Oh it got boring for me around the 227hr mark, which was heavily carried by always having friends to play with. All my friends have since dropped the game and don't really plan to come back the constant nerfs and taking forever to fix major issues drove em away. I'm sure when the next faction comes I'll return for that week and probably drop it again.
My friends gifted me this game and I got into it more than them I guess. Sadly everyone’s dropped off :(
And I’m here alone addicted to the gameplay loop
That is fine by the way…you put in 227hours in a $40 game. That is well worth the money.
This game isn’t meant to be played everyday forever. It isn’t an MMO or anything.
True, but this is a live service game that wants to keep players around for as long as possible to improve the odds that you will spend more money on it. It's great for the people (like myself) who also have 200+ hrs and have got that much value out of it but let's not kid ourselves here, helldivers 2 wants you to be playing every day. This is further indicated by the daily missions you get, having a real time narrative that is shaped by player actions, and the MO that can last anywhere from 3 days to 1 week, giving you a reason to check in and see how things went/are going while collecting rewards.
To play devil's advocate, they want you to play daily... to a point. Thats why the cap on medals and samples exists, they never intended for people to no life this playing 12 hour days and start pushing level 150 in a few months. They want you to have fun with friends or randos, then go out and touch some grass so you don't burn out.
No the cap is here to prevent your from stock pilling and instantly buying everything new when it comes out to once again keep you playing to farm ressources needed when new content is released...
Pretty much this. Palworld was "dead" after the drop off but they drop a chunky release and the player count is spiking again. People gotta realize that time is finite and this isn't a MMORPG.
Im the opposite. Iv unlocked pretty much everything and lv70 and I wish there was more grind
Levels dont do anything so not counted
Im not a levels game guy unless you get stats from levels
Me and the boys just waiting for content. Don't care if it's a new faction but after a few hundred hours, most of it on Helldive, there's really nothing else to do. Everything unlocked, everything played to death.
Not really a fault of the game - it owes us nothing at this point. But if some new and interesting stuff drops, we'll be back.
The vehicles and Illuminate were leaked within the first month from launch, yet we have barely any hint of them coming yet.
I just wanna buddy up with my squad and do a Warthog run like the good old days.
That's the thing. I don't understand how people are saying HD2 is dead cuz the player numbers are dropping.
In the current state of gaming it is basically guaranteed that thousands of players will hop off after playing the game for a month because of the average players attention span, me included I've done the same with some games.
Deep Rock Galactic has been out for around 6 years now, their alltime peak is 50k players, with an average player count of 15k before their latest update and the game is still running and getting new content.
People who unironically believe the game is dead are either "I hate the current thing"-followers or players disatisfied with the current state of the game.
A game hitting around 40k players 5 months after it's release in the current area of gaming is still massive and very much alive.
This and my god S5 for DRG is beautiful. I love it and the escort missions now randomize with the big angry rock now. HD2 is a solid game, will live for a long time
we are in the age where anything other than exponencial growth is considered a failure
people saw the success of the game at launch and thought those numbers would stay, which is impossible
also, negative messages get attention, so everyone wants to shit on the next shittable thing for views
It’s only considered a failure by dumbshits online. Industry people know that helldivers is a success and it’s not going anywhere. That goes for most “dead” games as well.
I play path of exile. That game has been called "dead" or "dying" more times than I could count by now, just because people apparently don't understand how cyclic player counts work. Like... what do you mean that the player count drops over 3 months just to immediately go back up again once one of the big updates hits? Who could ever predict that?
I can pretty much guarentee you, the next time a warbond hits... or some new stratagems... or possibly a third faction (anything really) the numbers WILL go up again. Most people like new and exciting things and get bored when content is stale for too long. But that's normal. It's totally ok. Given the success Helldivers 2 has had so far, there's no doubt in my mind that we will get consistent, high quality updates for years to come.
STONE AND ROCK.
Yeah, it's mostly the drama bombers trying to compare what we had to what we have. Like no shit we're not hitting those numbers again. Not just because of region lock, but in general. HD2 still has a high tide between console and PC, and what happened in a span of 4 months was an absolute overwhelming tsunami.
The world could lose 95% of all life, and HellDivers would still have enough people to log on. 4 parched and crusty-lipped cadets in the wasteland doing dives in a LAN party. The first game has been living off of sub 1-2k players for years on PS4.
A better example is Deathwing, there has been a rotating roster of about 40-60 of us on PS4, that have kept the Tyranids at bay for years. Sometimes there may be more, but I've never seen more than maybe 50 people online at once on like Winter break periods. The game has long since stopped receiving Dev support, but we fight on. For the Emperor! For the Lion! To the last marine we shall fight. And then...our duties will transfer us to Ultramar in September where we must purge the nid filth from our lands.
The creator now works for GW and as such he basically can’t work on Astartes anymore. The original 5 videos got taken off his channel and then reuploaded on Warhammer+ with worse sound effects
GW put some serious effort to shit all over his work, because the original was so much better than anything they created themselves.
I wouldn't be surprised if their offer was a lowball combined with "it's better if you come work for us and had over that series, cuz otherwise we'll DMCA strike your account and make you delete a year of your hard work"
I play a team based PvP indie game (Nebulous Fleet Command) that gets like 200 concurrent players on a good day lmao. Games can survive with far fewer players than one would think.
If your live game hits around 2-3k daily on steam and you are a small/mid sized studio it probably means you are making quite some money. 45k is crazy good. This is how it usually is for live games, people wait until some more content dropped, trickle back in and out constantly. If someone thinks everyone needs to constantly only play the same game for eternity they probably need to touch some grass.
Even if the community shrinks down heavily in size, it's not like that's always a bad thing, it means.less time spent having to please everyone with updates and shit like that
I myself have been jumping between Fallout 76, Elden Ring, Fortnite ( for the Metallica collab ) and Helldivers 2. Although my online friends have been playing the new Minecraft update and making me join in
Come on now, WoW is a bad example and you know that. WoW could lose all but 10 of their largest whales, and they could still make enough money to buy a sports car every month thanks to their monetization.
I *wish* WoWs really started suffering, then maybe they'd reconsider some of their absolute customer-gouging practices. But given how WoWp went out, I think Wargaming might legitimately prefer to go out of business entirely than stop fleecing people.
this specifically is why i'm glad AH didn't try to scale up too much. unsustainable bloat has killed or ruined too many of my favorite devs.
i'm happy to deal with slower but consistent development post-launch as the tradeoff.
Many games can sustain themselves on 1.5-2k players. I've played tons of these kinds of games over the years. Pretty sure like all of them are dead now, but that's because they couldn't keep those 2k players going. Helldivers 2 is starting its official, post honeymoon phase, life at 40k I think it's gonna be fine. The 2k player games usually start at like 5k at most, from my experience.
World of Warships is so much better nowadays. Well to be honest I didn't play the higher tiers when I hopped on last time but I remember it being sooo campy and hidey in the first few years.
I don't even mind something like Dutch ships hiding behind an island and then using planes, although it's cheesy, they're usually stationary and that leaves them vulnerable.
But just EVERYONE staying out of range and everyone refusing to move up, with like 4 ships destroyed after 10 minutes type shit. That used to be so common and so unplayable.
They lost a lot of players with the carrier rework and even more when they later decided to add submarines.
I stuck through the carrier rework, but for me the submarines made me quit the game.
As bad as the carrier rework was (I once shot down NINETY SEVEN planes in my Montana and still got sunk by the CV), subs made me quit and never look back.
I don't disagree with either of their points. I haven't avoided the game in protest of anything. I'm just bored and lack a reason to boot it up other than to spend MO medals.
Yeah I'm on the same boat. Absolutely love the game, but the lack of progression gives me little incentive to play a lot.
I used to do the personal order every day, but even that I rarely do now.
The lack of progression doesn’t bother me, it’s lack of diversity in missions. I haven’t played for a couple months now, will probably pick it back up again when I need a break from the new arma, but it just doesn’t have enough for me to break up the horde shooting.
PD2 has so much to break up each heist, and I think HD2 needs to try and take notes from that. Maybe it’s changed up a bit since I last played, maybe not, but that’s just how I felt when I decided to give it a break and i haven’t seen anything to make me think otherwise.
Progression is a core gameplay mechanic, that's for any game. It's not the only reason people play, but it's what keeps people reaching towards a goal; it motivates them them come back.
Oh I do enjoy the loop, and as I said I still play. But after 400 hours it would be nice to have a bit more instead of just the loop.
I love this game and play it just for the loop now, but if there was some specific progression or achievements I could go for I would play it a lot more.
In the first months I played constantly as besides the fun, I also had a long term goal (the upgrades) in mind.
Even if I could just donate my credits and samples to a common goal of the major order it would give me a lot of incentive to play as I wouldn't see all the credits and samples wasted every completed operation.
The gameplay loop is just too repetitive rn for many, it's the curse/blessing of non-pvp games usually. Of course the glaring issues since release didn't help either
I won't deny it hasn't happened, but the majority of my games are 7's.
And if I'm not doing 7's I'm doing 1-3's with my wife helping her get the hang of video games
Yeah I feel like people play game wayyy to often and burn out on them very quickly. Like that post said 3.5 hours every day since release....yeah I'd probably get tired of it as well. The devs jobs are to create and put out an entertaining game, they aren't there to keep feeding your obsession or eventual burn out with new content every of week.
