Naturally there is always going to be a certain amount of player decline over time, but I have to wonder how much of this could have been saved had Sony not created a PR nightmare for the game with the required PSN account linking.
That said, I'm sure there's going to be a sharp spike in players very soon, as Arrowhead should be releasing a new enemy faction into the game very shortly, which is going to bring a lot of players back again for a while. Hopefully they'll find a way to keep those players interested again.
All games like this have massive daily player drop offs a few months after release.
To be honest despite the publicity, most players don't actually give a shit. Most players don't read gaming news. And many players don't care, either because they already have a PSN account, or they just don't care about making another account to play the game.
I wouldn't be surprised if over half the players had never even heard of the PSN controversy at all. The SteamDB player chart actually indicates when those shenanigans were compared to player numbers, and the daily player numbers had already been declining at that same pace for a month up to that point and continued at about the same rate after.
Of course. I'm not an idiot, clearly there are people affected.
But even if EVERY Helldivers 2 sale were affected, of the 1.85 BILLION estimated PC gamers in the world, we would be looking at around 0.6% people affected. It's a tiny sliver, despite Helldivers having over 12 million sales (and that's both PC and console).
The fact of the matter is this doesn't mean shit in the grand scheme, and most people have likely never even heard of the game still even with the controversy. The industry is unfathomably massive and one game is tiny, even one with 12+ million sales.
All games like this have massive daily player drop offs a few months after release.
This makes me feel super old, because I must have played Quake 1 daily for 8 straight years. Same with Counter-Strike. I'm still not used to people changing games every few months.