Helldivers 2 sales curve is 'rare and amazing,' says gobsmacked industry analyst: 'I feel like Steve Irwin sighting a rare bird'
We all know by now that Helldivers 2 is really good and really popular, but Circana industry analyst Mat Piscatella says the game's sales success in its first few weeks of launch is almost unprecedented—and he's pretty excited about it.
«Feel like Steve Irwin sighting a rare bird or something,» Piscatella said in a recent tweet thread. «Rare and amazing, in an Australian accent even.»
The thrill is driven by what Piscatella said is «an honest-to-goodness inverse decay curve,» which he explained is a phenomenon that occurs when a game flips the usual course of sales, which go hardest at release and then tail off at varying rates.
«It's rare, particularly for bigger games. Just saying 'growth' doesn't explain the nature—as 'growth' could be temporary, ie from discounting,» Piscatella tweeted. «Using the term 'inverse decay curve' denotes that baseline sales are improving, unrelated to short-term things that can impact incremental demand.»
Piscatella told PC Gamer that Circana (formerly known as the NPD Group) bases its analysis on data collected from all major retailers, as well as digital sales provided by participants in the Digital Leader Panel, which includes a range of companies including Helldivers 2 publisher Sony. Circana normally only comments publicly on monthly data, he said, but «I found what was happening in the weekly data to be particularly fun and wanted to share this nugget.»
«What I'm really referring to here is how, over the first 12 weeks or so of a new release, particularly games that launch outside of Q4, there's a demand curve for most games that starts very high with sales peaking in week 1, and then decaying each week over time, until demand flattens out,» Piscatella explained. «I posted an example of this in that Twitter thread. Helldivers 2 has bucked that trend, and I can't recall offhand the last time a game has shown this behavior at this scale.»
The success of Helldivers 2 is particularly noteworthy given the server woes that plagued
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