When we started to look ahead to the 2024 release calendar a couple months ago to start predicting the biggest games of the year, everyone of course points to the obvious ones. A new Call Of Duty & Assassin's Creed. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Dragon's Dogma 2, Avowed & Tekken 8 we're likely on everyone's list as well. But Helldivers 2? Who could have predicted that? And honestly if you say you did, no one would likely believe you.
Indeed Arrowhead Game Studios latest release has truly exceeded even the most optimistic expectations. Backed by PlayStation publishing it naturally had garnered some attention and hype and everything about it pre-release showed a fun co-op shooter that could carve out a decent space for itself in the shooter genre. Here we are almost a month later and it's sales are still increasing week over week which is almost unheard of in gaming, and it still sits among the top played games on both PlayStation and Steam.
In some ways it's almost surprising it's become such a hit. While it is by all accounts a fantastic game and has had incredible word of mouth marketing (My social media is mostly Xbox players, the only platform it's not on, and I see it talked about more than any game right now) it has also been plagued by constant server issues. Those issues have mostly (all?) been fixed by now and we're only issues because of how successful it became, but just as rare as it is to see a games sales rise week over week, it's even rarer to see a live service game survive weeks of server problems.
Perhaps the morale of the story is if you make a great game that people want to play with friends they are willing to put up with the issues longer than others. Whatever it is there's no denying that Helldivers 2 has become one of the biggest surprises in quite awhile and has likely earned its way to the big boy table for 2024 and beyond.
Continue to do your part fighting for democracy gamers!
