Helldivers 2 is off to a record-breaking start on Steam, with the game’s concurrent player count eclipsing that of all other PlayStation PC ports combined.
“Despite our best efforts to increase server capacity to accommodate all of you who want to dive for Freedom, we are experiencing capacity issues,” read a statement on the game’s X account.
Ruh roh, somebody didn’t design the backend to scale horizontally. Might not be an easy thing to fix depending on what the problem is exactly
this is a sequel to a 10 year old game that had a peak concurrent user of 6.5K and sold about 2M copies over that time. helldivers2 has sold between 2-8M in a week.
Exactly! Designing a truly horizontally scalable system for something like this is damn hard and requires pretty specialized knowledge. It’s often the case that it simply isn’t possible to scale up the first version of some system you come up with since you may need to eg. completely rethink how clients communicate, or how you manage state updates and propagation, or need to rethink the consistency model you use to store the state over multiple nodes etc.
Ruh roh, somebody didn’t design the backend to scale horizontally. Might not be an easy thing to fix depending on what the problem is exactly
this is a sequel to a 10 year old game that had a peak concurrent user of 6.5K and sold about 2M copies over that time. helldivers2 has sold between 2-8M in a week.
Doesn’t change the fact that the backend apparently doesn’t scale; I was just pointing out that it might not be an easy fix to do post hoc
Yeah people love to trash on them “just add more servers duh 4head” but don’t understand how complex it can be
Exactly! Designing a truly horizontally scalable system for something like this is damn hard and requires pretty specialized knowledge. It’s often the case that it simply isn’t possible to scale up the first version of some system you come up with since you may need to eg. completely rethink how clients communicate, or how you manage state updates and propagation, or need to rethink the consistency model you use to store the state over multiple nodes etc.