A tale of two live service games: Helldivers 2 tanks as Palworld rises

The reason this is a bad idea is that while most publishers can make a hit out of a high-quality, big-budget single-player game, there are some that can with a decent degree of reliability (eg Sony’s recent Stellar Blade, which was also a new IP and made by a previously unknown developer), live service games are much more unpredictable. Not only that, but even if they do well initially, it’s no guarantee that they’ll still be popular months down the road.

Palworld and Helldivers 2 were among the first few releases of the year and were huge hits at first, seeming to herald a new era of live service dominance. And yet, a few weeks ago, both were fighting to stay in the top 40 most played games on Steam.

Helldivers 2 may be the fastest-selling PlayStation console of all time, but the majority of players are playing on PC – which is expected to influence Sony’s future policy on side-by-side releases and PC support in general.

However, the game never recovered from the completely unnecessary debacle involving the forced use of PlayStation Network accounts and has been on the wane ever since.

The number of players on Steam over the weekend (unable to get exact console numbers) was less than a tenth of its pre-launch peak of 458,709 people playing at once.

Although the PSN issue was an unforced error, another issue has been the lack of significant new content in recent weeks, with developer Arrowhead previously saying they are trying to ensure higher quality updates, even if it means fewer releases. often.

The problem is that there hasn’t been much to get excited about in recent months, and while Palworld has been doing just as poorly of late, fans had the promise of a *Sakurajima* update to look forward to, which came out on Friday and immediately saw the number of players on Steam increase by 700%.

The update adds a new area and PvP gameplay, and as a result the number of concurrent players on Steam has grown from around 15,000 earlier in June to 143,369 over the weekend. That’s still well short of the launch record of 2,101,867, one of the highest ever on Steam, but it’s pushed the game back into the top 20.

Whether it stays there or climbs even higher probably depends on how much the PvP features catch on, but the Pocketpair developer is pretty small and never expected this much success, so they had relatively few plans to take advantage of it.

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

There’s no sign that the uneven fortunes of the two games will deter the companies from trying again, as many see the chance to make another Fortnite as worth enduring a few flops — or just less successful hits — along the way.

There was no telling how big Palworld and Helldivers 2 would be when they launched, and it’s just as impossible to tell now. You probably won’t know for sure until next year.

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