A tale of two live service games: Helldivers 2 tanks while Palworld grows

The reason it’s a bad idea is that while most publishers can make a hit out of a high-quality single-player game on a big budget, this is something that most publishers can do with a reasonable degree of reliability (e.g. Sony’s recent Stellar Blade, which was both a new IP and created by a previously unknown developer), live service games are much more unpredictable. Not only that, but even if they do well at first, that’s no guarantee that they’ll still be popular a few months later.

Palworld and Helldivers 2 were among the first few releases of the year and were initially huge hits, as if heralding a new era of live service dominance. And yet, a few weeks ago, they were both struggling to stay in the top 40 most played games on Steam.

Helldivers 2 may be the fastest-selling PlayStation console exclusive of all time, but the majority of players are playing on 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 completely unnecessary debacle surrounding the forced use of PlayStation Network accounts and has been on the back foot ever since.

The number of players on Steam over the weekend (it’s not possible to get accurate console figures) was less than a tenth of the peak closer to launch, when 458,709 people were playing simultaneously.

While the PSN issue was an unexpected glitch, there has been another problem in recent weeks: a lack of significant new content being released. Developer Arrowhead has previously stated that they are trying to improve the quality of updates, even if it means they are released less frequently.

The problem is that there’s been nothing major to get excited about in the past few months, and while Palworld has been underperforming just as badly as of late, fans have had the promise of the *Sakurajima* update to look forward to, which dropped on Friday and immediately saw the Steam player count increase by 700%.

The update adds a new area and PvP gameplay, and as a result, concurrent player counts on Steam skyrocketed from around 15,000 earlier in June to 143,369 over the weekend. That’s still well below the game’s launch record of 2,101,867, which is one of the highest ever recorded on Steam, but it did lift the game back into the top 20.

Whether it stays there, or climbs even higher, will likely depend on how well the PvP features take hold, but developer Pocketpair is quite small and never expected this much success, so had relatively few plans to take advantage of it.

Sony has fewer excuses for the way they handled Helldivers 2, but both games make it clear that initial success is no indication of a game’s long-term future.

There’s no sign that the two games’ disparate fortunes will stop companies from trying again, as many see the chance to produce another Fortnite as worth putting up with multiple flops (or just less successful hits) along the way.

It was impossible to say how big Palworld and Helldivers 2 would be when they launched, and it’s just as impossible to say now. You probably won’t know for sure until next year.

The video game industry has always been driven by hits, but live service titles take that model to the extreme, and it’s unfortunate that it adds an extra layer of instability to an industry that still hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic or the cost of living crisis.