The Surprising Rise of Helldivers 2 is Only Matched by its Rapid Decline
The strengths and weaknesses of Helldivers 2’s positioning strategy marketing arguably explain both its initially shocking success and recent rapid decline in its concurrent player base.
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 around a billion dollars at time of writing (which for reference, is still barely more than half a year out from the games release date!).
While Helldivers 2 initially enjoyed positive press coverage, and a reputation as an 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 at time of writing, it hovers around twenty to thirty thousand players. That is a more than a 90% decline in about seven months. Even the recent major content update “Escalation of Freedom” has failed to slow the ongoing decline in the playerbase. The player base is in a slow freefall; it has not yet stabilized. 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 is happening with Helldivers 2.
I will show how Helldivers 2′s initial rise in popularity and subsequent decline in players seem driven by its positioning strategy marketing. This will reveal 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 developers 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.
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.
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. These 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.
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 in existential terms: Helldivers 2 can likely survive profitably for years as a live service game with only ten or twenty thousand 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 not just stabilized its decline, but reversed its misfortunes positively.
One thing nearly all players of Helldivers 2 and the developers of the game can agree upon is that the various patches and content updates to the game have usually been controversial. Rather than inspiring the community and encouraging its expansion through positive word-of-mouth, the patches and content updates have contributed to acrimonious press around the game.
As the former CEO of Arrowhead, Johan Pilestedt, glibly diagnosed the problem in May:
“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 hasn’t worked as well as hoped for Pilestedt just yet. As I mentioned earlier, the most recent major content update for Helldivers 2 proved just as controversial as previous patches. This prompted the game director Mikeal, to publicly admit 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,” but the game developers surely better.
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 stupidly powerful. Trying to combine both these qualities would be rather 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 somewhat be 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 they mean by fun and balance. Hopefully Arrowhead knows what they want and are 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– they need 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. After all, 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 Helldivers 2 fans would argue that I am missing the point. The particular changes the developers have made are not something I have detailed here. Initially, I can see how not including that in my argument would appear to substantially harm it. Yet, I would argue the details of the changes over the last few months are beside the point here.
Until it’s clear what the developers think the game is supposed to be, it’s hard to see how one can convincingly argue to the player base as a whole that any significant change is prima facie good or bad. If Arrowhead can’t communicate what the game is supposed to play like, the player base cannot hope to agree about what changes are 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!
How To Fix Helldivers 2 Positioning Strategy Marketing: Thick Concepts, Not Thin Concepts
To improve its positioning strategy marketing, I think the developers of Helldivers 2 need to start communicating what their intended vision of the game is to the player base without relying on vague design buzzwords like “fun” and “balance.” One way to think about how to resolve this problem is to think 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 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. At some level, I think Arrowhead recognizes their marketing is a huge pain point for them (why else have they explicitly promised to provide more of their “reasoning” behind future game changes).
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. Positioning strategy marketing is key to explaining Helldivers 2’s fortunes and misfortunes.
I sincerely hope that Helldivers 2 figures out its marketing growing pains, and that I can update this article in the future with a success story.
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