Despite feeling like it’s been around forever, Helldivers 2 is still just over a year old. One of 2024’s biggest and most surprising breakout hits, it continues to draw in huge crowds, deliver regular Warbonds, and throw some curveballs into its constantly evolving galactic battle. But despite its relative youth, the game has already gone through some turbulent patches that, at times, looked like they might sink the ship. Speaking in a new interview, the CEO of developer Arrowhead Games says that during its hellish summer, where community sentiment soured and its Steam rating dropped as low as 19%, it looked to No Man’s Sky’s famous redemption arc as motivation for its own comeback.
For the unaware, Helldivers 2 took a major knock last year after Arrowhead (by the studio’s own admission) began to over-balance the co-op game and take its eye off the powerful, bug-blasting fantasy that players loved about it in the first place. Discourse became so negative, and its Steam user rating became so low, that Arrowhead had to leap into action and do something drastic – a pause on its regular update cadence and a 60-day plan to right the wrongs of some of its previous patches.
Speaking to The Game Business, Arrowhead’s CEO Shams Jorjani – who only joined the studio a couple of months before its severe downturn – has described what it was like during that spell and the mounting pressure the studio was under.
“Games that get a 19% user score do not generally recover,” Jorjani says, “and maybe the lowest point during my tenure so far – there’s going to be many more I think – was during the summer when everyone was away [on vacation], our user score was down to 19%, and I had to get on a call with Hermen Hulst and explain to the CEO of Sony why things were in the state they were, and what we were doing to recover.”
“I was very much inspired by No Man’s Sky and the team over there,” he adds. “They had a similar kind of journey – very hyped, then bombed, and then they put their head to the grindstone and just updated the game.”
These days, No Man’s Sky is one of the best space games you can play, but only after dozens of transformational updates and eight years of work did its Steam user score finally tick over to ‘very positive.’ Take a look at Helldivers 2’s Steam user score right now, and you’ll see that its lifetime rating is 76% positive – a genuinely decent score given the severity of the review bombing it’s received at times. Over the last 30 days, though, you can see a true reflection of what the Helldivers 2 experience is today, with a ‘very positive’ score of 87%.
Player counts on Steam are consistently strong too. Since the start of 2025, it’s been enjoying daily concurrent peak player counts ranging anywhere between 40,000 and 90,000 players. We love a good redemption arc, and a tale like No Man’s Sky’s is clearly motivating studios like Arrowhead to pull off their own impressive bouncebacks.
For more, check out all the details on the latest Helldivers 2 Warbond. Alternatively, check out our list of the best multiplayer games for more titles you can play with your friends.
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