August 26 was an historic day for consoles, as the two giants of PlayStation and Xbox swapped exclusives. Gears of War Reloaded launched on PlayStation, while Sony published Helldivers 2 dropped onto Xbox.
So how is the excellent live-service game faring on the green brand? Well, the early numbers are promising, according to analytics firm Alinea.
Posting on X, Alinea Analytics discussed the launch, commenting on how Arrowhead’s CEO revealed that the game had over 500,000 concurrent players across all platforms a day after Helldivers 2 arrived on Xbox. With 160k of those being on Steam, that left 340k on consoles. Not bad for a live-service game that’s over a year and a half old at this point.
But Alinea went further, revealing that their data points to around 600k copies of Helldivers 2 being sold on Xbox thus far.
That might not sound like a lot – in fact, it’s a small drop in the bucket of Helldivers 2‘s overall sales – but on Xbox, which typically sees very low games sales, it’s a pretty solid start.
Speaking of game sales, Alinea is also claiming that Helldivers 2 has hit around 18 million copies sold. The last official number we got was 12 million.
However, these are estimates only. Alinea uses its own special sauce when it comes to determining sales and has faced controversy in the past due to its usage of user reviews on storefronts as a way of estimating sales and engagement. In other words, take the sales data with a pinch of salt. We have no way of verifying it, unless Arrowhead, Microsoft or Sony decide to provide any stats.