Helldivers 2 drops to Mostly Negative on Steam, player count plummets

Helldivers 2 has been on a near-constant decline since its peak hype window passed earlier this year. Frequent controversial nerfs and performance issues have plagued the game since launch, and it’s now receiving a wave of negative reviews again and seeing numerous players abandon ship.

Today, Aug. 30, a Reddit thread pointed out that Helldivers 2 is once more in the “Mostly Negative” review category on Steam (only 39 percent of the reviews are positive) as the game continues to receive controversial nerfs, both intentional and accidental ones that happened through game-breaking bugs.

The thread’s creator also said, according to Steam Charts, Helldivers 2 has lost two-thirds of its August player base, which spiked with the release of a major update, Escalation of Freedom, bringing the game to over 60,000 concurrent players on Valve’s platform. In the last 24 hours, though, the game peaked at below 21,000 concurrent players, marking a 40,000 decrease in a little over three weeks. Based on the replies in the thread and everything that’s happened to the game in the past month, it’s safe to say that misguided balancing and technical issues are to blame for Helldivers 2 players’ dissatisfaction and exodus.

Reddit user McGrinch27 said in a reply to this massive thread that the game’s chief executive Johan Pilestedt, or rather his comments, killed the game for them. They claim Pilestedt was always on the side of the community, had great communication with everyone, and readily criticized the developers’ mistakes and sought to improve them. “But like, homie, you’re in charge?” the user wrote, further asking “why are you releasing updates that go against the things you say?”

Pilestedt even stepped down from the position as chief executive of Arrowhead Game Studios to join the balancing team, which, seemingly, has changed next to nothing as weapons continue to be nerfed into the ground.

“Not having bad updates would help [the game],” wrote another user in the thread. And that just about summarizes the whole issue and explains why Helldivers 2 is where it is. The more time passes, the more challenging it will be to win back players once they’re lost.