny and outperforms Fortnite. If Helldivers is a failure then so are those games.
The game has lost me after the first balancing patch which nerved the railgun and fucked up the whole game balance.
I enjoyed the hell out of the game, put about 100 hours in. But yeah, I've just kind of had my fill. It's a great gameplay loop but it can't be sustained indefinitely. No shade to Arrowhead, the game's great, just dunno what people expected.
I don't understand how they got away with their 10e passes.
Maybe if Sony didn't shotgun itself in the foot with the account debacle, it would be doing better. I know I haven't played it since then and I didn't buy Ghosts either.
I'm more surprised it has so many players still. It's literally doing the same missions over and over again. Something like L4D2 or DRG at least has modding.
It's got a very stale gameplay loop.
I quit when they announced the PSN account bullshit, and I didn’t go back afterward. None of the group I played with went back either.
I gave up after having to relearn how to have fun with the game after every patch. I'd start to feel good with a weapon and then get hit with a patch that made my favorite feel like a squirt gun. The first few times, I'd find another loadout that was fun and then that would get hit. I swear the cycle happened about 5 or 6 times before I finally gave up.
Oh, and seeing their balance guy and community team mock my concerns didn't help, either. All the while PC performance seemed to be getting worse.
It was exactly my type of game. Fun, low-stakes and able to be played in small chunks. It's a real shame what happened to that game.
They sold over 12 million copies so I’m sure they’re fine.
I got 60 hours or so out of it which is more than worth what I paid. It's just how things are, games like this have a huge player base initially which drops way down. Nothing for the devs to worry about, it's still doing numbers on steam.
Like every game, ever. This is not news
I was hoping it’d get a discount for summer steam sale. The fact that it’s never gone on sale probably isn’t helping here.
Such is the fate of pretty much all live service games. I imagine even the successful ones like League or Fortnite have a consistent population that is a fraction of their peak playercount. But 35,000 on steam is still a very active playerbase. That's a couple times more than Vermintide 2 has been and that game still gets active development.
The real issue of course is buried in the article which is that it's Playstation population is much worse than on PC, which will likely irritate Sony for some reason.
Not a game to play constantly. Pick up with some friends for a game night or so then move on to something else until the itch returns
It was just flavor of the month. The gameplay loop was never going to last
Similar games like the tide games and DRG have lasted literal years with stable playerbases. HD2 is just horribly mismanaged and people are fed up with it.
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7d
Ah yes, all those uninhabited islands and TEST_COUNTRY can't play the game now
It didn't. Considering how well Ghost of Tsushima did, the PSN account requirement meant nothing.
Edit: Doesn't matter that one is single-player and the other is multiplayer. If that region-blocking issue had any real impact, it would have been noticeable in Ghost of Tsushima, yet it did better than all the other single-player games from Sony.
Two very different cases, Ghost of Tsushima is a single player game, Sony doesn't care about it's longevity. And when it released everyone already knew who could buy it or not, if it needed a PSN account or not, and it wasn't taken from people's hands after they paid for the license to use the game.
Helldivers 2 was supposed to be their golden goose, live service game, and the whole PSN backlash was around that game, mostly. If you don't see the correlation between losing almost 90% of the player base a few months after the game's launch and two whole fiascos (PSN Login and taking the game away from people in more than 170 countries), I don't know what to tell you.
If you don't see the correlation between losing almost 90% of the player base a few months after the game's launch and two whole fiascos
They already lost 75% of players at that point before any of those fiascos even happened.
And you think they didn't lose more players because of it?
Sure they lost some players because of it, but the amount of players they lost was so little that there was no noticeable decrease in players when it happened. If you look at the steam charts graph it is impossible to tell when the drama happened, thats how little impact it had.
But I'm not talking exclusively about the players they lost because of the "region lock". Public perception shifted on the studio and Sony, turning people off. True they were already down to 100k daily after the whole fiasco, but going down to maybe ~40k players in ~5 months is pretty drastic when you have a day one peak of 400k on a live service game people paid for.
Do you think the game being free would've helped retain more players or bring more new players into the game? Genuine question.
~40k players in ~5 months is pretty drastic when you have a day one peak of 400k on a live service game people paid for.
It is pretty normal imo. Helldivers is a pve game, those usually don't retain players that well without constant big content updates, which helldivers 2 is lacking.
Even one of the most upvoted comments here is saying "The gameplay loop is boring after a little while".
Do you think the game being free would've helped retain more players or bring more new players into the game?
Being f2p always attracts more players.
yeah it’s cause the game isn’t fun. repetitive slop.
People learning that live service games don't work out. It is one of my favorite things. Obviously, I want all games to be great and successful, but there is only so much time in the day and people can play all 300 live service games that exist while also keeping up with new ones. Eventually, everyone goes back to their main games. I'm sure during big content releases players will flock to the game again for a while.
