Like every PvE game which does not have hundreds of people working to churn out content, its playerbase will dwindle until only those who do not get bored by its gameplay stick around. Whether it’s Left 4 Dead, Payday, Deep Rock Galactic or Vermintide, those types of games follow this pattern…
And I for one, see no fucking issue with that. It’s a great game, people play it until they have had their fill and then move on. Helldivers 2 is only an outlier because of how hard it hit at launch. It absolutely does not have the content pipeline to keep a large playerbase engaged, so yeah it will not keep printing a lot of money, just a little bit every now and then.
Now excuse me as I go and spread some managed democracy.
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That’s a good point. An online game can be successful while having a limited shelf life. Make your money and shut it down (or just ramp it down for the smaller audience if it’s worth the effort)
The player base was always going to decline significantly.
It doesn’t have the same kind of slow grind and wide open maps with tonnes of things to interact with that kept up the populations of a game like WoW or Overwatch, so it was going to naturally decline anyway as most people got their fill of the game play and move on to the next game. Anything that is comparable either had a ton of content that was drip fed or has random loot boxes to keep people playing. This game lets you earn enough to play even the highest levels of play fairly quickly, with getting everything taking a bit longer.
The remaining population is actually pretty high for this kind of game, and it is far from dying. I play randoms when friends aren’t on even though I have unlocked all the upgrades to earn myself medals, but also to help out the other players because the game does promote team play even with all the accidental team kills. I never have to wait when there are more than 1,000 players on a planet, and the there are often several planets with several thousand even when people aren’t grouped up for major orders.
The community is engaged and while there will certainly be more of a decline as time passes, I wouldn’t be surprised if the game gets a significant bump in player activity (old players coming back) when they introduce the next faction. Probably not double whatever population is there when it hits, but maybe 50% increase as people come to check out the new content. I think the rapid release was their original plan to keep the player base going and I’m happy they slowed down to address bugs and do quality of life improvements for a bit.
This game also has the most friendly, or at least least antagonistic, player base I have ever experienced in an online game. Although most random games don’t have anyone speak up unless I do first, people help each other out, attempt to get everyone out, and there is often hugs on the ship after extraction. I have only had one player grief in dozens of random games and one match had someone who was rude. Far, far fewer negative experiences than any other game I’ve played.
It may get down to 3% of the highest number of players and will still be alive and kicking for those that do enjoy the game play.
Deep Rock Galactic would like a word about friendly player base!
Did I hear a “Rock and Stone”?
Rockity rock and stone!
ROCK AND STONE TO THE BONE!
Guild Wars 2 as well. :)
I haven’t experienced it, but hear good things about the community.
As would FFXIV.
When the initial player base numbers are fucking unsustainable, this is a necessary and expected correction.
Panicked headline aside, there are still tens of thousands of players online at any given time and the game is doing extremely well at for not having had a proper expansion or new faction, and just the steady drip feed of new gear and equipment.
It’s clickbait more so than panicked headline but yeah I agree
So?
I hate how every game want to compete for current playtime.
I got way more than money’s worth out of this game, but I haven’t played in over a month. I hope that when I go back to it, there’s still a playerbase.
But like, the developers planned for at best to get 10% of what they did…
If they dropped that extra 90%, I don’t see why that should spell the end of the game. It’s the playerbase the game was designed for.
There’s just this weird “first or worst” mentality with a lot of studios. I hope this game is just given the room to stretch it legs over a decade or so. Something people might not always keep installed on their console, but still download once or twice a year to get some games in.
Games like that can be a success. Just because a lot of people burnt out doesn’t mean they’ll never play again.
It’s just games like that don’t maximize investor returns. They want to churn out hits that people play exclusively for 3 months then drop, only to buy the new one next year.
And the Sony account requirement will be reimplemented in 3… 2… 1…
That’s like saying breaking bad has lost 99% of its viewers with no sign of recovery. L take
The point made in the article is that this isn’t supposed to some content that is released and over, like a TV episode. It’s a live service game that’s expected to be continuously played and generate income. This a huge drop is a mark against that model.
I do love helldivers, but I’m not exactly sad if live service games end up being not attractive to devs anymore.
More accurate to say that the initial success surge has calmed down to their core audience.
That 10% or fewer depending on if it’s still shrinking will be the rock and stoners that keep this game running well into the future.
You’ll probably see a similar spike then fall off then consolidation when The Forever Winter releases. That core community revenue is probably going to be what FunDog is planning on using for future projects and to cover the maintenance costs of TFW. I mean either that or they’ll power the servers by kidnapping the playerbase and harvesting their organs and bioelectricity but it was really their own fault for not being able to get out of sight before nightfall.
Never touched it again after the psn fiasco. I am not deluded enough to think the devs were on the players side. If you saw there early messages about it and still think they are with you, you are completely lost.
That is just the natural lifecycle of every multiplayer game
Oh no, anyway.
As someone who loves Helldivers 2 but has not played in about a month and a half, it’s summer Forbes. People are also playing less games than normal.
It’s down 90% because of summer?? Come on now, that’s ridiculous. You think all the kids home for the summer refuse to play games?
Maybe you should take a look at the steam numbers for the other big games, they are absolutely not down 90%
Without any real sense of progression, I just couldn’t find a reason to play unless I had a friend who was already online and playing. Unlocking new weapons and whatnot is fun until its not, and when I don’t have the minutia that comes with an MMO or the randomness that comes with a rogue-like, I don’t have anything to look forward to from the next run. There was no surprise to the game, and the initial luster faded pretty quickly when I realised what the treadmill was going to be. If there had been a more single player focused bit to it, I may have lasted longer, but being so heavily reliant on a party meant it was a group of friends, or some randos that are going to waste my time.
It has gotten more fun grinding at extreme for samples, and helping out lower level players, since the buffing patch. The endgame is just kind of flat.
(edit): The article doesn’t go into how and why there was a decline, how Sony and Arrowhead kinda shot themselves in the foot with account linking. I think this would still be a fast moving train had they not tried to do that, and had the man power to focus on bugs, balance and battles at the same time.
how Sony and Arrowhead kinda shot themselves in the foot with account linking.
The graph from the article literally proves the opposite.
Account linking happened May 6th. It is on the graph as point “A.”
There is a small increase in the decline of the player count, but you had already lost almost 200,000 players since the last peak on April 1st!
So between April 1st and May 6th the game went from around 370,000 players to around 170,000 players, and the current player count literally can’t drop the same level because that would be less than zero.
So, the bigger drop came way before account linking, friend. The game was already dying, and the account linking just firmly put it out of its misery.
You make mostly good points but its stupid to call the game dead or dying. They don’t currently have a bunch of players they never expected to have in the first place. They still sold their product to those people which makes it a huge net win for them. It’s a wildly successful game by any reasonable metric you can choose to evaluate it against.
Yea this is pretty much it. I meet online weekly to play something with some friends, after the third or fourth session I was just completely done with the game. It doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot to do after you’ve tried every mission type.
There Will be a bump when the release the new faction and the mystery 4th faction. But as someone with everything maxed out I just drop in twice or thrice a week now. Just nothing to aim for. Some kind of prestige system could be good.
Wait, was this heralded as some live service forever game?
