What’s Going On with This AAA Live Service Video Game
The strengths and weaknesses of Helldivers 2’s positioning strategy marketing arguably explain much of its initially shocking success, rapid decline, and shifting fortunes.
It is hard to overstate how unexpected the success of Helldivers 2 was, even to its developers. Helldivers 2 (2024) proved so unexpectedly popular on its release that it became actively unplayable for most; the servers could not handle the amount of players trying to play it. Eventually, Arrowhead Game Studios (the developers of Helldivers 2) were able to meet player demand, and the playerbase swelled to half a million concurrent players, which in financial terms translates to a game which made “the 7th highest grossing Sony published game in history.”
More precisely, this means within mere months, Helldivers 2 sold more than 16 million units. In revenue, (at a retail price of $40) Helldivers 2 has pulled in at least $640 million, not including revenue from microtransactions, which would presumably substantially inflate this number much further. I wouldn’t be surprised if Helldivers 2 has grossed more than a billion dollars at time of writing (which for reference, is only ten months after it was released).
While Helldivers 2 initially enjoyed positive press coverage, and a reputation as a relatively unique live service game that didn’t nickel and dime its players, things have changed. The relationship between the playerbase and the developers has noticeably worsened.
The numbers reflect this change. Helldivers 2 once enjoyed over a half million concurrent players on Steam, but seven months later, it hovered around 20,000 to 30,000 players. That is a more than a 90% decline in a seven month period. While decline in playerbase shortly after launch is normal and expected for live service games, this much of a decline within this timeframe is arguably unusual: it’s a sign something notable was happening with Helldivers 2. In response, Arrowhead made huge changes to the game, which boosted it to 70,000 concurrent players, but at time of writing, the player count is again hovering near 20,000 to 30,000. This loss in player count will drive a huge loss in revenue, likely to the tune of $100s of millions.
I will show how Helldivers 2′s initial rise in popularity and subsequent decline in players seem driven by its positioning strategy marketing. Arrowhead has been making big changes, but not ones that are reliably driving its game’s growth. I will share what Helldivers 2 could do to enjoy greater fortune, and what other developers can learn to create better positioning strategy marketing for their games, live service or not. Helldivers 2’s uneven fate is an example of just how much good and bad positioning strategy marketing affects a game’s fate.
What Initially Worked Well with Helldivers 2 Positioning Strategy Marketing
To understand why Helldivers 2 saw such a huge early success, you need to understand how it stood apart from other live service games. If you don’t know what live service games are, don’t worry, I’ve got your back, and I’ll get you up to speed in three paragraphs, lickety-split.
“Live service games” refer to games which aim to create revenue on an ongoing basis by changing or adding features over time and potentially indefinitely (hence they are “live service”). Some live service games cost money to initially purchase, like Helldivers 2, while some are free to play, like League of Legends. Other live service games require monthly subscriptions to play, like World of Warcraft. Nonetheless, almost all live service games offer premium in-game content to purchase with “season passes” or microtransactions or both.
Live service games have become increasingly common since the 2000’s, and especially after the 2010’s, because:
- Internet access has become ubiquitous
- This revenue model provides more stability for a developer
The attractions of this business model are so obvious that it has inspired many to pursue it at any cost, whether or not they are equipped to deliver a quality, ongoing live service game.
There’s an expectation that live service games should become better games over time, which has sometimes been used to justify live service games with underwhelming releases. Over time, this has seemingly led to a race to the bottom, creating recent massive failures. Take for example, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (2024), which lost its developer $200 million. Or consider Concorde (2024), which sold so few units in the first two weeks after its release that Sony decided to remove the game from its store and refund every person who purchased it. It doesn’t help that successful live service games just increase competition for the other ones too. The more good games released like these, the more they compete with each other’s playerbases.
Naturally, as underwhelming releases like Suicide Squad and Concorde have become more the norm year-after-year, live service games have gotten a correspondingly rotten reputation among consumers as bad products. A few are seen as good, most are seen as very bad.
Enter Helldivers 2.
In an era where live service games are typically a byword amongst consumers for games released as incomplete, buggy, generic, and expensive, Helldivers 2 launched seemingly complete, relatively stable, unique, and cheap next to comparable live service games. It’s not necessarily that Helldivers 2 did anything super remarkable; it just did all the basics right. Design fundamentals, well executed, are rather obviously key ingredients behind the game’s success.
