2024 Games That Lost Their Playerbase In Months

Though the trend seems to be losing steam (no pun intended), live service games are still all the rage, and 2024 has seen the launch of quite a few new titles. Some surprise hits have reignited players' enthusiasm for what live service games can be, but even the most exciting online games of the year have fallen victim to similar flaws. In many cases, overpriced battle passes, rushed gameplay mechanics, and a general lack of fresh content can drive players away from games that initially had them all fired up.

A handful of games that launched in early 2024 saw their playerbases dwindle out within a matter of months, which really isn't that shocking. Online games lose huge chunks of players all the time, and some are able to bounce back. Keeping gamers hooked for any length of time is a serious challenge for developers, and 2024 has given us examples of games that might be able to make a comeback — as well as a couple that were almost guaranteed to lose their first influx of fans.

First off: "Helldivers 2" is still one of the biggest surprises of the year. Developer Arrowhead Game Studios likely thought that it would just be building on the niche success of its original 2015 game, but the sequel instead debuted as one of the most popular games of 2024. With excellent third-person combat and a truly unique approach to immersive and cooperative storytelling, Arrowhead's latest game quickly gained a massive playerbase. It just didn't manage to hold onto all of those players for very long.

"Helldivers 2" is still an incredible game, but makes sense that 90% of the game's players have vanished. As a general rule, live service games struggle to keep their numbers up on a consistent basis. The game's publisher, Sony, didn't help matters when it tried to force PC players to link their Steam accounts to the PlayStation Network. The game managed to pull through that catastrophe just in time for its stream of new content to turn into a trickle. Arrowhead taking more time with its updates is great news for the game's most loyal fans, but without a constant bombardment of content, most of its players — the ones who weren't already boycotting it after the PSN debacle, that is — started seeking out other games.

"Palworld" is another 2024 game that seemingly came out of nowhere and took the entire industry by storm. Pocketpair's multiplayer survival game took more than a few cues from "Pokémon," and that turned out to be a winning strategy. At its peak, "Palworld" had more than 2 million concurrent players, making it one of the most popular games in Steam's history. No game could keep up those kinds of numbers, and "Palworld" ended up experiencing a 97% drop in players a few months after its early access debut.

With that said, "Palworld" still has a sizable amount of core fans, and the game has seen its concurrent player count jump into the mid-six-figure range whenever new content rolls out. One of the game's devs fired back at the playerbase debate in early July, arguing that gamers should focus their attention on simply playing games they enjoy. That kind of fun-first approach is a big reason why "Palworld" didn't immediately drop off the map after its first few weeks as the game of the moment. It's likely that "Palworld" will continue to entertain its hardcore fanbase for a long time, but that initial drop-off briefly had some gamers predicting an untimely end for their adventures on the Palpagos Islands.

The same week that Arrowhead launched "Helldivers 2," Square Enix dropped a different PlayStation exclusive that started doing numbers. "Foamstars" actually outperformed "Helldivers 2" that week, but the success wasn't meant to last. The game also started bleeding players way faster than Arrowhead's surprise hit, losing more than half of its players in just two weeks. Within a couple of months, over 90% of the "Foamstars" playerbase had evaporated.

If "Foamstars" hadn't been up against 2024 giants like "Helldivers 2" and "Palworld," it might have had more of a fighting chance. The game received middling reviews and unfavorable comparisons to Nintendo's beloved "Splatoon" franchise, but it definitely had promising elements. Unfortunately, it didn't receive wild word-of-mouth publicity like Pocketpair's "Pokémon"-like, and it wasn't nearly as polished as Arrowhead's other PlayStation exclusive. "Foamstars" is still kicking around, but the game's fate almost entirely rests on how many resources Square Enix is willing to dedicate to improving the experience for active players and creating new content to re-entice lapsed players.

We were worried about "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" well before the game actually launched. The game suffered from some delays, and despite being a full-priced title, it looked like it was going to come with all the hallmarks of the worst type of live service game. An expensive battle pass, generic missions and looter shooter gameplay, and hefty grinding requirements didn't get many people hyped for the game, and the fact that many reviewers didn't receive advance copies made "Suicide Squad" seem even more concerning. Leaked cutscenes and major spoilers generated even more controversy for the game, which felt like a bizarre shift from the highs of Rocksteady's "Batman: Arkham" franchise.

The game debuted to fairly poor reviews, and it started losing players almost immediately. "Suicide Squad" launched at the end of January, and by April it registered an active player count in the hundreds. For a while, the game even had fewer players than 2020's ill-fated "Marvel's Avengers." Like the other games on this list, "Suicide Squad" has continued crawling forward, with Warner Bros. prepping a second season for launch in July 2024.