‘Helldivers 2’ issues can’t be fixed by buying more servers

Arrowhead Studios has said the ongoing issues with players accessing Helldivers 2 can’t be fixed by simply buying more servers.

Helldivers 2 was released earlier this month and quickly became Sony Interactive Entertainment’s biggest ever launch on PC. It went on to rack up over one million sales in a handful of days. Yesterday (February 20) it hit a new peak of concurrent players on Steam, with over 450,000 fans playing the game [via SteamDB].

However, numerous players have had issues with accessing the game due to the sheer volume of people trying to play Helldivers 2. Arrowhead has released a number of rapid fixes but admitted it’s “struggling to keep up with the scaling that is needed to accommodate all our Helldivers”.

Earlier this year, Pocketpair’s Palworld experienced a similar level of success and confirmed it was spending 380k a month on servers to ensure everyone who wanted to play, could.

Fans have been messaging Arrowhead to ask them to do something similar, but CEO Johan Pilestedt has claimed it’s not that simple. “It’s not a matter of money or buying more servers. It’s a matter of labour,” he said on social media. “We need to optimise the backend code. We are hitting some real limits.”

Responding to another message telling him to stop tweeting and fix the game, Pilestedt wrote: “Yes! Good idea, I will sit behind the engineers and ask them ‘are we there yet?’. Or… I could let the engineers work independently, towards our common goal without me as the CEO pestering them at every moment. I wonder which one will work best?”

Praising the team at Arrowhead, Pilestedt confirmed the improvements made to Helldivers 2 were the same as ”tuning a vespa to compete in F1” after they’d increased the server capacity by 500 per cent and were working on going even further.

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