Palworld's Helldivers 2 developer defends the game after stats-tracker declares both games burned out

It seems that there is a growing desire to highlight the concurrent users who are playing formerly popular games such as Palworld and Helldivers 2. They see a line go down on a graph and declare them dead and buried.

Both games have a similar story. Palworld reached a peak of 2,000,000 players , while Helldivers 2 had a record-breaking 450,000 players. Although that's not the case anymore, neither game is dead by any stretch.

Bucky, Palworld's community manager (though also credited with localisation and design) took to Twitter to voice his frustration after a user pointed out that both games were on a downward slope, and claimed they were heralds of the "Age of meme-gaming", where you strive to burn brightly & strongly, but you know no matter what you do, you'll end up burning up fast (via GamesRadar).

Bucky replied with a somewhat baffled "Is Palworld a meme game? Helldivers is it? It's a win as long as both games are developed and someone enjoys them. Why compare them?

Even as an outsider, I am a little tired of the stat-chasing. It's technically correct to say that Helldivers 2 lost over 90% its playerbase. However, the statement "game is dead" simply isn't true. Helldivers 2 reached a peak of 54,000 users in a single 24-hour period on Steam, while Palworld ranked at around 39,000 even after its latest major update.

So, yes. You can say Helldivers 2 is around 8-11% more popular on Steam today than it was in its glory days. Palworld is around 1.8% less popular online. A playerbase of just a few dozen thousands is not "dead". Neither of these games is as desolate or as solitary as Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League which hasn't seen more than a thousand concurrent Steam players in months.

Bucky continues, "I don't know what the negativity was for." "People had a good time. People are still having fun. Isn't this all we ask as game developers? "We want people to enjoy our games."

In both cases, the games were unanticipated successes, despite smaller development teams compared to their AAA competitors. Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Games' servers were crushed by the unexpected demand of its liberty-hungry users, while Palworld was forced to spend $475,000 per month to keep its lights on.

It's not a high-profile MMO like World of Warcraft or a modest little game called Counter-Strike. It is at best absurd to expect them to continue attracting hundreds of thousands of new players indefinitely. It looks like we'll be having this conversation whenever the next smaller game sells gangbusters.