Sony’s massively popular third-person online sci-fi shooter Helldivers 2 is coming to Xbox later this month. Many fans had assumed that developers Arrowhead had been the ones behind the decision, likely pushing PlayStation to let them port the game to the company’s rival console. But it turns out it was actually Sony’s idea, and that’s just more evidence that the console wars are over.
Helldivers 2 launched in early 2024 to rave reviews and huge player counts. And since then, the game has continued to receive frequent updates, growing larger in scale as it adds more enemies and its massive galactic story of war continues to evolve. But for the last year, the only way to play Helldivers 2 was on PS5 or PC. This left Xbox players out of the loop. That changes on August 26, when Helldivers lands on Xbox Series X/S with full crossplay support. And according to Arrowhead’s CEO Shams Jorjani, the decision to port Helldivers 2 came entirely from PlayStation.
On August 6, as reported by Windows Central, when a player praised Arrowhead for bringing the Helldivers sequel to Xbox, Jorjani stepped in and gave Sony all the credit. “It was all PlayStation. Send them your thanks,” posted Jorjani in the game’s official Discord server. “We were all in support, of course.” The Arrowhead CEO later added, “I think it’s one of the coolest things [Sony’s] done. They’re killing it.”
While it might at first seem odd that PlayStation would bring one of its most popular video games in years to a rival platform, the reality is that the console wars have mostly fizzled out. Thanks to crossplay, cross save, Xbox ditching the whole affair after losing last gen, and Nintendo doing their own thing, there’s just not much of a war anymore. Xbox has found great success bringing its hit games like Forza to PlayStation 5, and Sony is following in their footsteps now by bringing games like Marathon and Helldivers 2 to Xbox, as well as continuing to port games like Spider-Man to PC. At this point, it just makes more sense to put your games on more platforms. This is especially true for big, expensive live-service games that rely on lots of players actively engaging with the game daily to make money. So I’d expect to see even more Xbox and PlayStation games hopping across platforms in the future. I mean, Gears of War is coming to PlayStation this year. The walls have fallen. The console wars are over. And only Nintendo seems to care about keeping stuff exclusive.