Accordingly, Helldivers 2 benefitted from excellent press from critics and strong word-of-mouth from players. The motto of Helldivers 2’s developer, “A Game For Everyone Is A Game For No-One,” has widely been attributed as responsible for what makes Helldivers 2 stand out. This tagline served as a piece of positioning strategy marketing for the game: implying this was a game that would live up to its unique vision of fun, rather than chasing industry trends. Helldivers 2 seemed to be a new live service game that initially avoided all the usual mistakes.
The trouble is, even a well designed game needs positioning strategy marketing.
What Went Wrong, and Is Still Going Wrong, with Helldivers 2 Positioning Strategy Marketing
So why has Helldiver 2 been losing players, more or less continuously, ever since its release? I don’t want to overstate the problem: Helldivers 2 can likely survive profitably for years as a live service game with only 10,000 or 20,000 players. But right now, the game’s active player base keeps declining, and it would obviously be much better for its long-term health if it did more than stabilize its decline, and stopped repeating the same mistakes.
One thing players of Helldivers 2 and the developers of it can agree upon is that the various patches and content updates to the game have rather often been controversial. Rather than inspiring the community and encouraging its expansion through positive word-of-mouth, patches and updates have contributed to acrimonious press around the game.
As the former CEO of Arrowhead, Johan Pilestedt, glibly diagnosed the problem:
“It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.”
Trying to resolve this issue, Piledstedt voluntarily stepped down as CEO to become the Chief Creative Officer, so he could focus his attention on the development of the game and satisfying the game’s community.
Though I’d argue this was probably a wise move, this didn’t work out as well as hoped for Pilestedt. There’s still been more than a few controversial major content updates for Helldivers 2. After one of these troubled updates, the game director Mikeal, candidly and publicly admitted that, just as before,“fun” is unfortunately still coming at the cost of “balance.”
While, as a player of the game myself, I admire the candidness of the developers, as a market researcher, I can’t help but wince at how Arrowhead has handled its public messaging to date. I think Arrowhead is unintentionally a victim of poor positioning strategy marketing.
It’s one thing to say “fun” shouldn’t be sacrificed for “balance,” but this is a cliché. Clichés, true as they may or may not be, are not viable for positioning strategy marketing.
What is “fun?” Seriously. To put my cards on the table, I think “fun” is an emergent property, akin to the flocking of birds. We can see the “flock” like we can feel “fun.” But both things are a confluence of multiple things happening simultaneously. In games, fun is created by some mixture of aesthetics, game design, mechanics, difficulty, sound design, etc. A gamer doesn’t need to know what makes things “fun,” anymore than a bird knows why it flocks. But the game developers surely must know what “fun” they intend to deliver, or they’ll suffer.
Because what I find fun about a game someone else will not, this is why there are many genres of games. Horror games are conventionally called fun because they disempower players, while action games are loved for the opposite reason. They make players feel fantastically powerful. Trying to combine these qualities would be difficult to pull off, and easy to mess up. Which makes obvious just how woefully inadequate talking about “fun” is in describing games. Different games create different “fun,” and even the same genres of games create different fun.
Similarly, what does “balance” mean in the context of positioning strategy marketing? “Balance” implies that multiple things are being weighed in some kind of equilibrium. Just as “fun” is an emergent property resulting from many things happening at once, “balance” results from many things being arranged in some relationship to each other. “Balance” will look radically different in a game with player versus player combat, player versus enemy combat, a single player game, a multiplayer game, an action game, a horror game, etc. and so forth.
So, when Helldivers 2 patches make big changes to the game, without specifying the general rationale behind them aside from “balance” and “fun,” every person is left to decide what those terms mean. Frankly, I can’t quite tell if Helldivers 2 is supposed to be a “fun balance” of squad teamwork, “realistic” combat, slapstick humor, and overwhelming or empowering fights. Not all of these things can be equally important, and a few are incompatible in some ways. But all of them seem to at least be somewhat important to the game’s existing marketing and trailers.
Thus, as a player, and market researcher, I don’t know what Arrowhead thinks Helldivers 2 should be like: what it means by fun and balance. Hopefully Arrowhead knows what it wants and is simply struggling in the marketing department to communicate this to the public. (It is, of course, possible that the problem is that Arrowhead is at odds with itself on its goals for the game, but even if that were true –I hope it isn’t– it needs better positioning strategy marketing.)
