By Paul Tassi Senior Contributor
Helldivers 2
Much ado has been made about Xbox bringing its games to PlayStation over the past year or so, but now, we have something heading in the other direction. That would be Helldivers 2, the rare successful live service game from PlayStation, which will now publish the shooter on Xbox.
This is, of course, not going on Xbox Game Pass, and will cost the standard $40, a welcome non-$70-80 price for a game that can extract hundreds of hours of playtime from players. The release date for Helldivers 2 on Xbox is not far, August 26, 2025, just under two months form now.
This is the first Xbox game published by PlayStation studios, ever, making this a big deal in the industry. MLB: The Show is published by MLB. PlayStation acquisition Bungie has Destiny 2 on all platforms and will release its upcoming shooter Marathon on Xbox day and date as well, which is not through PlayStation publishing. But no, we’re not seeing God of War or Ghost of Tsushima or The Last of Us headed to Xbox, even years after release.
The news comes at a time of horrendous developments at Xbox with mass layoffs and the cancellation of at least a half dozen games, some of them major like Perfect Dark and Rare’s Everwild. I don’t think this timing is to directly offset that news cycle in some sort of cynical way, but here we are.
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Helldivers 2 remains one of PlayStation’s only recent live service successes as it pushes and pushes to try to make a dent in that genre, which has itself resulted in many big cancellations at the studio. Future games like Marathon and Fairgames look to be full of issues even ahead of release.
Helldivers 2 is a healthy title, with a larger playerbase on PC than PlayStation, and it’s unclear just how widely it will be played on Xbox. From the numbers we can track, Helldivers can periodically spike well over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam with big updates, and even its “baseline” of normal play is still around 50-70,000 players nightly. Great for a game of this genre in the current context of the market.
One issue with the Xbox release is that Helldivers 2 still does not have cross-progression across its now three versions, and existing say, PC players hoping to boot up the game on their Xbox now will find themselves having to start over. And if it hasn’t gotten cross-progression now, it probably never will.
It’s a big moment for both PlayStation and Xbox. We’ll see what it does to each’s fortunes from here.
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