GamesThird Person ShooterHelldivers 2Helldivers 2 sales curve is ‘rare and amazing,’ says gobsmacked industry analyst: ‘I feel like Steve Irwin sighting a rare bird’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesThird Person ShooterHelldivers 2Helldivers 2 sales curve is ‘rare and amazing,’ says gobsmacked industry analyst: ‘I feel like Steve Irwin sighting a rare bird’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Arrowhead)
“Feel like Steve Irwin sighting a rare bird or something,” Piscatella said in a recenttweet thread. “Rare and amazing, in an Australian accent even.”
(Image credit: Mat Piscatella)
“It’s rare, particularly for bigger games. Just saying ‘growth’ doesn’t explain the nature—as ‘growth’ could be temporary, ie from discounting,” Piscatella tweeted. “Using the term ‘inverse decay curve’ denotes that baseline sales are improving, unrelated to short-term things that can impact incremental demand.”
“What I’m really referring to here is how, over the first 12 weeks or so of a new release, particularly games that launch outside of Q4, there’s a demand curve for most games that starts very high with sales peaking in week 1, and then decaying each week over time, until demand flattens out,” Piscatella explained. “I posted an example of this in that Twitter thread. Helldivers 2 has bucked that trend, and I can’t recall offhand the last time a game has shown this behavior at this scale.”
(Image credit: Mat Piscatella (Twitter))
The success of Helldivers 2 is particularly noteworthy given the server woes that plagued the game during its first couple weeks of launch. Unexpected demand absolutely crushed the infrastructure, to the point that Arrowhead had toimpose a cap on the player countanddraft Sony into the war effortto get it working properly. I can say from firsthand experience that it was incredibly frustrating, and Piscatella said that such problems can do real damage to many games facing similar problems, but in the case of Helldivers 2 it didn’t happen.
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The inverse decay curve “won’t last forever” and sales will start to decline, possibly quite soon, “as demand normalizes and word of mouth stops reaching new interested ears,” Piscatella said. “But for the moment at least, particularly in the 2024 market, it’s an incredibly encouraging and refreshing thing to see.”
As for how Helldivers 2 managed to pull off this rare-bird feat, he cited a number of potential reasons, including the focus on co-op, the $40 price tag, launching simultaneously on PC and PlayStation 5, and “the high potential for in-game shenanigans.”
Whatever the reason, Helldivers 2 remains a monster: It’s currently the top-selling game onSteamand holds the third spot on Steam’s most-played games list, behind Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, and well ahead of fourth-place holder PUBG: Battlegrounds. And there’s more to come: Earlier today, following numerous leaks, Arrowhead finally confirmed that playablemechs are coming soon.
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