HELLDIVERS 2 Becomes PlayStation's Biggest PC Release Thus Far

HELLDIVERS 2 is PlayStation's newest title, released on the 8th of February 2024, and just a few hours after its release, it has become the biggest PlayStation release to come to PC ever.

PlayStation has released many of their titles on PC over these last few years, starting with Horizon Zero Dawn and then moving on to many other heavy hitters, from smaller scope titles like Sackboy: A Big Adventure to bigger ones like God of War (2018), Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered (and the Miles Morales version), and even The Last of Us Part I. None of these, however, have been nearly as successful as the cross-platform release for HELLDIVERS 2.

For a bit of reference, the release of God of War (2018) was a massive shock to everyone and a success for PlayStation, bringing in an all-time concurrent peak of 73,529 players on its release on the 14th of January 2022. Likewise, released on the 7th of August 2020 was Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition, bringing in 56,557 players at its peak. Now, with HELLDIVERS 2, both of these records have been smashed by hitting 119,117 concurrent peak players, and it's likely to continue rising (as we saw with the highly successful Palworld).

Though it isn't as impressive in terms of its review scores (sitting at a 75% positive rate with 17,076 reviews at the time of writing), many of these have been because of the server-related issues that HELLDIVERS 2 has been experiencing, making many leave a negative review until the time in which Arrowhead Game Studios fixes them. Still, this could be a good problem for PlayStation to have, as they underestimated the amount of players that would join in on HELLDIVERS 2, and it still sits at #1 Top Sellers for the time being, so there are many other achievements outside of the player count that the game has racked up already.

Whether HELLDIVERS 2's success can be attributed to the fact that it's PlayStation's first cross-platform release or the merit of the game in itself is still up in the air until further releases come and go. But, for the time being, this bodes really well for PlayStation and for PC players (like myself) who are hopeful that the console giant brings more of its games on release (or closer to) to computers before the previously aforementioned window of two to three years.

In the meantime, we look forward to seeing if Horizon Forbidden West, released two years ago on the 18th of February 2022, will be able to break any of the previous records set by the other PlayStation single-player experiences that have been out and about for a while. In the meantime, HELLDIVERS 2 is ready to play now on PC and PlayStation 5.