Helldivers 2 has become far more successful than either developer Arrowhead or publisher Sony was expecting, and it just keeps getting bigger. A few days back I posted a story discussing how the game had broken 200,000 concurrent players on Steam, but now Helldivers 2 has managed to get over 250,000 people playing at once. We have no idea how many are enlisting on PlayStation 5.
The success has been so momentous that Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has confirmed that the game’s roadmap is now out of date compared to what they want to do going forward. Replying to an X user by the name Mario who asked if there was any news on the roadmap, Pilestedt had this to say: “Our team is working on it. Our old roadmap is very out of date in comparison to what we now want to do. “
Previously we were told that there would be a lot of free content coming our way, including more enemy types. But with the recent news that Arrowhead is hiring developers to beef up its staff, it seems like they might be considering a more substantial support plan. I personally wonder if that might result in them introducing more paid content to fund their new vision, but hopefully they can maintain the balanced and fair monetization Helldivers 2 currently has.
Just last night the game introduced its first live-service twist when the dastardly socialist robots suddenly invaded human occupied planets. The goal went from conquering planets held by the bugs to defending human territory against nightmarish robots that look like they were ripped out of Terminator 2 and then given more spikes.
The success has not come without struggle, though. The game was initially hampered by server issues and crashes. We would later find out that a lot of the server problems simply came down to the player-count vastly exceeding what was planned.
Taking to X last night, Pilestadt admitted that he and his team are exhausted but happy.
So, a bit of a retro of this week.
I am completely exhausted by the success. So is the team, many, many late nights, on-calls, emergency meetings, discussions around server capacity, shards, capacity units, CPU utilization, login rates and CCU.
Tired, but very, very pleased.
— Pilestedt (@Pilestedt) February 16, 2024
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He followed up those comments by addressing the coming weekend and the nervousness of his team. “And now, standing on the threshold of the weekend, with fingers crossed starting intently at the CCU graph and the icons for various subsystems glowing with a vibrant green ‘OK’. Last weekend, a lot of them were in bright red ‘NOT OK.’ wrote Pilestedt.