When 2024 began, Helldivers 2 was barely a blip on most individuals’s recreation launch radars. It rapidly turned the most important hit of the 12 months up to now, turning into each a gross sales juggernaut and a cultural phenomenon. And in an period of hyper consolidation, it made Arrowhead Studios an apparent goal for acquisition by the sport’s writer, Sony. Months later, co-founder Johan Pilestedt maintains the Sweden-based staff of over 100 has no plans of turning into one other cog within the first-party PlayStation machine.
“We satisfaction ourselves on being an unbiased studio,” he instructed Gamesindustry.biz in a brand new interview at this time. “Now we have to see what the longer term holds, however there’s nothing within the plans the place we need to be acquired by any individual. I need to see how excessive we will fly.” Pilestedt additionally introduced at this time that the studio has employed former Paradox Interactive govt Shams Jorjani to be its new CEO whereas he strikes right into a chief artistic officer function to focus extra on preserving Helldivers 2 a top-10 dwell service hit.
The 2 say Arrowhead now has ambitions of being a flagship studio that may rival the most effective on this planet, particularly on the subject of the hyper-competitive panorama of on-line co-op video games. “After we had been rising up, we actually needed to work at Blizzard, it was one of many bucket checklist locations to work at,” Jorjani mentioned. “I feel Arrowhead has the potential to be that.”
However Helldivers 2‘s in a single day success has additionally made it a lightning rod for controversy and assholes. When the sport launched, the servers had been so overloaded that Pilestedt instructed individuals to cease shopping for the sport, an uncommon transfer for any CEO, however he mentioned this solely “fanned the flames,” rising the sport’s participant depend much more. Extra not too long ago, the PSN login fiasco led to a Steam review-bombing marketing campaign that additionally made some Arrowhead staff a goal for the sport’s extra poisonous gamers.
“The massive distinction now, which is horrifying, is the quantity of threats and impolite habits that individuals within the studio are getting from some actually shitty people inside the group,” Pilestedt instructed Gamesindustry.biz. He continued:
Whenever you hit this massive, a lot larger than anybody thought – Sony, us, everybody – what occurs is the sport finds an viewers outdoors of that area of interest fan group. So that you get this amplification of various voices. Nearly all video games have a little bit of toxicity locally, however with these massive numbers you simply get so many, so we have to work with the group to get them to self-moderate, give individuals the instruments to talk with one another in a optimistic trend, so we will hold speaking to the gamers overtly. The extra voices being added to the choir does add complexity.
Whereas the Arrowhead executives mentioned the staff’s plans are solely rising extra grandiose, it doesn’t plan to scale as much as the dimensions of a full-blown AAA studio anytime quickly. It’s additionally going to decelerate the tempo of Helldivers 2‘s updates so it could possibly preserve high quality amid the chaos. “We need to take some extra time for this one and doubtlessly between future patches since we really feel cadence has in all probability been a bit too excessive to have the ability to preserve the standard commonplace we would like and also you deserve,” group supervisor Twinbeard not too long ago wrote on the sport’s Discord.
It seems like at the very least for now, nonetheless, gamers will nonetheless be getting new Warbond battle passes on a close to month-to-month foundation. Hopefully, fewer patches means much less nerfs to the brand new weapons gamers fall in love with.