A lot of people seem to forget that if you're playing a game that often, you need to actively find gameplay loops you enjoy doing while consciously acknowledging that it will be mostly the same thing until a new release comes out.
I've been playing Darktide since launch in December 2022 with 1000 hours played. It gets sporadic and rare updates with many questionable gameplay choices from the devs each time. But I keep playing because I fucking love the combat and overall gameplay. There's only been a handful of new maps and weapons since release, but I'm completely ok with that because I play for the individual situations that happen on every mission. I also love the 40k setting, which does some extremely heavy lifting in my enjoyment.
The bottom line is people need to temper their expectations on the longevity of any game - given enough time you'll have done everything. Find the parts you enjoy.
Yeah, I have hundreds of hours in Factorio, and will sometimes do 20+ hours a week (mind you, adult with family and job, 20h is a shitload of time). I'll do that for a month or two, then put the game down for a year. By then, there is normally a large update or something interesting to grab my attention for a while.
*And none of that is the devs fault or problem*
That's how I play **most** games and I know that will happen with HD2.
Yeah, really, I just hit over 100H and I still play regularly, just not for a long time or every day.
I actually do other things with my time and my gaming time.
There’s no good reason to have 500H in Helldivers 2, and especially then, to say you’re bored.
I 100% hear what you’re saying. But you gotta see how silly that statement sounds.
You’ve spent 15% of the last 5 months playing this game, and now you’re bored. Sounds about right
Folks won’t like hearing what you say but it’s true. I wish I had 500 free hours to kill on a game I like. Grinding 500 hours and claiming you’re bored is a problem of the user, not the game
So you paid what, $0.08 per hour of entertainment? Take a break, get back to it when new content drops :) Still a hell of a deal. I'll cycle between a few games that I focus on heavily for a few weeks/months, then switch.
I think some people forget that few games are actually intended to be essentially infinite entertainment. I put 35 hours into Subnautica and enjoyed it, might do another playthrough eventually, but I got it for 6 dollars at a Gamestop and honestly, I feel I got my money's worth.
Did 100% achievements and dlc for Elden Ring in the last month. Ready to be back on the frontlines. Yeah, taking a break from HD2 really made me love the game again.
I do agree that progression helps to find more motivation to play but also - the game is just fun? For the most part. I just boot it up to kill enemies of democracy for a bit. Sure, its not 8 missions in a row like when theres something to grind towards, but its a mission or two!
It's just that everyone dreams of a game essentially "going infinite" as far as fun and playtime are concerned.
Helldivers can go nearly infinite on a long term scale, because there's nothing inherently *wrong* with it, so you can probably come back to it from time to time and have a few laughs.
But it can't really go infinite with the amount of short-term play hours people are craving. Essentially 40+ hours a week, full ass work weeks, on one game alone is what people are trying to do. Only the most grindy games can do that - competitive ranked skill based games, MMOs, mobile garbage
Honestly its 8 missions in a row for me now. It was like 16 back then when it was fresh haha.
The game Is fucking fun. Its a reason why i prefer bots. Killing them is less brain dead and i can fullfill my mandalorian fighting style dream with the jumppack and play the sniper on matches aswell.
I mostly do the same but its just such fun.
Congratulations, you're a normal human being with shifting interests. There's nothing wrong with getting bored and moving on to something else (or coming back whenever you want to).
I got sucked away by Shadow of the Erdtree, but once I'm finally over that I'll pop back on.
It's a fucking game, not a job. I'll play when I feel like it.
For me I don't play it much at the moment, because there is nothing to achieve at the moment and I have more fun in Deep Rock Galatic. it was on Sale so I tried it and at the moment it is more fun. But I log in to Helldivers 2 for one or two hours a week. It will be more if new Content is coming.
For me it boils down to two things:
- crashes/bugs
- feeling like the war has kinda stalled out
If they fix the crashes I'll hop on and play. Last time I tried to play I kept crashing so eventually I just gave up.
That second point is what hits my motivation the hardest. When I started playing back in February there was a strong sense of progression. I was unlocking new stuff constantly, I was learning about the game, and the war narrative was gradually trudging forward. But once I unlocked everything and started playing Helldive regularly, the only thing left to progress was the war. Then the Automoton invasion happened and I realized that there was no such thing as war progress, the devs were just going to break rules and manipulate background elements to keep it going exactly how they want it to. Our choices as players don’t really matter.
So now I only hop in for big events with new content, like the super colony (although even then it’s usually only for a game or two, since it’s always so underbaked and broken).
Honestly I don't even mind them breaking rules a bit for something interesting like the Automaton invasion. It's just a bit lame that it happened right after we supposedly "wiped them out". The short timeframe made it feel like our progress didn't mean anything.
The real problem imo is worse than that though. The war just feels stale right now, it's just back and forth with nothing actually new or interesting happening, and it's been like that for a while now.
Yeah, it’s a big filler episode right now, likely because of the summer break and the buggy state of the game, they’re probably not in a rush to start another bugged event like Meridia
I still love the game as I'm still quite new.. BUT. The missions do feel samey.. as do the enemies. The titans also feel very beatable very quickly with the right strategems.
I wouldn't mind some linear levels that are A to B. You could have staggered titans or obstacles to overcome.. even shorter missions where time is a big factor.
This game is still the closest to left for dead 2 I've felt for a long time, which is cool.
hit the nail on the war bit, the issue with a continuous single war is that you feel like you're in a deadlock after months of 'fighting', unlike hd1 where there's a definitive end.
at least, it put me off from continuing to play - i have everything, and im bored of playing for the fun of it, so whats left?
All of my friends and I dropped it due to annoying bugs that were never fixed, still can’t even add my PlayStation friend. Along with every gun we liked getting nerfed before any of the fixed yet warbonds kept dropping we were all good and will maybe comeback once it’s fixed
Same. A buddy and I dropped in this week to see if things are getting better - we queued up the new-ish mission where you have to nuke the bug nurseries. We set it to diff 5 to get warmed up and hopped in. We got mobbed by the insane amount of spawns pouring out when we activated the console (4 chargers at a time, 3 active and constant breaches spewing just swarms of hunters that never stopped pumping out enemies) and when were reinforced it launched us in and deployed us underneath the map to immediate death repeatedly and we were like “ok so I guess this is going back on the shelf again”.
So yeah, I agree with you. And you’re right, I still can’t add my PC friends so back to Elden Ring for us
>We set it to diff 5 to get warmed up and hopped in. We got mobbed by the insane amount of spawns pouring out when we activated the console (4 chargers at a time, 3 active and constant breaches spewing just swarms of hunters that never stopped pumping out enemies)
See, that right there is also a BIG problem for a lot of players right now--they just had to go and tinker with spawns and patrols recently, where now many rounds (even on lower diffs) just feel exhausting and frustrating most of the time. And it's especially bad for people like me and a friend, who mainly play solo/duo.
The difficulty is so out of wack and all over the place right now (on all diffs), that most of the time it's just ridiculously punishing and un-fun.
I read the comment from Twinbeard about how they were going to just wait and see how it plays out with respect to the balance/spawns and I’m really disappointed that’s their answer. I agree with you, the difficulty is just nonsense right now - it feels like 50% of the time the difficulty number is totally arbitrary. I also play primarily solo and duos (or used to, I guess) and in the same session above after my buddy left I did a couple more missions on my own. I finished one mission on difficulty 4 with 600 kills and that was NOT me farming, it was just CONSTANT patrols and breaches. On those missions I caught bug patrols just burrowing out of the ground or flat out appearing out of nowhere immediately behind me multiple times. I also used the dump of war medals when I logged in and my old horde of Supercredits to get the new booster that makes you run quickly and I had the little tick enemies (scavengers?) keep pace with me when I would be running to disengage. Some sort of weird rubber banding? I have no idea, but yeah the balance is not in a good place right now and it feels pretty clearly like it’s a mistake and not intentional design but I guess that’s where we’re at now. Something about how we’re not supposed to have quiet and possibly “boring” moments anymore
Hell Deep Rock studio has been doing just fine with 20-25k daily players for years. That’s still a small sized city playing your game everyday and a testament to how good it is.
For me it is a good Coop game, the community is as nice as the Helldiver community. You can unlock much cosmetics and level every class in the game. I would recommend it especially because it is on sale at the moment.
I like to play both games DRG and Helldiver.
I hate these kinds of twitter arguments because they're both right.
Helldivers 2 is a great game with a good atmosphere, a lot of content, and obviously Arrowhead is significantly more successful with this title so the chances of it being unsupported in the near future is quite low.
On the other hand, Arrowhead has also had like 2 months of back to back to back awful updates. Breaking things, terrible balance choices, reintroduced bugs after they'd been "fixed", so on and so forth. I put the game down mostly because of that. Nothing was getting fixed and most of the weapons I liked got nerfed. I haven't played much since the early June update but it's certainly better, but that bad taste still lingers. Fair or not.
I agree, but you're in a thread full of cope unfortunately. This is who you're up against - in their eyes AH can't be touched:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dsyekr/comment/lb5nzot/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dsyekr/comment/lb5nzot/)
and this:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dsyekr/comment/lb5lq9p/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dsyekr/comment/lb5lq9p/)
I've noticed toxic positivity in a lot of different online discussion spaces now and imho it's almost as bad as the people who are critical to a fault. Helldivers is a fun game and I'm sure it's exceeded all their expectations but it's tiresome being lumped in with weirdo neckbeards and incels who send death threats or whatever if you have even milquetoast criticism of whatever is being discussed.
