Sony's live service game plan is off to a great start

Sony PlayStation's new live service model enjoys thunderous success with a new multiplayer sensation.

3

Helldivers 2 is all the rage right now. The game has amassed 155,926 concurrent players on Steam, and has been the #1 top-selling game on Valve's distribution service for a bit now. Yesterday, Helldivers 2 studio CEO Johan Pilestedt said the game had sold around 1 million copies on all platforms.

The game is so popular that Helldivers 2 had to be taken offline for server maintenance. The fixes didn't last for long, and the survival shooter had to be adjusted even more.

3

"We managed to increase the rate limit from 10,000/min to 20,000/min and the total capacity of concurrent players was increased from 250,000 total to 360,000 total. This was however still not enough as the player count jumped to 360,000 after 5 and a half minutes," Pilestedt said on Twitter.

Helldivers 2's success bodes well for PlayStation, and of course for Arrowhead Studios. Although Helldivers 2 wasn't made by an internal first-party PlayStation studio, it is published by Sony's PlayStation PC gaming division and will give the company key insights and takeaways for its own live service titles.

Sony recently laid out ambitions plans to release 12 live service games by 2025, including annualized games like MLB The Show. This strategy was later significantly revised and cut in half; Sony will now release six games by 2025, including expansions like Destiny 2's The Final Shape.

Responding to the delays, Sony Interactive Entertainment interim CEO Hiroki Totoki explained that quality was to come over quantity.