"People learning that live service games don't work out."
Helldivers was a massive success and still is. Nothing about this is a failure.
Its just dropped to a level and now it will enter the calm/new patch cycle.
To clarify, I mean live service games don't work in the way they are thought to be. Games played constantly for years and years with peak player counts all the time. That seems to be what corporations think a love service game is supposed to be, and it rarely works out that way.
I'm not saying the game was bad or a flop at all it sparked a huge conversation about what a game should be in a good way and is proof that triple A doesn't mean what it used to when a "double A" beats many of those supposed triple A games
I'l be honest anyone that expected that clearly isn't thinking straight.
Every single game peaks at release or at patch cycle releases. Then slowly dropps off as time goes on until a new patch or game releases. The meansurement of success is if you can keep a steady playerbase engaged through the quite periods.
This has always been the case for online games. Even before the term live service was even coined.
Edit: I also think Helldivers 2 massively overperfomed its peak because of hype and its not really a realistic peak for a game like this to measure itself to. 30-50k peaks on weekends is if you ask me more than fine for Helldivers if it can keep this going.
I know that, you know that, and people who play games know that, but big publishers seem to think a live service game = unlimited money forever. That's why games get canceled or studios shut down when a live service game isn't number 1 immediately always and forever.
Live service is fine, but it needs to be done right instead of churned out garbage, and every game does not need to be a live service game. Red Fall and suicide squad are two relatively recent games that come to mind that would've been better if they focused on making good single-player content instead of forcing live service microtransaction BS into it.
Publishers (and players sometimes) need to also temper their expectations. I hate seeing good studios get closed because of garbage publishers pushing crap that doesn't need to be pushed.
This is why I rarely jump on the hype train for any of these multiplayer games anymore, very few of them actually have staying power.
Helldivers still has an extremely stable player base and community. If you'd avoid a game just because it only has 40-60k daily players, then you're really only playing games for the hype, not because they're fun.
Riding the hype train on this one was pretty fun I'll be honest. It's not a game that retained the entertainment value forever, but I definitely got my money's worth out of it. It's only a shame that the biggest hype period was when you could barely play the game because of servers.
Yes dont play something extremely fun for 3-4months and hours and hours of fun and instead shield yourself lol. That's sad mate.
Had a lot of fun with it for 80 hours. Not sure what a hype train or staying power is relevant for. And if I feel like playing, I can still jump in whenever and have more fun. I'm just not actively playing because there are other good games I'm focusing on currently. My experiences with the game aren't diminished because there are less people playing the game now. What a weird way to look at games.
A friend offered me the game but despite numerous tries and hours played, I cannot get into. HD2 is for me, pretty boring.
The game needs mods
The balance team was hellbent on being anti fun as if they're working on League and not a PvE title. Sony probably pressed them to nerf SC drop rates by 99% and new content comes out with 1K SC warbonds.
That's why I left, but to be fair the game was flavor of the month and now it isn't, it's to be expected. Maybe without nerf crazy devs they'd have slightly more. For contrarians; I could complete helldive consistently, I was just not having fun.
It blew my mind that it was ever a hit. There’s just no depth to the game at all and the grind is insane and completely unrewarding. Maybe it was the cringey humor?
It was fun. The most important part of a game.
The content stream for live service is extremely demanding. Few devs have figured it out with out their own shortcomings.
Gave it a try after seeing the initial hype but unfortunately, I just don't think this game is for me. Killing hordes of the same creatures over and over got a little stale and the cosmetic rewards (usually a big motivator for me) just didn't look good enough to push me to keep playing.
For the sake of those that enjoy this game I hope they can turn those numbers around. Maybe even bring people like me back in the process.
Another Sony blunder.
I stopped playing this game due to imbalance and dogshit mechanics of automatons. Never in my life i played against something so badly designed. God damn.
After the sony fiasco I uninstalled and never looked back.
Lol. Filtered.
Desperately needs more interesting unlocks and more variety in missions. Got too repetitive for me, with nothing interesting to grind towards, the dopamine drip dried up quickly.
That's why seasonal live service games are best, people play 2 weeks, then go play smth else and be back for next season.
I really enjoyed it... for about 20 hours. Mostly solo play, but it was just too repetitive. Don't regret my purchase because it is a ton of fun. There's just not a lot there in terms of actual gameplay or variation.
Funny no one is mentioning the most obvious reason, the game runs like ass even in beefy hardware.
A shooter in PC has to be snappy and responsive so people keeps playing it for the gratifying shooting mechanics. Which this game fails to deliver.
People only tolerate the grind if the gameplay is tight, not the other way around.
This has nothing to do with Sony, the devs or the game mosty. I wonder when the industry will realize that, a larger part of games being Live Service isn't indefinitely sustainable because they all run on a limited player resource: Time
And you have to be a hell of a good game to get that from a player for a long time.
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