When 2024 began, Helldivers 2 was barely a blip on most individuals’s recreation launch radars. It shortly grew to become the largest hit of the 12 months to this point, 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 changing 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 right now. “We now have to see what the longer term holds, however there’s nothing within the plans the place we need to be acquired by any person. I need to see how excessive we are able to fly.” Pilestedt additionally introduced right now 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 retaining 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 this planet, particularly with regards to the hyper-competitive panorama of on-line co-op video games. “Once we have been rising up, we actually needed to work at Blizzard, it was one of many bucket checklist locations to work at,” Jorjani stated. “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 have been so overloaded that Pilestedt advised folks to cease shopping for the sport, an uncommon transfer for any CEO, however he stated 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 staff a goal for the sport’s extra poisonous gamers.
“The massive 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 inside the neighborhood,” Pilestedt advised Gamesindustry.biz. He continued:
Once you hit this huge, 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. Virtually all video games have a little bit of toxicity in the neighborhood, however with these huge 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 constructive 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 stated the staff’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 probably keep 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 keep the standard normal we wish and also you deserve,” neighborhood supervisor Twinbeard not too long ago wrote on the sport’s Discord.
It appears like no less than 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.
