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In the last five days, Helldivers 2 was removed from the PC market in 177 countries and the game’s Steam reviews collapsed under the weight of more than 200,000 negative ratings, dropping from Positive to Mixed. It’s now Tuesday and the Helldivers 2 Steam page is overrun with people ranting against Sony and celebrating democracy, and for anyone taking their first glance at the game, it’s all a bit confusing.

Here’s what’s going on.

Helldivers 2 is a third-person co-op shooter developed by independent team Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It went live on PlayStation 5 and Steam on February 8, marking a rare instance of cross-platform parity from Sony. Immediately, Helldivers 2 was a hit on PC — it clocked more concurrent players on Steam than any other PlayStation game, beating God of War, Spider-Man Remastered, Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last of Us Part I. Helldivers 2 was so popular in its first few weeks that Arrowhead’s servers had trouble meeting demand and had to be capped at 450,000 players.

“I am completely exhausted by the success,” Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt tweeted one week post-launch. “So is the team, many, many late nights, on-calls, emergency meetings, discussions around server capacity, shards, capacity units, CPU utilization, login rates and CCU. Tired, but very, very pleased.”

Helldivers 2 is one of the first tests of Sony’s long-term multiplatform goals. While Pilestedt was taking stock of Helldivers 2’s launch week, Sony executives were telling investors about their fresh plans to aggressively chase revenue streams on PC. Sony president Hiroki Totoki said the objective was to “proactively work on” releasing first-party games on PC alongside PlayStation, a shift from the company’s longstanding console-first approach.

Helldivers 2 isn’t a first-party Sony game, but it’s console-exclusive to PlayStation 5 and Sony has been supporting its development as its publisher. As long as H

Jessica Conditt Hiroki Totoki