Well, Helldivers 2‘s Heart of Democracy update has definitely succeeded in filling some pants with poop. The Galactic War arriving on the streets of Super Earth has propelled the game to its highest Steam player numbers since April 2024.
All it took to drag a bunch of divers back in was threatening their home planet, it turns out. Big up to The Illuminate for giving Arrowhead the assist here. Now, time to stop giving the squids credit and go back to slaughtering them with help from HD2’s beloved new SEAF buddies.
As Arrowhead chief creative officer Johan Pilestedt has noted on Twitter, the update’s deployment yesterday has sparked a pretty huge player boost for the game – as you’d hope given it delivers arguably the biggest twist to the war yet from an in-universe stakes perspective.
Taking a look at SteamDB, the game’s just hit a 24-hour peak of 163,581 players. For context that’s more folks diving in on the platform simultaneously than have at any point since April 2024 – that being the point at which the game’s initial release attention bump that saw figures in the 400,000s began to tail off a bit in the fashion you’d expect with any game.
The fact that May saw the infamous PSN account linking furore kick off and sour a lot of people on the game was likely also a factor in the decline, but the trend of the numbers gradually starting to settle down towards the more mundane figures HD2’s been chugging along at since was already in motion by that point.
As it stands, Heart of Democracy is the biggest bump in players the game’s gotten from any of the big updates its gotten since the aforementioned time in 2024, having outdone the swell to just over 150,000 players that The Illuminate faction’s long-awaited Helldivers 2 debut brought when that happened via the Omens of Tyranny update December last year. It’s also seen the game vault back into the top 10 of SteamDB’s most played games rankings.
People are clearly invested in the struggle for Super Earth, given the start of this month saw the game posting Steam player totals in the 30,000s.
Naturally, Arrowhead’s chuffed with this resurgence, with studio CEO Shams Jorjani having taken to the games Discord server to say of the player bump: “It’s all you folks and your amazing support.”
Have you dived back into Helldivers 2 for the first time in a while in order to do you your bit for Super Earth, or are you one of the stalwarts who’s stuck with the game through all of its leaner periods? Let us know below!
