Helldivers 2 blows away God of War with new record player count for PlayStation launch on Steam

Helldivers 2 is rapidly establishing itself as a cracking PC shooter of the online coop variety, and it has easily overtaken God of War to become the biggest Steam launch ever for a PlayStation title.

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A simultaneous PS5 and PC launch, Helldivers 2 hit just over 155,000 concurrent players on Steam over the weekend.

To put that in perspective, God of War previously held the record amount of concurrent players for a PlayStation PC published game at 73,000 - so Helldivers 2 has more than doubled this, which is quite the achievement.

As we already reported late last week, Helldivers 2 seemed to come from nowhere to be the top-seller on Steam (although to be fair, the first game had its fervent fans among the community).

The trouble was a whole lot of issues made for a difficult launch for the developer, Arrowhead Game Studios, on the PC platform certainly, where a good deal of firefighting had to be done to squash some nasty bugs. That included the game crashing a lot, and some pretty serious matchmaking issues as a fly in the coop ointment.

Things have improved considerably, though, it would seem, as reviews have now reached 'mostly positive' ratings on Steam, whereas at launch, they were 'mixed.' So that in itself is a pretty good sign, although there still remain some complaints about disconnections - and also the anti-cheat.

The latter, as we discussed before, is a kernel-level system and it remains controversial for some gamers. But in fairness to Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is not the only game to run such an anti-cheat.