The main thing for the weekend (March 16-17)

According to analysts, sales of Helldivers 2 exceeded 8 million copies, Something Wicked Games studio laid off most of its employees, Steam again updated the record for peak online, — we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

Helldivers 2

• Dozens of employees of Something Wicked Games have lost their jobs. Eric Webb, a former senior animator at the studio, wrote about this on Linkedin. He did not name the exact number of those fired, but according to the Game Industry Layoffs portal, there were about 40 people. Recall that Something Wicked Games was opened in 2022 by Jeff Gardiner, the former head of Fallout 76 development, along with several veterans of Bethesda and Obsidian Entertainment. The studio is currently working on a dark fantasy RPG Wyrdsong, set in medieval Portugal.
• Marcus Lehto, the former head of story content development for Battlefield, spoke in X about his departure from Electronic Arts (EA). He left the company at the end of February, and shortly after that EA closed his Ridgeline Games studio. Apparently, he is not too happy with the situation. "I don't write much here because I can't say anything good about EA, nor about my recent departure, nor about how many people, including my team, are suffering from layoffs in the gaming industry," the developer wrote. Earlier, he said that he left the company on his own, although it was not an easy decision for him.
• TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz estimated that the Helldivers 2 cooperative shooter has sold over 8 million copies in a month and a half since its release. In a Bloomberg comment, he also noted that sales of the game are growing every week. Neither Arrowhead Studio nor Sony, which published the game, officially disclosed the figures. According to statistics from the SteamDB service, the daily online only Steam version of Helldivers 2 is stable at 350 thousand people. At its peak, the game was able to attract 458,709 Steam users at the same time.
• Sales of the Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor car scooter exceeded 1 million copies. The game overcame this milestone a month after it went into early access on Steam. By comparison, it took the original Deep Rock Galactic two years to achieve the same result.
• On the evening of March 17, Steam set a new record for peak online traffic, with 36,354,393 users on the site at the same time. It is noteworthy that Steam has updated the record for the sixth time in a month. Previous records were recorded on March 2 (34.3 million people), March 3 (34.65 million people), March 9 (34.9 million people), March 10 (35.38 million people) and March 16 (35.75 million people).