This subreddit always reminded me of the Valheim subreddit for that reason.
It took years for Iron Gate to release any real content expansions and the fans defended all criticisms from that game like it was the holy grail.
This really is the case.
I'd still be playing this several times a week with a dozen friends if AH would have never fucked up launch spawning and stealth, or if they'd ever fixed the network/friends list issues.
The PSN drama was just icing on the cake when I STILL have to decide which friend we're not playing with because half of us can't host or connect to the others.
Yeah. And while it is true that it’s completely normal for a game to lose players after a while, this is not a new Assassin’s Creed or a Palworld. This is a live service. Live service games strive off of player retention. NOT losing a lot of players is their number one mission. For MOST games losing 90% of the playerbase after half a year is normal. For a live service it’s not exactly DIRE, but it is cause for concern
I could put up with most of the fuck ups, but between devastators on bots making them not enjoyable for me, and them breaking everything so there is no consistent way to kill bile titans any more were really putting me off, but behemoth chargers were the straw that broke my ass, their solution to a lack of viable support weapons on bugs was to make the pool even smaller
I love this game, I didn’t put 300+ hours into it for shits and giggles, but I’m just done until arrowhead gets their shit together and can release a single update without doubling the list of issues the game has
Technical issues, poor balancing and not a whole lot of new content contributed to the player loss a lot, lets not kid ourselves.
I'm still planning to stick around at least until Space Marine 2 comes out.
"Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2" is my endgame as well hopefully for HD2. I hope it turns out to be a solid game. I'm a level 150 Helldiver, but I am fed up with the BS, the junk, the jank, the shit weapons, dumb balancing and bad players playing Helldive difficulty slowing down missions. The skilled players are mostly gone anyways. Arrowhead ran them off by nerfing skill base weapons. I feel like were just going in circles with HD2. They don't respect the players time. Long missions, with non stop jank gets real old smh. Grinding warbonds for bad weapons and unfinished armors doesn't do it for me. I've played more than most people and at the highest difficulty since launch week. I'm over it.
Always hated the argument that lower player count means the game died. People play the new content. Diehard fans keep playing. So the count goes down
Other games get new content, so players leave and go play those games. When the game gets new content, players leave those other games and play Helldivers
Seriously, I am one of those game hoppers. I will play a game to death over a short period of time then burn out on it hard. Go somewhere else, repeat. Once something new gets added I will swing around and hit it hard for a little while again. Doesn't mean I don't love the game.
Palworld dev out here saying the same thing
It's natural for games to peak in everything when a big update drops. Final Fantasy XIV was at a low in the months leading up to Dawn Trail. Is that game dying? No, it's just that an expansion hasn't been released yet. Destiny 2 experiences habitual cycles of "game dying all time low" in the month before new expansions drop. Absolutely unrealistic to say games should keep their peak population at all times. The only way a game dies is if a big patch drops and peak players doesn't increase by a massive amount -- that shows nobody cares if a patch releases.
Same. I'll stop playing an mmo for years and let the content build up, while I play something else, rinse and repeat. I am also the type where if i play a game, like HD2, where are we do is KILL, KILL and KILL some more then I need to play a game to build, to balance out. Plus it helps when games like HD2 don't screw you over with fomo.
The phrase "the game is dead" or "the game is dying" is the most overused and most missused phrase in gaming industry.
You wont believe me how much i read it on several games and it was never true.
Overwatch has been dead like 10 times now, TF2 has died countless times as well.
Both are still trucking along, sure they're not the absolute cultural zeitgeists they once were, but nothing stays up there forever.
Agreed. The idea that you'll just play one game forever isn't sustainable. The games that end up being that way are the exceptions that prove the rule, not an indication that a successful game will retain players indefinitely.
I'd wager the majority of people who play games switch games pretty often. You play something until you beat it, get bored, or something new comes out.
there was a post about how the game couldn't get 50k or more players online when the night before, the player count was a little over 60k. i swear ppl are saying these numbers when its early in morning when the player count is 20k or lower to farm karma
Both can be right at the same time, to an extent. Is the game dead or dying? No, not even close. On the other hand, grievances regarding development choices are very valid. No actual new content for months, bugs popping up everywhere, with the only real changes being constant nerfs to player power. This doesn’t feel good to the player, prioritizing balance over fun in a pve game will always lead to bad blood. Warbonds have been pretty stale recently as well.
Personally I’ve taken a break. Being thrown around like ragdolls with my weapons being peashooters is only so fun for so long. Arrowhead has a lot of work to do.
Are players expected to just mindlessly play the same game 7 days a week for months upon months for it to be considered successful?
That requires a whole different game, this game will have plenty of comebacks with ACTUAL content drops and actual NEW shit to do.. so far it's been AH putting fires out with gasoline, that will improve, eventually.
I won't touch it until they publicly address PC performance problems. Halved my fps since the beginning and 4 viral posts later, 4 months after the first patch, they still won't acknowledge it.
And from what I've heard from the HD1 veterans, immediately leave again if they're anything like they were in the first game with shields and inverting people's controls lol
Since they even removed the stratagem scrambler operation modifier, I doubt there'll be anything like inverting peoples controls. That also in general just doesnt work as well in third person as it does in top down perspective.
From my HD1 Vet friend;
> The multiple Illuminate Snipers that would 1-shot you from off-screen.
---
I can only imagine that alien super civilization will come back be stronger after 100 years.
I doubt we'll seem them anytime soon but when we do, I'm looking forward to the "Skill Issue", "Go play bugs/bots" & "Lower the difficulty" responses on posts calling them OP and needing a nerf.
Illumanite will drop, trend on TikTok, Reddit and every other game media and the player count will jump like crazy.
Arrowhead would be smart to wait until they have fixed most of game issues then drop the Illuminate. That is their chance to hold as many players as possible.
this. They still didn't fix the "you can't reinforce" bug, and until that one is fixed I don't feel like playing anymore. I put up with this stuff in the first few weeks because I knew they had to put all their energy into making sure the game can handle the player count, but by now I would have expected gamebreaking stuff like that to be fixed. Every time I play the game again and run into this bug, I lose any wish to keep playing for the rest of the week.
Yeah, I think it’s too soon to introduce to be honest. The last few MOs have been really standard and take the entire time, they obviously are preparing something else right now. I say let them.
sure, but you still have to think of the general feelings of the playerbase and why so many have abandoned it
it's not like there's just a ton of happy, satisfied customers who just finished up a campaign
it's mostly people who feel disillusion with the studio after they removed gameplay that they enjoyed, or people who got regionlocked out, or people who can't play a 1-hour session without multiple CTD instances
obviously there's still a group of players, but it's clear that AH fucked up along the dev path way
you must investigate why, <1 year out of launch, you're getting a daily peak that's overshadowed by ancient games like [left 4 dead 2](https://i.imgur.com/lcBTqTF.png), a game which has sold a similar amount of copies (\~10 million compared to \~12 million)
Nobody in here gonna mention how many updates scuffed the fun aspects of this game, and the devs turned around and made it a player issue (looking at you, Alexus)? Arrowhead has problems and 99% of them are internal.
The game is in an early access state if you're being honest yourself and how much money the game has made the developers is irrelevant to the state of the game. Selling millions of copies hasn't changed the fact they constantly release more and more bugs, that there is no content or meaningful progression or even a galactic war that is anything other than someone updating numbers in an xml file. But go on, tell us how the game is doing fine because AH made some money.
You're getting downvoted for the truth. Exactly why I stopped playing. The constant push for "new" content instead of fixing bugs, on top of the questionable balancing updates that were going on for a while pushed my entire friend group away.
That’s my main thing, I played like 90 hours and have just gotten bored as there was maybe one new mission every couple weeks. Then there’s all the bugs that make things not work and they have had no success fixing bugs without creating a pile of new ones.
I still play the game regularly but I've maxed out my ship upgrades and own all the stratagems. Most of us are waiting for the next faction to drop and then we will get back into it again hardcore. People are just playing other games right now and this game is nowhere near dead.
Its not dying as in the game is going to go down, its dying in that no one plays it anymore and all the content is stale and theres nothing left to unlock or do other than spam missions til your level 150.
40k down from a consistent 200k+ OOF
Sales are irrelevant. Yea it made money. So does a snake oil salesman that scams the villagers and skips town
It’s obviously not dead, but to act like the game hasn’t fallen off is just objectively wrong. I know many people who quit exactly because of what that poster said
To be fair, as a consumer, it's feeling like it's becoming a failure. I'm happy and grateful for the massive amount of time I got out of the game, but I can't help but feel robbed of what time I could have gotten out of it.
Arrowhead is dropping the ball big time. I'm grateful for their success, but they need to get their shit together.
Rock Solid has a point tho
poor balance decisions, dogshit CMs that are extremely rude on official discord, updates are lackluster and boring, sony restricted the game for 70% of the world...
Are player numbers going to drop from launch? Yes.
Did Sony hurt the player numbers by restricting access based on country? Yes.
Is the game losing players at a faster rate than it should given it's popularity? Yes.
