Helldivers 2 is now PlayStation's biggest PC launch by a factor of two

Helldivers 2 is now not only PlayStation's most successful PC release, it has doubled the record of previous big hit God of War. Helldivers 2 has reached a peak concurrent player count of 155,926 this weekend, while God of War previously held the record at 73,529 peak concurrent players.

PC Gamer reported on Friday that Helldivers 2 had topped PlayStation's other launches, but with server troubles in the offing and negative reviews rolling in continued growth wasn't a sure thing. It's clear that cooperative third-person shooter is now very much a success.

Helldivers 2 is a third-person shooter, primarily cooperative, that tells the tongue-in-cheek story of the wildly propagandized and xenophobic Helldivers of future Super-Earth, whose job is mostly to go around killing as many aliens as possible in conflicts over resources that Super-Earth started. It's got some seriously cool features up its sleeve, not the least of which is live human game masters messing with players.

For all that it had a pretty rough launch, with a lot of server troubles and crashes going around. The first few patches shored a lot of that up and it's already in much better shape, though not entirely devoid of troubles.

You can find Helldivers 2 on Steam, where it launched on February 8, 2024. If anyone needs me, I'll be hip-firing my shotgun into a horde of bugs. If you're thinking of helldiving in, go ahead and check out 11 things I wish I knew before playing Helldivers 2.

As a perhaps-too-huge fan of the original Helldivers, I'm finding Helldivers 2 to be just the game I wanted. It's a chaotic, cooperative, and properly skill-based third-person shooter that takes everything best about the previous game into three dimensions—the Grand Theft Auto 3 to original Helldivers' Grand Theft Auto.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.