Helldivers 2 sold 12 million copies in 12 weeks, its players have casually killed about 100 times as many bots as that in the past few days

In its latest earnings call, Sony chatted about a lot of numbers, as you'd expect. Some of them were PS5 console sales figures, but equally as eye-catching was the number of copies the console maker revealed that Helldivers 2 sold in the weeks following its release. Yup, the shooter has claimed the title of PlayStation’s fastest-selling game ever.

While it's recently hit a speed bump in the form of the massive backlash Sony got when it tried to make linking your PSN and Steam accounts a mandatory requirement for Helldivers 2's PC players - a decision the publisher then walked back - Helldivers has been a roaring success. Even if the real world numbers are dwarfed in pretty funny fashion by some of the ones being chucked around in-game.

As confirmed in the earnings call, the game managed to shift 12 million copies across PC and PS5 in its first 12 weeks, beating God of War Ragnarok's gaudy numbers out to become a new high mark of the company when it comes to sales success immediately following launch.

Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has pointed out in a tweet that this is a bigger number than the population of Sweden, which sat at about 10.49 million as of 2022. "What a massive achievement from everyone involved in realizing Helldivers 2," he added, "A massive thank you to the community for your support, passion and dedication in the fight for democracy!"

While very big, very good numbers like this always offer a prime opportunity to be put into context a bit by being compared to the likes of the population stats, in an effort to convey just how impressive they are, we're going to do something akin to opposite here. Helldivers 2's galactic war has been full of numbers - with a lot of them being utterly ludicrous in size.

In fact, the Major Order going on right now concerns one of those - casually tasking players to kill 2 billion automatons, after they successfully managed to squish that very amount of terminids in less than 24 hours not too long ago. As of writing, something like 1,284,124,134 bots have been dispatched to the robotic afterlife since this latest order dropped on May 10 (thanks, Helldivers.io).

That's just over 100 times as many bugs as copies of Helldivers 2 that were sold in its first 12 weeks. Numbers, eh? Both of those ones are impressive, but yeah, the ones being bandied about in the game are, to put it simply, bonkers.

Oh, and Helldivers 2 got a fresh patch this morning, which adds an new option, and I stress option, to link your PSN and Steam accounts from within the game's settings.