A Steam maintenance window turned into the closest victory in Galactic War history.
Players defending the planet Mort had 20 minutes left. Then every PC player got kicked offline. What happened next became one of the wildest moments in Helldivers 2 Malevelon Creek Gabe Newell gaming history.
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When Steam Went Dark at the Worst Moment
Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt dropped this story at GDC 2025, and it’s the kind of thing you couldn’t script if you tried.
The community had been fighting for 48 hours straight to defend Mort from Automaton forces. The liberation percentage kept climbing. Victory looked certain. Then the disconnects started.
“The entire PC community got disconnected,” Pilestedt said during his talk. “There were places calling us, like, ‘what’s going on with your servers?’ It’s like, ‘we don’t know. We can’t see anything wrong with our servers.'”
Turns out Arrowhead’s servers were fine. The culprit? A Steam update pushed by Valve at the absolute worst time.
“It was our friend Gabe N[ewell, the owner of Steam]. It was [a] Steam update,” Pilestedt revealed.
Every PC player saw the same message: “please wait democratically” with a spinning buffer wheel. Meanwhile, the clock kept ticking on Mort’s defense timer.
PlayStation Players Held The Line Alone
With PC players offline, only PlayStation users remained fighting on the ground. They kept running missions, completing objectives, anything to stop the liberation percentage from dropping.
The Steam maintenance finished. PC players flooded back in. But now they only had ten minutes left to save Mort.
The Community’s Last Stand Strategy
Someone figured out the key: completing primary mission objectives updated the backend servers immediately. Extraction didn’t matter for the data sync.
The strategy spread across Discord servers and Reddit threads within minutes:
Complete your primary objectives Kill your entire squad Repeat until time runs out
Freedom isn’t free. Players sacrificed their squads over and over, treating it like a feature instead of failure. The death counts skyrocketed but so did the defense percentage.
Pilestedt and his team watched from the office. “We were sitting there at the office with popcorn,” he said.
Mort was saved. The margin? 20 seconds.
Why Players Cared So Much About Mort
Mort wasn’t strategically important to the Galactic War. Pilestedt admitted Arrowhead “just made” the planet and “didn’t care too much about it.”
But the community? They cared greatly. And that caring came directly from Malevelon Creek.
The jungle planet nicknamed “Robot Vietnam” traumatized the playerbase in the best way possible. Dark forests, constant fog, ion storms disabling stratagems, and Automatons emerging from every shadow.
Between February and April 2024, over 25 million Helldivers died on Malevelon Creek. Players called themselves “Creekers” and wore their veteran status like a badge. Propaganda posters flooded social media. When the planet fell to Automaton control on February 28, the community mourned.
They took it back on April 1 through Operation Swift Disassembly. Arrowhead gave everyone a commemorative cape and made April 3 an official in-game holiday: Malevelon Creek Memorial Day.
After bleeding that much for one planet, nobody wanted to lose Mort without a fight.
Joel Was Watching Everything
Behind the scenes, someone else was invested in how the Mort defense played out.
Joel serves as Helldivers 2’s Game Master. That’s his actual job title at Arrowhead. He controls the Galactic War like a dungeon master running a campaign for millions of players.
Joel picks which Major Orders go live, decides where Automatons attack, and adjusts reinforcements when planets get too easy or too hard. Sometimes he wakes up at 3 AM to tweak enemy spawn rates.
In an anniversary video, Joel called Mort his favorite moment from the war’s first year.
“Three minutes left on a 48-hour event that’s like 0.01% left in terms of time,” he said. “That moment was one of my personal favorites simply because it proved to us that we’re onto something special with the galactic war.”
Joel started as one person but has grown into a team. Players still refer to the role as Joel though. The community treats him like a mythical figure, crediting victories and defeats to his influence.
Some players joke Joel is actually an AI. Others think he’s Arrowhead’s way of creating a common enemy. The reality? He’s a group of developers crafting a living narrative that responds to how players actually behave.
What Arrowhead Got Right
Live service games crash and burn constantly. Helldivers 2 thrived because Arrowhead built flexible systems that could turn accidents into memorable stories.
The Gabe Newell Steam update could have killed momentum. Instead, it created a moment players still talk about. The community’s sacrifice strategy wasn’t planned by developers but became part of the game’s legend.
Pilestedt’s GDC talk emphasized how the industry chases features instead of nailing fundamentals. Helldivers 2 focused on making co-op chaos feel good first, then built everything else around that core.
The numbers back it up. Months after launch, the game maintains a healthy concurrent player count. New Warbonds drop regularly. The Galactic War keeps evolving through Joel’s team and player actions.
And when players discuss legendary Helldivers 2 moments, they mention Malevelon Creek and Mort in the same breath. Two planets that meant nothing to the developers but everything to the community.