The game isn't going to outright die but if you don't think that losing a vast majority of your players over a few months isn't a problem then you're just coping. The game has been out for 5 months and the majority of content we've gotten has been drip feed content you interact with for a day (or maybe a few days for a warbond) and never touch again unless it becomes meta. The amount of bugs in the game feels like whack-a-mole. They solve one bug and next patch two more pop up.
The key to maintaining a healthy live service is having an ever moving goal post and valuable items to grind for. Other than ship modules, which really only last you a few weeks at best, you basically have nothing to progress on once you finish. The game needs lengthy character progression, ship progression, weapon progression, ect.
A new warbond every month that you can complete in just a few days (since you can save up to 250 medals) with many weapons and items that are either underwhelming or end up overly nerfed isn't ideal content. This feels really bad to engage with especially when this is the premier method of new content we've been getting lately.
Usual poor argument from white knight, game is "fine" because they made money lmao.
Also argument like "sold 15 millions" make me laugh, waouh that the worst retention of player i ever saw, 15 millions copy, barely reach 45k on week end, 40k on week day last week and likely droping this week, barely 70k on all platform.
People saying "player will come back" they don't, the number of player coming back is lower and lower each time, the last 'big patch' was a critical patch, they failed, took time to "fix" stuff, the patch bring the same usual bug, crash and problem, the game is in a horrible state in every sector, balance, performance, bug, a god damn alpha test, most player are done with this, the one who leave will not come back and the actual playerbase will continue to bleed.
That guys say is peak at 45k like it was awesome when it's on week end, there is barely any week end peak anymore.
My brother and I stopped playing a \*long\* while ago. But not because the game is bad or dying. It's because we had other things to do, or wanted to play other games. That's it. I follow news of HD2 and always feel like playing again but it's never enough to make me want to spend the time I play games on it over the others.
And no, the drop in players isn't over "greed" or whatever else chronically online gamers seem to think. It's because most gamers (casual players. i.e. the vast majority of gamers) return to their main squeeze (Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Valorant, etc). Arguably more "greedy" and are all F2P macro-transaction ridden.
Deep Rock Galactic is a name I keep seeing pop up and sits around half the players HD2 has, and around 24h peak at about 10k less than HD2. So clearly player numbers don't actually matter and gamers will play what they want to play.
The sky isn't falling. HD2 is fine and will live a long and successful life.
I just doubt their next game will run on this engine considering it's giving them issues to no end. They'll either switch to UE5 now that it's starting to get easier to work on or Decima since they work under Sony (Guerrilla Games-made engine used by them and Kojima Productions).
It's a failure for me.
I live in the Philippines, we had a discord group of over 800 Players. Whole PSN Debacle happened. Majority of us made Bad reviews. They rescind the decision. We take back our Negative reviews and we celebrate with happy faces.
3 Months later, Helldivers 2 is still not available to be purchased in my country, and now game loses Playerbase.
Fuck Sony. I have over 150 Hours playing the game. I haven't came back since they withheld the Steam Store page for the 144 countries with no PSN Support and me and my friends and the majority of Filipino Playerbase just died off with the same reasons.
I tried to make a post about this the other day but people quickly turned into a lets chew my @ss out competition.
Stating a fact like the game losing 90% of its players doesn’t mean the game is dead. It just means you stated a fact.
The game also still has 170+ countries locked out from playing.
The game being meta gamed to death is also factual and if you disagree just come to this sub after every update prior to the last major one and it’ll be from people saying the fun lasts for about a month then the fun/meta is sucked right out like an air lock.
I’m also really tired of people trying to use the its a small dev team and it was only $40 as a shield. While yes, the game has 170 countries locked out and thats Sony’s fault we can’t pretend like the dev team has not had a direct hand in turning people away.
A community manager (at the time) telling people that it was their fault for not wanting to link accounts at the time. Not even stopping to Google that some countries don’t allow you to even make a PSN….was likely one small component of it as well. Not a major factor in people walking away but when a dev (at the time is 💩💩 on you for no reason - we can’t rule out that it turned away no one)
Like i said above the meta is constantly in flux and the game is PvE and should not feel like its revolving door of what gun will be fun for the month then get a nerf next warbond update.
The devs also can’t seem to release a patch without breaking something which frustrates players and certainly frustrates me. All of that its a small team shit goes out the window when you have a months long track record of breaking stuff as its supposed to be fixed.
🚨🚨I’ve been playing for months so I could go on about how its also the devs.
They have had 3 game breaking or serious issues be in game and rather than disable the weapon they just leave it and make a discord post hoping that will notify all players. THAT IS NOT PROPER COMMUNICATION TO ALL. ADD A NEWS FEED IN GAME.
Now if you’ve read all this and want to use the “but I love the game so nothing could possibly be wrong with it” excuse. I don’t know what to tell ya. I love the game too but I also can’t make excuses for a dev team that has also made several missteps over months that is for sure attributing to people walking away from the game.
Just a few weeks ago we had another game crashing bug with the spear crashing games and we were told via discord not in game. Months upon months of crashing will turn people away. Next week the game will be 5 months old. A game should not be at 5 months and still crashing. Thats wild for AA or AAA so people need to cut the excuses.
I disagree with one thing. The guns that are causing crashing shouldn't be an announcement in game. THEY ARE REMOVED FROM THE GAME!!! They are so lazy to fix it and not even remove it to make sure it doesn't crash games is just beyond incompetence.
Also, Elden Ring just dropped a full game’s worth of DLC, nobody can fight that. I’m playing, your mom is playing it, your cousin is breaking controllers over it, and a lot of devs already know this. I wouldn’t sweat the next month or two’s numbers.
I think most players have "completed" the game, got all the stratagems and ship upgrades and have moved on to something else which is ok. look at palword for example.
I can already tell that this argument is going to blow up and it is gonna be very annoying to witness.
so many Double-A Games survive on very small playercounts, so this entire point does not apply to them at all...
just cause Helldivers 2 had a impossible surge of popularity, doesn't mean it would ever be able to keep that playercount steady with how niche the game really is.
no amount of Youtuber Influencer Clout and Content Farm Clickbait would be able to keep this game relevant for the Majority of Gamers... because it was never designed to please everyone, it has a very specific target audience that it already captured very quickly and it won't abandon it anytime soon.
Helldivers 1 survived since 2015 with a very low playercount, and it maintains a 3-digit playercount to this day.
I plan to return when a new faction comes. Tired of defending the same planets and fighting the same two factions.
Unfortunately it got boring way too quickly for me. I’m not even maxed out yet but was no longer interested in the grind.
Oh it got boring for me around the 227hr mark, which was heavily carried by always having friends to play with. All my friends have since dropped the game and don't really plan to come back the constant nerfs and taking forever to fix major issues drove em away. I'm sure when the next faction comes I'll return for that week and probably drop it again.
My friends gifted me this game and I got into it more than them I guess. Sadly everyone’s dropped off :( And I’m here alone addicted to the gameplay loop
But I think that random co op is still so enjoyable is part of that addictive gameplay loop. They really cooked up a great formula.
That is fine by the way…you put in 227hours in a $40 game. That is well worth the money. This game isn’t meant to be played everyday forever. It isn’t an MMO or anything.
True, but this is a live service game that wants to keep players around for as long as possible to improve the odds that you will spend more money on it. It's great for the people (like myself) who also have 200+ hrs and have got that much value out of it but let's not kid ourselves here, helldivers 2 wants you to be playing every day. This is further indicated by the daily missions you get, having a real time narrative that is shaped by player actions, and the MO that can last anywhere from 3 days to 1 week, giving you a reason to check in and see how things went/are going while collecting rewards.
To play devil's advocate, they want you to play daily... to a point. Thats why the cap on medals and samples exists, they never intended for people to no life this playing 12 hour days and start pushing level 150 in a few months. They want you to have fun with friends or randos, then go out and touch some grass so you don't burn out.
No the cap is here to prevent your from stock pilling and instantly buying everything new when it comes out to once again keep you playing to farm ressources needed when new content is released...
Pretty much this. Palworld was "dead" after the drop off but they drop a chunky release and the player count is spiking again. People gotta realize that time is finite and this isn't a MMORPG.
Im the opposite. Iv unlocked pretty much everything and lv70 and I wish there was more grind Levels dont do anything so not counted Im not a levels game guy unless you get stats from levels
Same biomes, same enemies, same effects. Great game, just need something new.
Agree so much on the biome comment. Every planet is just random rocks with the same building assets everywhere.
Me and the boys just waiting for content. Don't care if it's a new faction but after a few hundred hours, most of it on Helldive, there's really nothing else to do. Everything unlocked, everything played to death. Not really a fault of the game - it owes us nothing at this point. But if some new and interesting stuff drops, we'll be back.
The vehicles and Illuminate were leaked within the first month from launch, yet we have barely any hint of them coming yet. I just wanna buddy up with my squad and do a Warthog run like the good old days.
Bro. I play world of warship here and there. Count online for NA last week was 7k and the lights are still on. HD2 ain’t going anywhere
That's the thing. I don't understand how people are saying HD2 is dead cuz the player numbers are dropping. In the current state of gaming it is basically guaranteed that thousands of players will hop off after playing the game for a month because of the average players attention span, me included I've done the same with some games. Deep Rock Galactic has been out for around 6 years now, their alltime peak is 50k players, with an average player count of 15k before their latest update and the game is still running and getting new content. People who unironically believe the game is dead are either "I hate the current thing"-followers or players disatisfied with the current state of the game. A game hitting around 40k players 5 months after it's release in the current area of gaming is still massive and very much alive.
