As Helldivers 2 slides down to about 10% of its player number peak on Steam, those left are torn as to how Arrowhead should try to right the ship

Helldivers 2 has been in a bit of a quiet period lately, relatively speaking. With Arrowhead largely busy focusing on bug fixes and putting out stuff at a bit of a slower cadence, some players have been getting a bit tired of the same old thing, with an unfortunate milestone the game’s hit PC playerbase-wise having prompted some debate as to whether things might be getting a bit too static.

While the switch in how Arrowhead’s approached solving issues and deploying new content in the game got a lot of initial support, the results have been a bit mixed in practice, with some gear and upgrades in particular – the spear’s a big example – seeing a steady stream of problems afflict them, even after previously recieving fixes. Arrowhead continues to work hard to whack problems as they crop up, but you can kind of understand the frustration.

As this has been happening, the game’s 24-hour player number peak on Steam, according to SteamDB (thanks, Forbes), sits at 45,315, which is only about 10% of the initial peak of 458,709 it recorded back in February. Now, to put this in context, that decline hasn’t happened overnight and certainly isn’t that abnormal – the game’s player numbers on the platform have been gradually coming down since that point, having last hit the 200,000 mark in late April.