20 Million Sales Later, Helldivers 2 Hits PS Plus Game Catalog

The PS Plus Game Catalog for August 2026 is led by Helldivers 2, a shooter that has already sold north of 20 million copies without any help from a subscription service. Sony confirmed the line-up on 12 August, and Arrowhead's squad-based blaster went live for Extra and Premium members the same day, timed to land alongside a new game update.

Nine more titles follow over the rest of the month. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Vampire Survivors, Metro Exodus, Dying Light 2, Two Point Museum, Hell is Us and Umamusume Pretty Derby – Party Dash make up the bulk of it. Premium subscribers get two extras on top: Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams, originally a PlayStation 2 game from 2006, and a tidied-up version of Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Here's the part worth pinning to the calendar if you're playing in Britain. They do not all unlock together. Three of them arrive a full week after the date most of the coverage is leading with, which matters when the catalogue is the reason you pay £99.99 a year for Extra instead of £59.99 for Essential.

When Each Game Actually Unlocks

Sony staggers these additions rather than dropping them in one go, and August is a particularly messy example. Three separate dates are in play, and regional availability differs depending on where your account is registered. If a game isn't showing up, it usually isn't a fault — it's a rollout.

Live now: Helldivers 2

Helldivers 2 went into the catalogue on 12 August for PS5, worldwide, no regional caveats. It's a chunky download and a live-service game, so budget time for the update as well as the install. If you've never touched it, it's four-player co-op against alien swarms, with a persistent galactic war that shifts week to week.

From 18 August

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (PS5) and Vampire Survivors (PS5 and PS4) headline the mid-month batch. Metro Exodus and Dying Light 2, both playable on PS4 and PS5, are also part of this wave, though a few outlets reporting the announcement placed those two in the later group for certain territories. Check the store on the 18th, and check again a week on.

From 25 August in the UK

Hell is Us (PS5), Two Point Museum (PS5) and Umamusume Pretty Derby – Party Dash (PS4) are flagged for the United States, United Kingdom and Japan on 25 August. So British subscribers get the tail end of the line-up last, not first. It's a one-week wait, not a cancellation.

Why the PS Plus Game Catalog Wanted Helldivers 2

This is the interesting bit commercially. Helldivers 2 launched in February 2024 and passed a million sales inside a week. It has since cleared 20 million copies and roughly $700 million in revenue from sales alone, with Steam accounting for around 13 million players against 5.6 million on PS5. Roughly 3.6 million people played it across all platforms in a recent month.

Games with that kind of tail don't usually get handed to a subscription service. Sony putting it in anyway suggests the goal isn't unit sales any more — it's funnelling new bodies into a live game that earns from Super Credits and Warbonds long after the box price is forgotten. A subscriber who dives in for free can still spend.

A Six-Million-Seller Joins the Line-Up

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II is the other genuine heavyweight here. Warhorse Studios shipped it on 4 February 2025, sold a million copies on day one, hit five million within its first year and passed six million by June 2026. This is a game that is still selling at retail, going into a subscription eighteen months after release — historically quite fast for something performing that well.

It's also enormous. If you want value from a single month's subscription, a sprawling 15th-century Bohemian RPG is the one to start. Vampire Survivors sits at the opposite end: cheap, tiny, and capable of eating a weekend forty seconds at a time.

Is Extra Worth £40 More Than Essential?

The maths is simple. Extra costs £99.99 a year against Essential's £59.99 — a £40 gap, less than most new PS5 releases cost on their own. Premium adds another £20 for the classics library. Push Square reported in May 2026 that Sony's price rise hit shorter subscription terms rather than the 12-month plans, so paying annually remains the cheaper route.

Two caveats. Catalogue games rotate out, so nothing here is permanent — and Hell is Us, which reviewed at 79 on Metacritic for PS5 after its September 2025 launch, is exactly the sort of mid-sized game that makes a subscription worthwhile precisely because you wouldn't have paid full price for it.

What to Do Before the Weekend

If you're on Extra or Premium, add Helldivers 2 to your library now even if you can't play yet — claiming it locks your access while the game is in the catalogue. Set a reminder for 18 August for Kingdom Come, and another for the 25th for the UK-dated trio. And start the downloads overnight: between Metro Exodus, Dying Light 2 and a 100GB-plus shooter, your broadband will need the head start.