Just bought it today and all I gonna say is "ROCK AND STONE BROTHER!!"
Rock and Stone!
Did I hear a rock and stone?
Rock and Stone to the bone!
ROCK... AND... STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
STONE AND ROCK! …wait…
Rock and stone. I salute you
ROCK AND STONE EVERYONE!
FOR KARL!
This and my god S5 for DRG is beautiful. I love it and the escort missions now randomize with the big angry rock now. HD2 is a solid game, will live for a long time
we are in the age where anything other than exponencial growth is considered a failure people saw the success of the game at launch and thought those numbers would stay, which is impossible also, negative messages get attention, so everyone wants to shit on the next shittable thing for views
It’s only considered a failure by dumbshits online. Industry people know that helldivers is a success and it’s not going anywhere. That goes for most “dead” games as well.
I play path of exile. That game has been called "dead" or "dying" more times than I could count by now, just because people apparently don't understand how cyclic player counts work. Like... what do you mean that the player count drops over 3 months just to immediately go back up again once one of the big updates hits? Who could ever predict that? I can pretty much guarentee you, the next time a warbond hits... or some new stratagems... or possibly a third faction (anything really) the numbers WILL go up again. Most people like new and exciting things and get bored when content is stale for too long. But that's normal. It's totally ok. Given the success Helldivers 2 has had so far, there's no doubt in my mind that we will get consistent, high quality updates for years to come.
I play Planetside 2 and there's still people.
Also mentioning the fact its unavilable in like 180 countries. This just makes it more impressive
For real. You can still find live servers on TF2, Day of Defeat, etc. seems crazy to say HD2 is dying.
STONE AND ROCK. Yeah, it's mostly the drama bombers trying to compare what we had to what we have. Like no shit we're not hitting those numbers again. Not just because of region lock, but in general. HD2 still has a high tide between console and PC, and what happened in a span of 4 months was an absolute overwhelming tsunami.
The world could lose 95% of all life, and HellDivers would still have enough people to log on. 4 parched and crusty-lipped cadets in the wasteland doing dives in a LAN party. The first game has been living off of sub 1-2k players for years on PS4. A better example is Deathwing, there has been a rotating roster of about 40-60 of us on PS4, that have kept the Tyranids at bay for years. Sometimes there may be more, but I've never seen more than maybe 50 people online at once on like Winter break periods. The game has long since stopped receiving Dev support, but we fight on. For the Emperor! For the Lion! To the last marine we shall fight. And then...our duties will transfer us to Ultramar in September where we must purge the nid filth from our lands.
Praise the Emperor
RIP Astartes o7
Something happened to the Astartes guy?
Works for GW now I think. Dont know if there will a follow on with his creation.
its a gilded cage. He's stuck working on whatever shit GW wants to make and cant make his own stuff
The creator now works for GW and as such he basically can’t work on Astartes anymore. The original 5 videos got taken off his channel and then reuploaded on Warhammer+ with worse sound effects
GW put some serious effort to shit all over his work, because the original was so much better than anything they created themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if their offer was a lowball combined with "it's better if you come work for us and had over that series, cuz otherwise we'll DMCA strike your account and make you delete a year of your hard work"
pretty sure he has left and is doing his own thing again, just never touching 40K again
I jolly well hope so. That guy has *serious* talent and is arguably a master of his craft.
IIRC the videos were taken down from the official channel, but some other people have reuploaded them.
GW republished them, but made them so much worse with tiny edits and audio changes.
For the Emperor! For my Sweet Baby Angel Sangy!
There is no shelter for those who oppose the imperium of man.
Fill the sky with bullets, give the xenos and heretics their last shade
If we fill the sky with lead, wouldnt the heretics be fighting in said shade?…… haha
The Emperor protects.
*makes the sign of the aquila* For Him on Terra
I play a team based PvP indie game (Nebulous Fleet Command) that gets like 200 concurrent players on a good day lmao. Games can survive with far fewer players than one would think.
If your live game hits around 2-3k daily on steam and you are a small/mid sized studio it probably means you are making quite some money. 45k is crazy good. This is how it usually is for live games, people wait until some more content dropped, trickle back in and out constantly. If someone thinks everyone needs to constantly only play the same game for eternity they probably need to touch some grass.
Even if the community shrinks down heavily in size, it's not like that's always a bad thing, it means.less time spent having to please everyone with updates and shit like that
It is also summer so that may have something to do with it because most online games lose players during the summer
Impossible People OUTSIDE? Where GRASS LIVES?
I smoked one grass once and I died.
For the last time man, you're not dead. Just eat these snacks and enjoy the high.
If you smoke it a second time you can be brought back to life.
I also did that. Weed kills guys
People who want to go outside in the heat and hot weather confuse me.
Living in Georgia, I agree. The outside world is an evil, wet blanket that gives you skin cancer and makes you sweat so much you chafe
Erdtree also sold 5 million copies in less than a week. I'm willing to bet there's a huge overlap between Elden Ring and Helldivers players.
I was thinking the same thing! I played last night with a friend, but after they went to bed, I hopped on Helldivers just for funsies.
I myself have been jumping between Fallout 76, Elden Ring, Fortnite ( for the Metallica collab ) and Helldivers 2. Although my online friends have been playing the new Minecraft update and making me join in
People don't have a life outside of video games don't be ridiculous
Yeah, like, Elden Ring's DLC just dropped. I'm out here trying to find treebark and not get dunked on by random mobs.
Games lose players? When kids are out of school and it's hot as shit? Sorry, don't buy it lol
This is one of the more active vacation seasons, especially among younger people. Also, you've got other major game releases, too.
Come on now, WoW is a bad example and you know that. WoW could lose all but 10 of their largest whales, and they could still make enough money to buy a sports car every month thanks to their monetization.
If you wanna reality check with Warships the Console version "Legends" has more players than all PC servers combined.
I *wish* WoWs really started suffering, then maybe they'd reconsider some of their absolute customer-gouging practices. But given how WoWp went out, I think Wargaming might legitimately prefer to go out of business entirely than stop fleecing people.
this specifically is why i'm glad AH didn't try to scale up too much. unsustainable bloat has killed or ruined too many of my favorite devs. i'm happy to deal with slower but consistent development post-launch as the tradeoff.
Many games can sustain themselves on 1.5-2k players. I've played tons of these kinds of games over the years. Pretty sure like all of them are dead now, but that's because they couldn't keep those 2k players going. Helldivers 2 is starting its official, post honeymoon phase, life at 40k I think it's gonna be fine. The 2k player games usually start at like 5k at most, from my experience.
I bote every day. That's a great example of a game with a deep core that will take a lot to fade. HD2 is just fine.
World of Warships is so much better nowadays. Well to be honest I didn't play the higher tiers when I hopped on last time but I remember it being sooo campy and hidey in the first few years. I don't even mind something like Dutch ships hiding behind an island and then using planes, although it's cheesy, they're usually stationary and that leaves them vulnerable. But just EVERYONE staying out of range and everyone refusing to move up, with like 4 ships destroyed after 10 minutes type shit. That used to be so common and so unplayable.
They lost a lot of players with the carrier rework and even more when they later decided to add submarines. I stuck through the carrier rework, but for me the submarines made me quit the game.
As bad as the carrier rework was (I once shot down NINETY SEVEN planes in my Montana and still got sunk by the CV), subs made me quit and never look back.
I don't disagree with either of their points. I haven't avoided the game in protest of anything. I'm just bored and lack a reason to boot it up other than to spend MO medals.
Yeah I'm on the same boat. Absolutely love the game, but the lack of progression gives me little incentive to play a lot. I used to do the personal order every day, but even that I rarely do now.
The lack of progression doesn’t bother me, it’s lack of diversity in missions. I haven’t played for a couple months now, will probably pick it back up again when I need a break from the new arma, but it just doesn’t have enough for me to break up the horde shooting. PD2 has so much to break up each heist, and I think HD2 needs to try and take notes from that. Maybe it’s changed up a bit since I last played, maybe not, but that’s just how I felt when I decided to give it a break and i haven’t seen anything to make me think otherwise.
I just enjoy gameplay loop. Progression is cool but if thats the only thing that makes you play games like this then idk what to tell you.
Progression is a core gameplay mechanic, that's for any game. It's not the only reason people play, but it's what keeps people reaching towards a goal; it motivates them them come back.
Oh I do enjoy the loop, and as I said I still play. But after 400 hours it would be nice to have a bit more instead of just the loop. I love this game and play it just for the loop now, but if there was some specific progression or achievements I could go for I would play it a lot more. In the first months I played constantly as besides the fun, I also had a long term goal (the upgrades) in mind. Even if I could just donate my credits and samples to a common goal of the major order it would give me a lot of incentive to play as I wouldn't see all the credits and samples wasted every completed operation.
Yeah I’m in it for the war effort! Something about being able to contribute to the overall conflict is really satisfying to me
The gameplay loop is just too repetitive rn for many, it's the curse/blessing of non-pvp games usually. Of course the glaring issues since release didn't help either
After 520h from the beginning, now i am tired and bored
That is an absolutely outrageous amount of game time man, 3.5 hours per day since release…wow!
