Helldivers 2 continues to dominate as more players jump in to defend Super Earth, but the high demand has caused countless server issues for developer Arrowhead Game Studios. At the time of writing on a quiet Monday, 393,844 concurrent players were shooting down alien threats on PC according to SteamDB – setting yet another peak concurrent player count for the game since launch. This number doesn’t account for PlayStation players, so it’s likely the actual amount is much higher.
In an effort to manage the overwhelming number of players on Helldivers 2, the developer has announced that the concurrent player count has been capped at 450,000. The move was announced via the official Discord (shared on X by Wario64).
“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,” the post reads. “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. If you have progression related issues, please restart the game in order for things to sync back up. Thank you for your continued patience.”
Arrowhead CEO and Helldivers 2 Creative Director Johan Pilestedt took to X over the weekend, saying he was “completely exhausted by the success. So is the team, many, many late nights, on-calls, emergency meetings, discussions around server capacity, shards, capacity units, CPU utilisation, login rates and CCU.” Despite this, Pilestedt said he was “tired, but very, very pleased.”
The Arrowhead team has been working around the clock to get a handle on server and capacity issues since the game launched on 8 February. Some players have reported issues logging in and receiving endgame rewards amongst other problems caused by its sheer popularity since release. While Helldivers 2 had a massive release weekend, interest has only continued to grow beyond the first few days. The title jumped almost immediately to PlayStation’s most successful Steam launch, ahead of God of War. It’s currently the second most-played game on Steam behind Counter-Strike 2.
The Helldivers 2 player cap seems to only be a temporary fix based on Arrowhead’s comments regarding work to raise the number of concurrent players going forward. It seems like the game is suffering from success beyond the developer’s expectations, and interest in the shooter only continues to grow.
Have you experienced any issues accessing the Helldivers 2 servers? Let us know in the comments.
Image: Arrowhead Game Studios
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