I suspect this confusion is why every change has proven so controversial. If a community of players doesn’t understand why the developers make the changes they do, if they don’t know what the intended vision of the game is, they will inevitably dislike changes made to any game.
For, even if I may not know the fun developers seek to provide, if I am already playing the game, I must already feel some parts of it are fun, whether or not I can articulate what I like. Naturally, I am likely to feel any ongoing change simply messes up my current fun unless someone can explain to me why the changes improve my fun or serve some kind of fun better.
Simply put, if I don’t know why you changed the game I play, I’m probably going to dislike it– if only out of a knee-jerk dislike for change, not because of a clever analysis of fun.
Of course, I suspect that some would argue that I am missing the point. The particular changes the developers have made are not something I have detailed here. I haven’t gone into all the various minutiae, the new weapons, changes to them, etc. Initially, I can see how not including all the various details might appear to render my argument irrelevant. Yet, I would argue the details of the changes over the last few months are not the underlying issue here.
Until it’s clear what the developers think the game is supposed to be, it’s hard to see how one can convince the players any significant change is prima facie good or bad. If Arrowhead can’t communicate what the game is supposed to play like, players cannot hope to agree about what is good or bad. The problem isn’t the individual changes per se, it’s that in the absence of a clear rationale, they all seem arbitrary. And arbitrary-seeming changes aren’t fun!
Arrowhead’s Inadequate Response to Its Positioning Strategy Marketing Problem
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like Arrowhead recognized this was a marketing problem, not a game design problem. Arrowhead responded to consumer criticism by announcing a 60-day plan to improve the game and restore player confidence. Its goals included reconciling “fun” and “balance” as we saw earlier. But two key other goals were better learning from and communicating with the playerbase, and developing an improved way to test new mechanics. In short, Arrowhead committed to increasing fun, making sure new content was more fun, and better communicating why it makes certain changes, and spelling out what’s fun about them.
The primary design change to improve “fun” at the end of the 60-day plan was a move towards implementing buffs, more so than nerfs. If you didn’t know, a “buff” is a change that improves how viable something is to do in a game, while a “nerf” makes something less viable. So, if you buff one weapon, you make it more powerful, and if you nerf it, it becomes weaker.
Evidently, Arrowhead realized that players preferred buffs instead of nerfs, all else being equal. After all, people are more likely to react poorly to perceived losses rather than gains, even if the net change is the same. This loss aversion bias is a well known social science finding, and it’s good that Arrowhead finally realized they were ignoring it at their own peril. Arrowhead’s shrewd change towards reconciling “fun” and “balance” with more buffs rather than nerfs is likely responsible for Helldivers 2 temporary return to a 70,000 concurrent playerbase.
The trouble is, Arrowhead didn’t reliably deliver on testing or communicating better, which means the underlying problem isn’t fixed. Arrowhead is still releasing content for Helldivers 2 with flaws that should have been caught in the testing stages. They are still making changes the playerbase struggles to interpret, because their rationale is mysterious. And so, it’s no surprise Helldivers 2 is now in the same place it was before the 60-day plan, with a player count hovering around 20,000 to 30,000 concurrent players on Steam. It’s the same old story. And the playerbase is declining as these same mistakes are repeated over multiple months.
Frankly, even if Arrowhead ironed out its testing process, and sticks only to buffs, I doubt it would help them that much. Until they confront the marketing problem, things are unlikely to change. No series of buffs or design changes, however well-tested, can fix a marketing problem. No more than you can hammer nails into a wall using a puff pastry in lieu of a proper hammer.
How to Fix Helldivers 2 Positioning Strategy Marketing: Thick Concepts, Not Thin Concepts
To improve its positioning strategy marketing, I think Arrowhead needs to start communicating what its intended vision of the game is to the playerbase without relying on vague design buzzwords like “fun” and “balance.” Trying to solve its problems with buffs rather than nerfs, or improve future testing for game mechanics won’t work. It might drive a temporary uptick in players, but it’s not a fix to the underlying problem at play. And when the cost of a mistake is hundreds of millions of dollars, it seems prudent to get it right. I think it’s helpful to diagnose this problem in terms of “thick” and “thin” positioning strategy marketing.
