When 2024 began, Helldivers 2 was barely a blip on most individuals’s recreation launch radars. It rapidly grew to become the most important hit of the yr 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 group of over 100 has no plans of turning into one other cog within the first-party PlayStation machine.
“We pleasure ourselves on being an unbiased studio,” he advised Gamesindustry.biz in a brand new interview as we speak. “We have now to see what the long run holds, however there’s nothing within the plans the place we need to be acquired by someone. I need to see how excessive we are able to fly.” Pilestedt additionally introduced as we speak that the studio has employed former Paradox Interactive govt Shams Jorjani to be its new CEO whereas he strikes right into a chief inventive officer position to focus extra on holding 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 relating to the hyper-competitive panorama of on-line co-op video games. “Once we had been rising up, we actually wished to work at Blizzard, it was one of many bucket listing locations to work at,” Jorjani mentioned. “I believe 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 advised individuals to cease shopping for the sport, an uncommon transfer for any CEO, however he mentioned this solely “fanned the flames,” growing the sport’s participant rely much more. Extra not too long ago, the PSN login fiasco led to a Steam review-bombing marketing campaign that additionally made some Arrowhead workers a goal for the sport’s extra poisonous gamers.
“The large distinction now, which is horrifying, is the quantity of threats and impolite conduct that folks within the studio are getting from some actually shitty people inside the group,” Pilestedt advised Gamesindustry.biz. He continued:
Whenever you hit this huge, a lot larger than anybody thought – Sony, us, everybody – what occurs is the sport finds an viewers exterior of that area of interest fan group. So that you get this amplification of various voices. Virtually all video games have a little bit of toxicity locally, however with these huge 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 constructive style, so we are able to maintain speaking to the gamers overtly. The extra voices being added to the choir does add complexity.
Whereas the Arrowhead executives mentioned the group’s plans are solely rising extra grandiose, it doesn’t plan to scale as much as the scale of a full-blown AAA studio anytime quickly. It’s additionally going to decelerate the tempo of Helldivers 2‘s updates so it will possibly preserve high quality amid the chaos. “We need to take some extra time for this one and probably between future patches since we really feel cadence has most likely been a bit too excessive to have the ability to preserve the standard customary we would like and also you deserve,” group supervisor Twinbeard not too long ago wrote on the sport’s Discord.
It appears like at the least for now, nevertheless, 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.
