Helldivers 2 increases player cap to 700,000 but CEO warns it will still likely max out

The player cap for Helldivers 2 has been increased, but the CEO of developer Arrowhead Game Studios warns that it will still likely hit its limits.

In a post on X, Johan Pilestedt explained that the concurrent user (CCU) cap for the game had been increased to 700,000 players, but that he expected this limit to still be reached.

“I have one final update for tonight,” he wrote. “We have updated the max CCU cap to 700,000. Unfortunately, we expect the CCU to reach that level. We believe that the wait times will be much more bearable.

“Tomorrow we are doing some final improvements for the weekend.”

The game has been a huge success on Steam, where it hit a concurrent player peak of 457,649 on Wednesday (before taking PS5 players into account too).

Players have been reporting long waits as they attempt to get into the game, suggesting the peak could have been substantially higher if the servers hadn’t reached their limits.

In another attempt to reduce server crowding, a new update for the game was released yesterday which aims to stop idle players hogging server space.

Players were starting to stay logged in, even when not playing, so they could avoid large queues the next time they wanted to play the game. The new update, however, now kicks players back to the title screen if they remain idle for 15 minutes.

Pilestedt recently said the company wants to recruit more developers to “beef up” its content plans for the Sony-published shooter.