When 2024 began, Helldivers 2 was barely a blip on most individuals’s sport launch radars. It rapidly grew to become the largest hit of the yr thus far, 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 changing into one other cog within the first-party PlayStation machine.
“We satisfaction ourselves on being an impartial 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 wish to be acquired by any person. I wish 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 conserving Helldivers 2 a top-10 reside service hit.
The 2 say Arrowhead now has ambitions of being a flagship studio that may rival the very best on the planet, particularly in terms of the hyper-competitive panorama of on-line co-op video games. “After we have been rising up, we actually wished to work at Blizzard, it was one of many bucket record 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 have been so overloaded that Pilestedt advised folks 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 large distinction now, which is horrifying, is the quantity of threats and impolite conduct that individuals within the studio are getting from some actually shitty people throughout the neighborhood,” Pilestedt advised Gamesindustry.biz. He continued:
If you hit this large, a lot greater 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 large numbers you simply get so many, so we have to work with the neighborhood to get them to self-moderate, give folks the instruments to talk with one another in a optimistic vogue, so we are able to preserve 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 dimensions of a full-blown AAA studio anytime quickly. It’s additionally going to decelerate the tempo of Helldivers 2‘s updates so it may preserve high quality amid the chaos. “We wish 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 wish and also you deserve,” neighborhood supervisor Twinbeard not too long ago wrote on the sport’s Discord.
It appears like at the 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.