Helldivers 2 continues to sell well. The game had surpassed one million units sold just four days after its February 8 launch. Arrowhead Creative Director Johan Pilestedt has now confirmed it is around three million units just over two weeks after the release.
As noted by GamesIndustry’s Chris Dring, Helldivers 2 improved its sales in Europe by 40% from the first to the second week, which is very rare (usually, games start very strong on their launch weeks and then continue to drop off from there). Dring also said over 60% of the sales are on PC.
There’s a downside to all this success, though. Helldivers 2 players have experienced constant server issues since launch, which were some of the problems highlighted by Ule Lopez in Wccftech’s review.
This game is currently broken and not in a good way, at least on PC. The game has given me naught but multiple crashes, many of which happened while I was playing with randos. The game’s horrible stability is only rivaled by how it can’t even stay online long enough.
I’ve seen multiple players report that they can’t even get into the game itself, either because the servers are always at capacity (which is still an issue as of today) or because of another factor like login errors. The game just feels like it allows you in whenever it feels like it. Couple this with the crashes, and you can be in for a bad time trying to get in and stay in the game.
What’s worse is that Helldivers 2 is also technically broken in other areas. Right now, the developers issued a patch that fixes crashes and supposedly helps with matchmaking. Somehow, the patch also introduced a new bug that prevents armor values from working correctly. This basically makes one of the strategic parts of any mission pointless.
In more Helldivers 2 news, Arrowhead’s Johan Pilestedt commented on Twitter about the lack of NVIDIA DLSS support on the PC version. He said:
DLSS – cool tech, but not necessary. If I have code time over I prefer to put that to good use focusing on the core gameplay as it’s what is most important for a game to be successful.
This way of thinking seems to have paid off.
Later he clarified:
I love DLSS and other performance boosting tech. But when you are in a prio meeting and it’s “more awesome content” vs “more tech” the decision is easy….
The Helldivers 2 Creative Director also noted that the game’s performance largely hinges on CPU, since the game simulates everything. However, while NVIDIA DLSS 2 and AMD FSR 3 do not help much with CPU bound games, the same is not true for DLSS 3 and FSR 3. Frame Generation was designed specifically to aid performance in those cases. Hopefully, Arrowhead takes note and opts to implement those frame generation techniques on PC.
