Game devs commiserate with the Helldivers 2 team by sharing their own server launch horror stories: 'You can only attempt to prepare for scale'

Helldivers 2 is one of my favourite games of the year so far. I also barely get to play it at the moment, thanks to a payload of server problems that've knocked its Steam user review average down to «Mixed.»

It's hardly the first game to suffer from server problems at launch. I'm used to the catastrophic waiting times of MMORPG expansion launches like Final Fantasy 14's Endwalker, which fully had to stop selling copies while it waited for things to calm down. I anticipate Dawntrail will be much the same.

It's a frustrating situation for players—some of which are more understanding than others. A small contingent of not-so-patient ones have been calling for the Helldivers 2 team to 'just buy more servers' or some variant thereof for a while now, which came to a head the other day when Arrowhead CEO and creative director Johan Pilestedt sarcastically responded to a fan telling him to «stop tweeting and fix» the game.

«Yes! Good idea, I will sit behind the engineers and ask them 'are we there yet?'» wrote Pilestedt. «Or… I could let the engineers work independently, towards our common goal without me as the CEO pestering them at every moment.»

Like rugged veterans trading war stories in a smoky bar, other developers responded to Pilestedt's exasperation with their own brutal game launch experiences. One particular quote tweet shone a bright, glaring light on how chaotic a game launch can be—written by Christina Pollock, a writer and game developer who worked on Dauntless, a Monster Hunter-esque game that launched out of its beta phase and into crossplay in 2019. 

«The launch of Dauntless (2019) was the most difficult launch of my career,» Pollock writes, before unravelling her yarn—the studio had originally planned for 260,000 "[concurrent users] peak". Its open beta period sported 65,000 players, but when the thing launched: «It fell over at 10,000 [concurrent users]. Took 3 weeks of 15 hour days, 7 days a week to get it stable.»

Pollock says this was due to a year of