With Helldivers 2 losing 90% of its player base, the Arrowhead summer break could turn into a disaster for the game

Following a meteoric rise, becoming one of the best-selling games of 2024, with the last figure being 12 million sales in the first three months, things have been rocky for Helldivers 2 since then due to the PSN controversy, which led to players in 180 countries being unable to play. Despite still being widely available in most of the western part of the world, Helldivers 2 has seen a downward spiral over the past two months, with players leaving the game in droves.

This is normal for most games, even live service titles, as players complete all of the available or become bored of the game and move on to something new. Since its launch in February 2024, Helldivers 2 last lost over 90% of its player base, dropping from its peak of 458,709 players on Steam to peaking at just 44,938 today (June 29th). The first Helldivers game peaked at just 6,744 players, meaning that even during its decline, the sequel still averages more than 566% more players.

After such a hectic 2024, Arrowhead Game Studios is taking a much-needed Summer break, with the development team being on vacation for the next six weeks as the studio enters a “semi-siesta mode.” This will likely mean that the development team will still be on hand to fix any major issues with the game, but no new updates will be released during this time.

The Helldivers 2 Community Manager Twinbeard did take the official Discord server to assure players that the game won’t be abandoned. “Arrowhead won’t close during summertime and Helldivers 2 won’t be abandoned, so you continue breathing, it will be ok. It is however fact that Sweden in many ways go into a semi-siesta mode during “Sweden industry summer break”, which is typically early July to mid August,” he said.

But, with Helldivers 2 experiencing a major decline in players and many losing confidence in both Arrowhead Game Studios and Sony due to the PSN controversy, it is worrying that no new content will be coming to the game over the next month or so. It will be interesting to see whether the game maintains its current player count or whether it will continue to decline. If this is the case, hopefully, Arrowhead Game Studios has a plan to bring players back in once they return to full-time work. The recent 01.000.400 update did cause an 86% increase in players, so there is still an active community ready to dive into new content.

Players have been waiting for The Illuminate to finally make their presence known in the Galactic War, which will bring the biggest change to the game that we will have seen so far as it will be a much-needed break from the Automatons and Terminids. If you’re still actively playing the game, Super Earth is once again battling the Terminids following the new jungle biome being released earlier this month. To ensure victory against the Terminids, we highly recommend optimizing your loadout by checking out our Helldivers 2 best weapons guide and best armor guide so you and your squad can serve hot cups of Liber-tea to every enemy that stands between you and democracy.