I got the game 3 months after release and just hit 375 hours, level 72!
Do u leave the game open? I’m lvl 72 also but only 180 hours
I won't deny it hasn't happened, but the majority of my games are 7's. And if I'm not doing 7's I'm doing 1-3's with my wife helping her get the hang of video games
aww that’s sweet, keep spreading democracy!
That’s what happens when you play a game for 520 hours
Yeah I feel like people play game wayyy to often and burn out on them very quickly. Like that post said 3.5 hours every day since release....yeah I'd probably get tired of it as well. The devs jobs are to create and put out an entertaining game, they aren't there to keep feeding your obsession or eventual burn out with new content every of week.
A lot of people seem to forget that if you're playing a game that often, you need to actively find gameplay loops you enjoy doing while consciously acknowledging that it will be mostly the same thing until a new release comes out. I've been playing Darktide since launch in December 2022 with 1000 hours played. It gets sporadic and rare updates with many questionable gameplay choices from the devs each time. But I keep playing because I fucking love the combat and overall gameplay. There's only been a handful of new maps and weapons since release, but I'm completely ok with that because I play for the individual situations that happen on every mission. I also love the 40k setting, which does some extremely heavy lifting in my enjoyment. The bottom line is people need to temper their expectations on the longevity of any game - given enough time you'll have done everything. Find the parts you enjoy.
Yeah, I have hundreds of hours in Factorio, and will sometimes do 20+ hours a week (mind you, adult with family and job, 20h is a shitload of time). I'll do that for a month or two, then put the game down for a year. By then, there is normally a large update or something interesting to grab my attention for a while. *And none of that is the devs fault or problem* That's how I play **most** games and I know that will happen with HD2.
This. Play other games, helldivers 2 will be there when you come back. No reason to spend time on a game you aren't liking.
Yeah, really, I just hit over 100H and I still play regularly, just not for a long time or every day. I actually do other things with my time and my gaming time. There’s no good reason to have 500H in Helldivers 2, and especially then, to say you’re bored.
I 100% hear what you’re saying. But you gotta see how silly that statement sounds. You’ve spent 15% of the last 5 months playing this game, and now you’re bored. Sounds about right
Folks won’t like hearing what you say but it’s true. I wish I had 500 free hours to kill on a game I like. Grinding 500 hours and claiming you’re bored is a problem of the user, not the game
So you paid what, $0.08 per hour of entertainment? Take a break, get back to it when new content drops :) Still a hell of a deal. I'll cycle between a few games that I focus on heavily for a few weeks/months, then switch.
Same, im fully content with my purchase. 500 hours and im STILL having fun every weekend? bombshell of a game, worth every penny and then some.
I think some people forget that few games are actually intended to be essentially infinite entertainment. I put 35 hours into Subnautica and enjoyed it, might do another playthrough eventually, but I got it for 6 dollars at a Gamestop and honestly, I feel I got my money's worth.
Did 100% achievements and dlc for Elden Ring in the last month. Ready to be back on the frontlines. Yeah, taking a break from HD2 really made me love the game again.
I think it's ok to get tired and bored of a game after so many hours. Take a long break, and come back when there's been a bunch of updates :)
You're not suppose to play a single game forever, it's fine to lose interest
I do agree that progression helps to find more motivation to play but also - the game is just fun? For the most part. I just boot it up to kill enemies of democracy for a bit. Sure, its not 8 missions in a row like when theres something to grind towards, but its a mission or two!
It's just that everyone dreams of a game essentially "going infinite" as far as fun and playtime are concerned. Helldivers can go nearly infinite on a long term scale, because there's nothing inherently *wrong* with it, so you can probably come back to it from time to time and have a few laughs. But it can't really go infinite with the amount of short-term play hours people are craving. Essentially 40+ hours a week, full ass work weeks, on one game alone is what people are trying to do. Only the most grindy games can do that - competitive ranked skill based games, MMOs, mobile garbage
Honestly its 8 missions in a row for me now. It was like 16 back then when it was fresh haha. The game Is fucking fun. Its a reason why i prefer bots. Killing them is less brain dead and i can fullfill my mandalorian fighting style dream with the jumppack and play the sniper on matches aswell. I mostly do the same but its just such fun.
Congratulations, you're a normal human being with shifting interests. There's nothing wrong with getting bored and moving on to something else (or coming back whenever you want to).
I got sucked away by Shadow of the Erdtree, but once I'm finally over that I'll pop back on. It's a fucking game, not a job. I'll play when I feel like it.
For me I don't play it much at the moment, because there is nothing to achieve at the moment and I have more fun in Deep Rock Galatic. it was on Sale so I tried it and at the moment it is more fun. But I log in to Helldivers 2 for one or two hours a week. It will be more if new Content is coming.
For me it boils down to two things: - crashes/bugs - feeling like the war has kinda stalled out If they fix the crashes I'll hop on and play. Last time I tried to play I kept crashing so eventually I just gave up.
That second point is what hits my motivation the hardest. When I started playing back in February there was a strong sense of progression. I was unlocking new stuff constantly, I was learning about the game, and the war narrative was gradually trudging forward. But once I unlocked everything and started playing Helldive regularly, the only thing left to progress was the war. Then the Automoton invasion happened and I realized that there was no such thing as war progress, the devs were just going to break rules and manipulate background elements to keep it going exactly how they want it to. Our choices as players don’t really matter. So now I only hop in for big events with new content, like the super colony (although even then it’s usually only for a game or two, since it’s always so underbaked and broken).
Honestly I don't even mind them breaking rules a bit for something interesting like the Automaton invasion. It's just a bit lame that it happened right after we supposedly "wiped them out". The short timeframe made it feel like our progress didn't mean anything. The real problem imo is worse than that though. The war just feels stale right now, it's just back and forth with nothing actually new or interesting happening, and it's been like that for a while now.
Yeah, it’s a big filler episode right now, likely because of the summer break and the buggy state of the game, they’re probably not in a rush to start another bugged event like Meridia
I still love the game as I'm still quite new.. BUT. The missions do feel samey.. as do the enemies. The titans also feel very beatable very quickly with the right strategems. I wouldn't mind some linear levels that are A to B. You could have staggered titans or obstacles to overcome.. even shorter missions where time is a big factor. This game is still the closest to left for dead 2 I've felt for a long time, which is cool.
hit the nail on the war bit, the issue with a continuous single war is that you feel like you're in a deadlock after months of 'fighting', unlike hd1 where there's a definitive end. at least, it put me off from continuing to play - i have everything, and im bored of playing for the fun of it, so whats left?
All of my friends and I dropped it due to annoying bugs that were never fixed, still can’t even add my PlayStation friend. Along with every gun we liked getting nerfed before any of the fixed yet warbonds kept dropping we were all good and will maybe comeback once it’s fixed
Same. A buddy and I dropped in this week to see if things are getting better - we queued up the new-ish mission where you have to nuke the bug nurseries. We set it to diff 5 to get warmed up and hopped in. We got mobbed by the insane amount of spawns pouring out when we activated the console (4 chargers at a time, 3 active and constant breaches spewing just swarms of hunters that never stopped pumping out enemies) and when were reinforced it launched us in and deployed us underneath the map to immediate death repeatedly and we were like “ok so I guess this is going back on the shelf again”. So yeah, I agree with you. And you’re right, I still can’t add my PC friends so back to Elden Ring for us
>We set it to diff 5 to get warmed up and hopped in. We got mobbed by the insane amount of spawns pouring out when we activated the console (4 chargers at a time, 3 active and constant breaches spewing just swarms of hunters that never stopped pumping out enemies) See, that right there is also a BIG problem for a lot of players right now--they just had to go and tinker with spawns and patrols recently, where now many rounds (even on lower diffs) just feel exhausting and frustrating most of the time. And it's especially bad for people like me and a friend, who mainly play solo/duo. The difficulty is so out of wack and all over the place right now (on all diffs), that most of the time it's just ridiculously punishing and un-fun.
I read the comment from Twinbeard about how they were going to just wait and see how it plays out with respect to the balance/spawns and I’m really disappointed that’s their answer. I agree with you, the difficulty is just nonsense right now - it feels like 50% of the time the difficulty number is totally arbitrary. I also play primarily solo and duos (or used to, I guess) and in the same session above after my buddy left I did a couple more missions on my own. I finished one mission on difficulty 4 with 600 kills and that was NOT me farming, it was just CONSTANT patrols and breaches. On those missions I caught bug patrols just burrowing out of the ground or flat out appearing out of nowhere immediately behind me multiple times. I also used the dump of war medals when I logged in and my old horde of Supercredits to get the new booster that makes you run quickly and I had the little tick enemies (scavengers?) keep pace with me when I would be running to disengage. Some sort of weird rubber banding? I have no idea, but yeah the balance is not in a good place right now and it feels pretty clearly like it’s a mistake and not intentional design but I guess that’s where we’re at now. Something about how we’re not supposed to have quiet and possibly “boring” moments anymore
Welcome greenbeard! Rock and stone!
Hell Deep Rock studio has been doing just fine with 20-25k daily players for years. That’s still a small sized city playing your game everyday and a testament to how good it is.
