A tale of two live service games: Helldivers 2 tanks as Palworld surges
What will be the final fortunes of both games? (Sony Interactive Entertainment/Pocketpair)
It’s the fastest selling PlayStation exclusive ever but Helldivers 2’s popularity continues to plummet, while Palword enjoys a successful comeback.
You don’t have to dislike live service titles – games like Fortnite that are meant to last forever – to think they’re a bad idea. Or at least that it’s a bad idea for publishers to focus on them to the exclusion of almost everything else, which is what is reportedly happening at PlayStation at the moment.
The reason it’s a bad idea is that while making a high quality, big budget single-player game a hit is something most publishers can do with a fair degree of reliability (e.g. Sony’s recent Stellar Blade, which was both a new IP and made by a previously unknown developer), live service games are far more unpredictable. Not only that, but even if they do well at first that’s no guarantee they will still be popular a few months later.
Palworld and Helldivers 2 were amongst the first few releases of the year and were enormous hits at first, as if heralding in a new era of live service dominance. And yet a few weeks ago both were struggling to stay in the top 40 of the most played games on Steam.
Helldivers 2 may be the fastest selling PlayStation console exclusive of all time, but the majority of players are on the PC – which is expected to influence Sony’s future policy on simultaneous releases and PC support in general.
However, the game never recovered from the thoroughly unnecessary debacle involving forced use of PlayStation Network accounts and has been on back foot ever since.
The number of players on Steam over the weekend (it’s not possible to get accurate console numbers) was less than a tenth that of its peak closer to launch, when 458,709 people were playing at once.
Although the PSN issue was an unforced error, the other problem has been a lack of significant new content in recent weeks, with developer Arrowhead previously stating that they’re trying to ensure updates are of higher quality, even if that means they come out less frequently.
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