Helldivers 2 tanks while Palworld floats

It’s the fastest-selling PlayStation exclusive ever, but Helldivers 2’s popularity continues to decline, while Palword makes a successful comeback.

You don’t have to hate 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 it at the expense of almost everything else, which is reportedly happening at PlayStation right now.

The reason it’s a bad idea is that while making a high-quality, big-budget single-player game that’s a hit is something most publishers can do with a reasonable degree of reliability (see 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 initially, there’s no guarantee 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 just 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 game of all time, but most players are playing on PC. That’s expected to influence Sony’s future policies regarding 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 unforced error, the other problem in recent weeks has been a lack of significant new content, with developer Arrowhead previously stating that they try to ensure updates are of higher quality, even if that means they come out less frequently.

The problem is, there hasn’t been much to get excited about in the past few months. Palworld has been performing just as poorly lately, but fans can look forward to the *Sakurajima* update, which dropped on Friday and immediately boosted Steam player count 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 rises even further will likely depend on how popular the PvP features become. Developer Pocketpair is quite small though and never expected such a success, so there were relatively few plans to capitalize on 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 are no signs that the two games’ uneven odds will stop companies from trying again. Many feel that the chance to produce another Fortnite is worth enduring some flops along the way, or just less successful hits.

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 about 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.

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