Helldivers 2 Takes The Crown As PlayStation’s Biggest PC Release And Steam’s Best-Selling Game

Honestly, I wouldn’t have given Helldivers 2 a second glance if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s now PlayStation’s biggest PC launch of all time. The Starship Troopers-inspired co-op shooter recorded an all-time peak concurrency of 155,926 players on Saturday night, decimating God of War’s standing record of 73,529 players.

Helldivers 2 slipped past God of War on Friday night, a little over a day after its back-to-back Steam and PlayStation 5 launches, despite persistent launch issues, game crashes, and initial negative reviews.

Developer Arrowhead Game Studios, however, quickly managed to turn things around. Helldivers 2 now boasts a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam and is currently the best-selling game on the platform, edging out Counter-Strike 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Palworld, which sits at the second, third, and fourth spots, respectively.

The third-person shooter drops players into the shoes of a Helldiver, a group of Super Earth Federation soldiers tasked with capturing alien planets and pushing back against any resistance, particularly from swarms of massive bug-like monsters not unlike those in the cult-classic Starship Troopers franchise and the Zerg of Starcraft. One of its highlight features is that live game masters are always on hand to churn out new challenges and content on the fly.