Helldivers 2 has been growing in popularity each day since its launch on 8 February. Not only has social media blown up with clips from players fighting the galactic war but on Steam, the game has reached a new all-time-high player count every day too.
The game peaked at 150k players last week and this weekend, that number surpassed 409k. Last night, Helldivers 2 peaked at 409,367. This makes Helldivers 2 Sony’s biggest launch on PC to date.
While these numbers are nice to see, they do come with their fair share of issues. Players have been plagued by server problems with many of them being disconnected from the game and others being unable to log in to the Helldivers 2 servers entirely.
Last night, I wasn’t able to play Helldivers 2 at all. The servers were too busy and it kept throwing me into a log-in loop. No matter how long I sat and waited, the game simply didn’t log me in.
To make matters worse, it seems the server cap is to blame for these problems. While close to a million players want to log into Helldivers 2, according to the studio, the server can only accommodate 650k of those players. Last night, this cap was dropped down to 450k to help improve online stability.
So we have 400k players on Steam and 600k players on PS5. There’s a server that can only fit half of those players. There’s bound to be some sort of wait time. Sadly, these wait times can become increasingly long and if anything, infinite if the concurrent player count doesn’t drop.
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.
Some players are urging gamers to log out of the game if they aren’t playing. They say that if you’re not actively playing Helldivers 2, you should close the game to open up a slot for another player. Unfortunately, Helldivers 2 doesn’t have a “disconnect for inactivity” feature which may result in some players hanging around in their spaceship while they make dinner.
Apart from that, we can only hope that Arrowhead Game Studios will increase its server capacity soon. Either that or we’ll all just have to wait around for the congestion to die down. For many, that means giving up and playing something else.
Helldivers 2 is out now on PS5 and PC. You can read my review of the game here where I praise the action-packed gameplay which can often be frustrating to master.
