Helldivers 2 overtakes God of War and Spider-Man to become PlayStation’s biggest PC release to date

rockpapershotgun.com:

Helldivers 2 has become the biggest PlayStation game released on PC yet, at least going by the number of simultaneous players on Steam, as it doubled the previous record of concurrent players set by God of War.

The co-op pastiche of Starship Troopers and its brutal sci-fi satire released last Thursday, and has since blown up in popularity to the point where developers Arrowhead have scrambled to fix servers buckling under the number of people playing, leading to disconnects, iffy matchmaking and login problems.

While Arrowhead desperately patch things up, SteamDB has quantified just how much momentum Helldivers 2 has behind its bug-blasting success, revealing that the game hit a peak of over 155,000 simultaneous players last weekend. (Cheers, Eurogamer.) At the time of writing, it still sits very close to that number at over 140,000 people currently playing.

That’s a lot of people - so many, in fact, that Helldivers 2 is now PlayStation’s biggest PC launch to date on Steam, racking up over twice the top 73,000 player count of previous record-holder God of War. It’s also a long way past runners-up like Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Horizon Zero Dawn and The Last of Us.

Of course, it’s worth noting that Helldivers 2 is the first PlayStation-published game to launch on PC alongside PlayStation 5, which may be helping a lot in giving it this initial burst of popularity versus older games that people may have played elsewhere in the time they took to make the leap to PC.

Still, that’s not to undermine the fact that, by all accounts, Helldivers 2 is a complete blast to play - and its co-op nature compared to those predominantly single-player PlayStation ports means that you’re probably trying to convince your pals to play too, adding some extra figures to that total. If nothing else, it’s hopefully an argument for PlayStation not waiting so dang long to bring their biggest hits to PC in the future - we’ll see.