It's time to put Microsoft's "this is an Xbox" angle to the test. Helldivers 2 launched on PS5 and PC in February 2024, and as we all must surely know, any PC is an Xbox. But Helldivers 2 is now coming to Xbox Series X and S consoles on August 26, with the Xbox blog proudly proclaiming that the game is "coming to Xbox."
So, will Helldivers 2 be on Xbox? At last, the answer is yes.
That said, there's a bigger head-scratcher than semantics hanging over this. Xbox must have been waiting and working on this launch for more than a year, yet somehow Helldivers 2 is still coming to Series X on the exact same day as Gears of War: Reloaded, pointlessly pitting two shooters with multiplayer against each other and inevitably cannibalizing the launch of both.
"We have so much more in store for the future months and years – and the more players we have the more stories we can tell!" game director Mikael Eriksson says of the news. "The fight for Super Earth has only just begun.”
The launch timing is a bizarre decision, and this announcement comes on the heels of Xbox blowing its foot right off following yet another wave of layoffs across Microsoft as a whole, that's seen thousands of employees cut as well as projects cancelled. This includes many Xbox staff, the games they were making, and in some cases the entire studios they used to work at.
The fallout from the big Xbox cuts has been so extreme that FPS legend John Romero and the crew at Romero Games have apparently had the rug pulled out from under them, with employees saying their game's funding vanished "because of the layoffs" under Xbox. I would imagine the folks at Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead would've liked for their big announcement to follow some better news.
More ways to play Helldivers 2: yay. More soldiers for the meat grinder that is the Galactic War: also yay, just don't think about it too hard. But it's kind of difficult to be excited about anything in the Xbox orbit right now that isn't a root-deep change of leadership.