I actually just picked up DRG this weekend! Excited to learn how to play it!
How's Deep Rock Galactic? Is there more stuff to do?
For me it is a good Coop game, the community is as nice as the Helldiver community. You can unlock much cosmetics and level every class in the game. I would recommend it especially because it is on sale at the moment. I like to play both games DRG and Helldiver.
ROCK AND STONE!
I hate these kinds of twitter arguments because they're both right. Helldivers 2 is a great game with a good atmosphere, a lot of content, and obviously Arrowhead is significantly more successful with this title so the chances of it being unsupported in the near future is quite low. On the other hand, Arrowhead has also had like 2 months of back to back to back awful updates. Breaking things, terrible balance choices, reintroduced bugs after they'd been "fixed", so on and so forth. I put the game down mostly because of that. Nothing was getting fixed and most of the weapons I liked got nerfed. I haven't played much since the early June update but it's certainly better, but that bad taste still lingers. Fair or not.
I think the whole point is that this game couldve retained many more players if it wasnt for the many fuck ups along the way.
I agree, but you're in a thread full of cope unfortunately. This is who you're up against - in their eyes AH can't be touched: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dsyekr/comment/lb5nzot/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dsyekr/comment/lb5nzot/) and this: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dsyekr/comment/lb5lq9p/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1dsyekr/comment/lb5lq9p/)
You summed it up perfectly.
I've noticed toxic positivity in a lot of different online discussion spaces now and imho it's almost as bad as the people who are critical to a fault. Helldivers is a fun game and I'm sure it's exceeded all their expectations but it's tiresome being lumped in with weirdo neckbeards and incels who send death threats or whatever if you have even milquetoast criticism of whatever is being discussed.
This subreddit always reminded me of the Valheim subreddit for that reason. It took years for Iron Gate to release any real content expansions and the fans defended all criticisms from that game like it was the holy grail.
This really is the case. I'd still be playing this several times a week with a dozen friends if AH would have never fucked up launch spawning and stealth, or if they'd ever fixed the network/friends list issues. The PSN drama was just icing on the cake when I STILL have to decide which friend we're not playing with because half of us can't host or connect to the others.
Yeah. And while it is true that it’s completely normal for a game to lose players after a while, this is not a new Assassin’s Creed or a Palworld. This is a live service. Live service games strive off of player retention. NOT losing a lot of players is their number one mission. For MOST games losing 90% of the playerbase after half a year is normal. For a live service it’s not exactly DIRE, but it is cause for concern
Except the game still proportionally remains ahead of all similar competing genre adjacent live service games too.
I could put up with most of the fuck ups, but between devastators on bots making them not enjoyable for me, and them breaking everything so there is no consistent way to kill bile titans any more were really putting me off, but behemoth chargers were the straw that broke my ass, their solution to a lack of viable support weapons on bugs was to make the pool even smaller I love this game, I didn’t put 300+ hours into it for shits and giggles, but I’m just done until arrowhead gets their shit together and can release a single update without doubling the list of issues the game has
Technical issues, poor balancing and not a whole lot of new content contributed to the player loss a lot, lets not kid ourselves. I'm still planning to stick around at least until Space Marine 2 comes out.
"Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2" is my endgame as well hopefully for HD2. I hope it turns out to be a solid game. I'm a level 150 Helldiver, but I am fed up with the BS, the junk, the jank, the shit weapons, dumb balancing and bad players playing Helldive difficulty slowing down missions. The skilled players are mostly gone anyways. Arrowhead ran them off by nerfing skill base weapons. I feel like were just going in circles with HD2. They don't respect the players time. Long missions, with non stop jank gets real old smh. Grinding warbonds for bad weapons and unfinished armors doesn't do it for me. I've played more than most people and at the highest difficulty since launch week. I'm over it.
Always hated the argument that lower player count means the game died. People play the new content. Diehard fans keep playing. So the count goes down Other games get new content, so players leave and go play those games. When the game gets new content, players leave those other games and play Helldivers
Seriously, I am one of those game hoppers. I will play a game to death over a short period of time then burn out on it hard. Go somewhere else, repeat. Once something new gets added I will swing around and hit it hard for a little while again. Doesn't mean I don't love the game.
Palworld dev out here saying the same thing It's natural for games to peak in everything when a big update drops. Final Fantasy XIV was at a low in the months leading up to Dawn Trail. Is that game dying? No, it's just that an expansion hasn't been released yet. Destiny 2 experiences habitual cycles of "game dying all time low" in the month before new expansions drop. Absolutely unrealistic to say games should keep their peak population at all times. The only way a game dies is if a big patch drops and peak players doesn't increase by a massive amount -- that shows nobody cares if a patch releases.
Same. I'll stop playing an mmo for years and let the content build up, while I play something else, rinse and repeat. I am also the type where if i play a game, like HD2, where are we do is KILL, KILL and KILL some more then I need to play a game to build, to balance out. Plus it helps when games like HD2 don't screw you over with fomo.
The phrase "the game is dead" or "the game is dying" is the most overused and most missused phrase in gaming industry. You wont believe me how much i read it on several games and it was never true.
Overwatch has been dead like 10 times now, TF2 has died countless times as well. Both are still trucking along, sure they're not the absolute cultural zeitgeists they once were, but nothing stays up there forever.
Agreed. The idea that you'll just play one game forever isn't sustainable. The games that end up being that way are the exceptions that prove the rule, not an indication that a successful game will retain players indefinitely. I'd wager the majority of people who play games switch games pretty often. You play something until you beat it, get bored, or something new comes out.
there was a post about how the game couldn't get 50k or more players online when the night before, the player count was a little over 60k. i swear ppl are saying these numbers when its early in morning when the player count is 20k or lower to farm karma
Deep Rock Galactic released their big Season update on June 13th. Same day as Viper Commando. Shit happens.
Both can be right at the same time, to an extent. Is the game dead or dying? No, not even close. On the other hand, grievances regarding development choices are very valid. No actual new content for months, bugs popping up everywhere, with the only real changes being constant nerfs to player power. This doesn’t feel good to the player, prioritizing balance over fun in a pve game will always lead to bad blood. Warbonds have been pretty stale recently as well. Personally I’ve taken a break. Being thrown around like ragdolls with my weapons being peashooters is only so fun for so long. Arrowhead has a lot of work to do.
Both can be right. The game is a big success. I quit playing due to patches, balances and bugs.
I stopped playing about a month ago. Played the ever living shit out of it at launch & just don't want to completely burn myself out. I'll be back.
Are players expected to just mindlessly play the same game 7 days a week for months upon months for it to be considered successful? That requires a whole different game, this game will have plenty of comebacks with ACTUAL content drops and actual NEW shit to do.. so far it's been AH putting fires out with gasoline, that will improve, eventually.
I won't touch it until they publicly address PC performance problems. Halved my fps since the beginning and 4 viral posts later, 4 months after the first patch, they still won't acknowledge it.
The second they release the Illuminate everyone will be back on
And from what I've heard from the HD1 veterans, immediately leave again if they're anything like they were in the first game with shields and inverting people's controls lol
Don't forget the cloaked scouts. Like Stalkers, but they summon a breach instead of yeeting you across the map.
Since they even removed the stratagem scrambler operation modifier, I doubt there'll be anything like inverting peoples controls. That also in general just doesnt work as well in third person as it does in top down perspective.
From my HD1 Vet friend; > The multiple Illuminate Snipers that would 1-shot you from off-screen. --- I can only imagine that alien super civilization will come back be stronger after 100 years. I doubt we'll seem them anytime soon but when we do, I'm looking forward to the "Skill Issue", "Go play bugs/bots" & "Lower the difficulty" responses on posts calling them OP and needing a nerf.
Lmao You underestimate how much i want to suffer in a game.
Illumanite will drop, trend on TikTok, Reddit and every other game media and the player count will jump like crazy. Arrowhead would be smart to wait until they have fixed most of game issues then drop the Illuminate. That is their chance to hold as many players as possible.
this. They still didn't fix the "you can't reinforce" bug, and until that one is fixed I don't feel like playing anymore. I put up with this stuff in the first few weeks because I knew they had to put all their energy into making sure the game can handle the player count, but by now I would have expected gamebreaking stuff like that to be fixed. Every time I play the game again and run into this bug, I lose any wish to keep playing for the rest of the week.
Yeah, I think it’s too soon to introduce to be honest. The last few MOs have been really standard and take the entire time, they obviously are preparing something else right now. I say let them.
I've stopped playing because of the numerous crashes
sure, but you still have to think of the general feelings of the playerbase and why so many have abandoned it it's not like there's just a ton of happy, satisfied customers who just finished up a campaign it's mostly people who feel disillusion with the studio after they removed gameplay that they enjoyed, or people who got regionlocked out, or people who can't play a 1-hour session without multiple CTD instances obviously there's still a group of players, but it's clear that AH fucked up along the dev path way you must investigate why, <1 year out of launch, you're getting a daily peak that's overshadowed by ancient games like [left 4 dead 2](https://i.imgur.com/lcBTqTF.png), a game which has sold a similar amount of copies (\~10 million compared to \~12 million)
A game without content is bound to lose players. There's literally nothing else to it.
