The boss of the company behind runaway gaming success Helldivers 2 has said that hard-up gamers should wait to buy the game – especially as its servers are struggling to cope with demand.
Helldivers 2, which was developed by Arrowhead Game Studios, has been a massive success since it was released on February 8. This included having more than 411,000 concurrent players on Steam at one point – more than Grand Theft Auto 5 has achieved.
In the game, players are part of a team of soldiers dropped into an alien planet and must survive waves of attacks from giant insect-like aliens. The game has received many positive reviews for its gameplay, as well as references to cult 90s sci-fi movie Starship Troopers.
But it has almost been too successful as the number of players wanting to log on has put pressure on the game’s servers, leading some players – especially on PC and PlayStation 5 – to be stuck in queues to play or receiving the ‘servers at capacity’ message.
Now, Arrowhead’s CEO, Johan Pilestedt, has said that gamers should wait to pick up the $40 game. “If you have no cash, get it later,” he said in posts on X (formerly Twitter).
“While we made a really fun game it’s worth waiting until the servers can support the capacity,” he replied.
“I mean, as a CEO I of course want the game to be as profitable as possible, but if you spent [your] last $ and got stuck in server queues I’d be heartbroken.”
Arrowhead is working on solving the problems and this week the company will release updates on PS5 and PC to address the most serious issues such as login and server load, although the company said that no one update will solve all the issues.
