Helldivers 2 drops to less than 10,000 players for the first time ever

Helldivers 2 has seen one of the largest falls from grace in some time. The game managed to sell over 12 million copies in the first three months of its release, but now it sees just a fraction of that amount jump on to bring democracy to the galaxy. This is the case for many games and most have their shares of ups and downs.

With a lack of major updates outside of new weapons and Stratagems, there is very little to keep players engaged long term once the endlessly repeated missions grow tiresome. And now, Helldivers 2 has fallen to its lowest point ever, dropping to less than 10,000 players for the first time since the game launched in February 2024.

According to Steamdb, at 9am UTC today, July 22, 2024, Helldivers 2 dropped to its lowest ever play count at just 9,796 players on PC. The game has been on a major decline for months now, but its most significant downturn has come following the PSN controversy in May, with the game still averaging over 100,000 concurrent players at the time.

As this figure is only showing the Steam player count, and the fact I wasn’t playing the game at 9am this morning, it is unclear what the overall player counts was. But, at the time of writing, there are over 16,000 players on Steam and 22,385 overall. So, it would be fairly to estimate that the player count earlier today was around 13,000.

It is worth noting that this time was at 5am EST so much of the US player base will have been offline, which is typically when the count is lowest, but, it still does indicate a continued decline. Hopefully once the developers return from summer vacation we will see new major updates that will bring some players back. The biggest boost we will see is when The Illuminate finally make their presence known, but as of right now there is no word on when they will be coming to Helldivers 2.

Despite the low player count, the Helldivers 2 community has been on a roll when it comes to Major Orders. Collectively, Super Earth were able to decimate the Automatons and significantly push back the robot army in the Andromeda Sector. A new Major Order should go live either later today or tomorrow, but until then players can check out the Emancipator Mech for free, as well as being able to spawn both of the Mechs in the same mission.