I realize that might sound a little confusing, because I just used a piece of jargon from professional philosophy and the field of ethics to talk about marketing, but stick with me.
In philosophy, sometimes it can be helpful to distinguish talk about “thick” and thin” ethical concepts. A classic example of “thin vs. thick”: “good” is “thin,” but “courageous” is “thick,” because saying someone is “good” is less descriptive than calling them “courageous.”
It wouldn’t be surprising if you found a crowd of people with different definitions of “thin” concepts, ambiguous as they are, but “thick” concepts carry more precise meanings. A crowd is more likely to be in consensus about what a “thick” concept means, which is helpful to us.
Returning to Helldivers 2, I’d argue they rely on “thin” positioning strategy marketing. Just look at the Steam capsule & description of the game, a first impression swaying consumers.
What can we tell based on the image and description? The game is a sarcastic, sci-fi, third-person shooter that emphasizes militarism and teamwork. The sarcasm is easy to miss, but arguably must be intended with the play on “last line of offence [sic]” rather than the more conventional phrase “last line of defense.” Unhelpfully, many of the same ideas are repeated in different words. Definitionally, most acts of “offense” involve “fights” and “fights” involve a “hostile” entity. The “fast, frantic, and ferocious” description is alliterative, but also again, needlessly repetitive. Conventionally, hostile, fast-moving things seem ferocious and elicit a frantic response. Because of all the wasted words and ambiguous repetition, it’s not clear how this third-person shooter will play. This is “thin” positioning strategy marketing. It’s not obvious what would feel “fun” or “balanced” about a third-person shooter marketed like this one.
Compare this image and blurb to Sea of Thieves, a well established live service game that was originally released in 2018, and shows no evidence of declining any time in the near future.
What can we tell, based on this image and description? Sea of Thieves is a cartoony and spooky pirate game, which offers adventures around lost treasure, battles and sea monsters. The cartoony and spooky game aesthetic is recognizable in the image of the skull and font of the title. That it is a pirate adventure game involving looting, battle and sea monsters is explicitly stated. We can all easily imagine what this game is supposed to play like based on this description.
There aren’t wasted words; repetition occurs once and intentionally, only with the word “pirate,” which tells us that everything we see here is fundamentally helping us feel like a type of pirate.
This is “thick” positioning strategy marketing. It’s not ambiguous, vague, or imprecise. Presumably, this game is “fun” and “balanced,” insofar as it delivers on its promises of piracy .
Helldivers 2 needs to embrace “thick” not “thin” positioning strategy marketing.
Arrowhead’s marketing team should stop talking to the community about “thin” design concepts like “fun” and “balance” when it updates the game. It must articulate a specific “thick” vision. It certainly also wouldn’t hurt if they updated the description of their game on Steam to be more evocative of specific experiences in the way that Sea of Thieves’ description is. Arrowhead would benefit from recognizing that it can’t game design its way out of a marketing issue.
I can’t help but speculate part of the issue is that Arrowhead is competing in AAA live service game space with the resources of an indie or AA studio. Arrowhead has around 120 employees, and I wouldn’t be surprised if its resources dedicated to marketing are limited. At least to me, it looks like Arrowhead is leaving money on the table due to their limited investment in marketing. Whether or not this is part of the problem, it remains the case that Arrowhead can do far better. Arrowhead needs to get out of its own way and establish better communication with its players. It’s a good sign they hired a Marketing and Community Director in November. That suggests to me that Arrowhead may now be prioritizing getting their marketing right.
Ultimately, I think that Helldivers 2 will continue to disappoint so long as it keeps changing the game without articulating to players some “thick” positioning strategy marketing. Until players can see why changes are being made, and what the game is supposed to be, they are naturally inclined to criticize ongoing changes that seem pointless at best, and harmful at worst. It matters much less if the content looks like a buff or a nerf, or if it is well or poorly tested. Positioning strategy marketing is key to explaining Helldivers 2’s fortunes and misfortunes.
I hope Helldivers 2 figures out its marketing growing pains so I can update this article with a success story. Helldivers 2 could be so much more than it is for its players and make so much more for its developers if it irons out its marketing issues. Normally, AAA live service games are heavy on marketing and light on innovative game design. Helldivers 2 is an example of the opposite approach, which I prefer, but which has its own flaws. Good marketing can’t replace a quality product, but a quality product needlessly suffers without good marketing.
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