Helldivers 2 was so popular this weekend it broke. Again. – WGB

A few days ago, Arrowhead’s CEO mentioned that the team was worried that the upcoming weekend would be too much for the game to handle, and it seems those fears have come true. Over the weekend the servers buckled under the influx of players, once again resulting in people unable to play.

The reason is that Helldivers 2 saw yet another massive surge in its peak concurrent players, hitting a staggering 333, 827 players on Steam, breaking its prior records, and an unknown amount on the PlayStation 5 side of things. Unfortunately, this was enough to send the servers into panic mode yet again as players could not log in and were greeted with a message explaining that the servers were at max capacity.

As I write this at 15:00 on Sunday, the problem is persisting. If I try to log in, I’m told the log in limit has been reached and that I must wait. Queue times can be anywhere from minutes to hours, based upon what players are saying on the official subreddit.

Arrowhead put out a statement addressing the issue :

Earlier tonight we had server related issues with a concurrent player spike. This lead to some mission payouts failing, some players being kicked to their ships, or being logged out.

Our team is working around the clock to solve these issues. While we’ve been able to mitigate some of the causes, we are still struggling to keep up with the scaling that is needed to accommodate all our Helldivers.

Therefore we’ve had to cap our concurrent players to around 450,000 to further improve server stability. We will continue to work with our partners to get the ceiling raised.

Arrowhead Game Studios

Based on their explanation, it seems Helldivers 2 is still hitting that 450,000-player count cap that Arrowhead put on the game. While that’s incredibly good news for the success of the game, it’s obviously a major headache for both the developers and everyone who bought the game.

Making matters worse, this weekend is playing host to a double XP event as a way of saying sorry to everyone for the prior problem of failed progression tracking which resulted in people being unable to get their XP or Medals.

The developers are in a tricky situation here. They’ve admitted they were not expecting anywhere near the number of players that have descended on Helldivers 2 like a ravenous horde. The initial issues were therefore understandable, especially as servers are not cheap to rent, nor fast as new contracts have to be written up and signed. Palworld is a prime example of a surprise success story that resulted in the developers having to hastily get new servers online to keep everything going.

However, as time passes by, it becomes harder and harder to forgive the mistakes. Helldivers 2 may not be a first-party Sony title, but it has Sony money behind it. My assumption is that they are worried about signing expensive server contracts only for the player base to drop significantly in the coming weeks and months, leaving them with hefty monthly bills and not enough income to cover them. More flexible options are available, but those tend to be more costly.

Moving forward, Arrowhead is looking to bulk up its team and is in the process of changing the roadmap, but these server issues need to be addressed quickly. As fun as the game is, and I really do love it, people are going to move on to other things if they can’t actually play it. The good news is that right now, people seem willing to forgive the issues because fighting for the glory of Super Earth is worth the wait.