‘Helldivers 2’ On Xbox? Even PS5 Players Want It To Happen

Helldivers 2 continues to suffer from success, struggling to operate under the weight of an enormous amount of PS5 and Steam players attempting to play. The Steam concurrent record has now breached 400,000, and previously, Arrowhead CEO said the PlayStation split was 50/50, so it’s unclear what it is now. But the total is massive.

But the Helldivers 2 community wants even more players to join.

I am now seeing something that I never thought was possible, this war game causing a ceasefire between PlayStation and Xbox fans. Xbox players are obviously wishing that Sony would release this game on Microsoft’s console the way Microsoft has committed to making some of its multiplayer games playable on PlayStation. But even many PlayStation players want Xbox to have it as well.

Some of this is a bit meta. There’s this idea that more Xbox players would bolster the “war effort” in that they may make even more progress beating back the tide of bugs and rust buckets. I’m not sure it works like that, as the “solar system warscape” aspect of the game is GM-ed by Arrowhead so it’s sort of as hard or as easy as they want to make it. But sure, they would probably be meta enough to write Xbox players joining as part of the story.

But often it’s more practical reasons. Helldivers 2 is the most fun co-op game to play with friends in a very long time, and some of those friends are on Xbox, left out in the cold unless they have a PC could enough to run the game.

This is in the wake of Xbox’s Phil Spencer wondering out loud “who it helps” that Helldivers 2 is skipping Xbox, but following up with “I get it,” as Microsoft currently does that too with many of its multiplayer games. While Sony has committed to more day and date PC releases like what we saw with Helldivers (which uh, clearly indicated that’s a good strategy) the only true cross-platform games they’re doing right now are ones like Bungie’s Destiny 2 after its acquisition, or future Bungie games like Marathon.

So, how likely is this to happen? I have doubts. First, Sony would have to decide to greenlight this, and opening up its big live service success to Xbox, which does not seem like something they’d be eager to do.

But even if they approved the idea today, there is not just a “port to Xbox button” Arrowhead can press. It would take months of work to make this a reality, and it’s unclear if “Helldivers mania” will still be relevant then. Not that it wouldn’t be great to port it over regardless, but this idea of Xbox players suddenly dropping in to help win the war unfortunately is probably not going to happen.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.