Helldivers 2 continues to go absolutely gangbusters, being one of the most-played multiplayer games of the moment and filling servers faster than developer Arrowhead Game Studios can keep up.
The game is frequently sitting among the top five most-played games on Steam, according to SteamDB, sitting at #2 behind Counter-Strike 2 at the time of writing. It’s also cracked the top ten in highest 24-hour peak and nearing the likes of Palworld and PUBG – and could potentially have been higher were it not for server capacity limits.
Helldivers 2 has now passed 400k concurrent players on Steam and is ranked 24 on all-time peak pic.twitter.com/qBEQdjZTNe
— Wario64 (@Wario64) February 19, 2024
The studio has been incredibly quick to jump on social media and its own Discord channels to address the ongoing issues with the game, predominantly just due to the insane player counts, and has revealed that it’s had to cap the concurrent player limited to around 450,000 (presumably across both Steam and PS5) to help improve server stability. The team was also handing out increased rewards over the weekend to make up for earlier progression issues.
A message from Arrowhead on Discord read:
“Earlier tonight we had server related issues with a concurrent player spike. This lead to some mission payouts failing, some players being kicked to their ships, or being logged out. Our team is working around the clock to solve these issues. While we’ve been able to mitigate some of the causes, we are still struggling to keep up with the scaling that is needed to accommodate all our Helldivers.
“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.”
Despite our best efforts to increase server capacity to accommodate all of you who want to dive for Freedom, we are experiencing capacity issues. We are once more working without delay to improve the issue and we hope to have a fix in place as soon as possible. Thank you
— HELLDIVERS™ 2 (@helldivers2) February 17, 2024
We’ve still got a review cooking for Helldivers 2, although the ongoing server issues have meant it’s not coming along as quickly as we’d like. In the meantime, you can read some early thoughts of my own around how the game’s sense of humour, meaningful live service elements and respectful approach to monetisation have helped propel it to the massive success that it is.
