Like every PvE game which does not have hundreds of people working to churn out content, its playerbase will dwindle until only those who do not get bored by its gameplay stick around. Whether it's Left 4 Dead, Payday, Deep Rock Galactic or Vermintide, those types of games follow this pattern... And I for one, see no fucking issue with that. It's a great game, people play it until they have had their fill and then move on. Helldivers 2 is only an outlier because of how hard it hit at launch. It absolutely does not have the content pipeline to keep a large playerbase engaged, so yeah it will not keep printing a lot of money, just a little bit every now and then. Now excuse me as I go and spread some managed democracy.

Already seeing that with DRG, even though the player base seems to be mostly stable at 20k, that doesn't mean the games making money for the devs. Hence why season 6 seems to be delayed while they work on their newer games that *will* make them money.