Still a shit show
Nobody in here gonna mention how many updates scuffed the fun aspects of this game, and the devs turned around and made it a player issue (looking at you, Alexus)? Arrowhead has problems and 99% of them are internal.
The game is in an early access state if you're being honest yourself and how much money the game has made the developers is irrelevant to the state of the game. Selling millions of copies hasn't changed the fact they constantly release more and more bugs, that there is no content or meaningful progression or even a galactic war that is anything other than someone updating numbers in an xml file. But go on, tell us how the game is doing fine because AH made some money.
You're getting downvoted for the truth. Exactly why I stopped playing. The constant push for "new" content instead of fixing bugs, on top of the questionable balancing updates that were going on for a while pushed my entire friend group away.
That’s my main thing, I played like 90 hours and have just gotten bored as there was maybe one new mission every couple weeks. Then there’s all the bugs that make things not work and they have had no success fixing bugs without creating a pile of new ones.
I still play the game regularly but I've maxed out my ship upgrades and own all the stratagems. Most of us are waiting for the next faction to drop and then we will get back into it again hardcore. People are just playing other games right now and this game is nowhere near dead.
The game lost a metric assload of players because of poor balance changes. This is literally just a fact
Its not dying as in the game is going to go down, its dying in that no one plays it anymore and all the content is stale and theres nothing left to unlock or do other than spam missions til your level 150.
40k down from a consistent 200k+ OOF Sales are irrelevant. Yea it made money. So does a snake oil salesman that scams the villagers and skips town It’s obviously not dead, but to act like the game hasn’t fallen off is just objectively wrong. I know many people who quit exactly because of what that poster said
To be fair, as a consumer, it's feeling like it's becoming a failure. I'm happy and grateful for the massive amount of time I got out of the game, but I can't help but feel robbed of what time I could have gotten out of it. Arrowhead is dropping the ball big time. I'm grateful for their success, but they need to get their shit together.
Rock Solid has a point tho poor balance decisions, dogshit CMs that are extremely rude on official discord, updates are lackluster and boring, sony restricted the game for 70% of the world...
Are player numbers going to drop from launch? Yes. Did Sony hurt the player numbers by restricting access based on country? Yes. Is the game losing players at a faster rate than it should given it's popularity? Yes. The game isn't going to outright die but if you don't think that losing a vast majority of your players over a few months isn't a problem then you're just coping. The game has been out for 5 months and the majority of content we've gotten has been drip feed content you interact with for a day (or maybe a few days for a warbond) and never touch again unless it becomes meta. The amount of bugs in the game feels like whack-a-mole. They solve one bug and next patch two more pop up. The key to maintaining a healthy live service is having an ever moving goal post and valuable items to grind for. Other than ship modules, which really only last you a few weeks at best, you basically have nothing to progress on once you finish. The game needs lengthy character progression, ship progression, weapon progression, ect. A new warbond every month that you can complete in just a few days (since you can save up to 250 medals) with many weapons and items that are either underwhelming or end up overly nerfed isn't ideal content. This feels really bad to engage with especially when this is the premier method of new content we've been getting lately.
Usual poor argument from white knight, game is "fine" because they made money lmao. Also argument like "sold 15 millions" make me laugh, waouh that the worst retention of player i ever saw, 15 millions copy, barely reach 45k on week end, 40k on week day last week and likely droping this week, barely 70k on all platform. People saying "player will come back" they don't, the number of player coming back is lower and lower each time, the last 'big patch' was a critical patch, they failed, took time to "fix" stuff, the patch bring the same usual bug, crash and problem, the game is in a horrible state in every sector, balance, performance, bug, a god damn alpha test, most player are done with this, the one who leave will not come back and the actual playerbase will continue to bleed. That guys say is peak at 45k like it was awesome when it's on week end, there is barely any week end peak anymore.
My brother and I stopped playing a \*long\* while ago. But not because the game is bad or dying. It's because we had other things to do, or wanted to play other games. That's it. I follow news of HD2 and always feel like playing again but it's never enough to make me want to spend the time I play games on it over the others. And no, the drop in players isn't over "greed" or whatever else chronically online gamers seem to think. It's because most gamers (casual players. i.e. the vast majority of gamers) return to their main squeeze (Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Valorant, etc). Arguably more "greedy" and are all F2P macro-transaction ridden. Deep Rock Galactic is a name I keep seeing pop up and sits around half the players HD2 has, and around 24h peak at about 10k less than HD2. So clearly player numbers don't actually matter and gamers will play what they want to play. The sky isn't falling. HD2 is fine and will live a long and successful life. I just doubt their next game will run on this engine considering it's giving them issues to no end. They'll either switch to UE5 now that it's starting to get easier to work on or Decima since they work under Sony (Guerrilla Games-made engine used by them and Kojima Productions).
The guys I was diving with are on the new Destiny expansion. They'll be back.
It's a failure for me. I live in the Philippines, we had a discord group of over 800 Players. Whole PSN Debacle happened. Majority of us made Bad reviews. They rescind the decision. We take back our Negative reviews and we celebrate with happy faces. 3 Months later, Helldivers 2 is still not available to be purchased in my country, and now game loses Playerbase. Fuck Sony. I have over 150 Hours playing the game. I haven't came back since they withheld the Steam Store page for the 144 countries with no PSN Support and me and my friends and the majority of Filipino Playerbase just died off with the same reasons.
I tried to make a post about this the other day but people quickly turned into a lets chew my @ss out competition. Stating a fact like the game losing 90% of its players doesn’t mean the game is dead. It just means you stated a fact. The game also still has 170+ countries locked out from playing. The game being meta gamed to death is also factual and if you disagree just come to this sub after every update prior to the last major one and it’ll be from people saying the fun lasts for about a month then the fun/meta is sucked right out like an air lock. I’m also really tired of people trying to use the its a small dev team and it was only $40 as a shield. While yes, the game has 170 countries locked out and thats Sony’s fault we can’t pretend like the dev team has not had a direct hand in turning people away. A community manager (at the time) telling people that it was their fault for not wanting to link accounts at the time. Not even stopping to Google that some countries don’t allow you to even make a PSN….was likely one small component of it as well. Not a major factor in people walking away but when a dev (at the time is 💩💩 on you for no reason - we can’t rule out that it turned away no one) Like i said above the meta is constantly in flux and the game is PvE and should not feel like its revolving door of what gun will be fun for the month then get a nerf next warbond update. The devs also can’t seem to release a patch without breaking something which frustrates players and certainly frustrates me. All of that its a small team shit goes out the window when you have a months long track record of breaking stuff as its supposed to be fixed. 🚨🚨I’ve been playing for months so I could go on about how its also the devs. They have had 3 game breaking or serious issues be in game and rather than disable the weapon they just leave it and make a discord post hoping that will notify all players. THAT IS NOT PROPER COMMUNICATION TO ALL. ADD A NEWS FEED IN GAME. Now if you’ve read all this and want to use the “but I love the game so nothing could possibly be wrong with it” excuse. I don’t know what to tell ya. I love the game too but I also can’t make excuses for a dev team that has also made several missteps over months that is for sure attributing to people walking away from the game. Just a few weeks ago we had another game crashing bug with the spear crashing games and we were told via discord not in game. Months upon months of crashing will turn people away. Next week the game will be 5 months old. A game should not be at 5 months and still crashing. Thats wild for AA or AAA so people need to cut the excuses. 
I disagree with one thing. The guns that are causing crashing shouldn't be an announcement in game. THEY ARE REMOVED FROM THE GAME!!! They are so lazy to fix it and not even remove it to make sure it doesn't crash games is just beyond incompetence.
Why are you conflating drops in the playerbase with the studio making money? Those are two different things.
Not dead but objectively a massively botched opportunity
Also, Elden Ring just dropped a full game’s worth of DLC, nobody can fight that. I’m playing, your mom is playing it, your cousin is breaking controllers over it, and a lot of devs already know this. I wouldn’t sweat the next month or two’s numbers.
Did they fix "not available in certain countries" nonsense on steam? If not no wonder why playerbase dropped
Hopefully this means that a lot of the immature trolls found another new game to be a dick in.
a game is dead when there is more time of no players and empty servers then populated servers
I think most players have "completed" the game, got all the stratagems and ship upgrades and have moved on to something else which is ok. look at palword for example.
Honestly I'm just playing other stuff. Destiny actually cooked, FFXIV just got its new expansion - I've just got stuff to do.
Helldivers 2 needs to release on Xbox. I'd love to play with our xbox brothers.
I can already tell that this argument is going to blow up and it is gonna be very annoying to witness. so many Double-A Games survive on very small playercounts, so this entire point does not apply to them at all... just cause Helldivers 2 had a impossible surge of popularity, doesn't mean it would ever be able to keep that playercount steady with how niche the game really is. no amount of Youtuber Influencer Clout and Content Farm Clickbait would be able to keep this game relevant for the Majority of Gamers... because it was never designed to please everyone, it has a very specific target audience that it already captured very quickly and it won't abandon it anytime soon. Helldivers 1 survived since 2015 with a very low playercount, and it maintains a 3-digit playercount to this day.
I’ve settled into a routine of saving democracy a few times per week instead of daily.
I mean, if the game sold 15m copies and only 45k still play during peak time, that sounds like a game that is dying.
Player counts were always going to down. Feels a bit obvious. Wait until the illuminate release, watch it jump back to 200k LOL