As 2024 began, Helldivers 2 was barely visible on most people’s game release radars. It quickly became the biggest hit of the year, becoming both a top seller and a cultural phenomenon. And in an era of hyper-consolidation, it made Arrowhead Studios an obvious acquisition target for game publisher Sony. Months later, co-founder Johan Pilestedt claims the Sweden-based team of over 100 employees has no plans to become another cog in the first-party PlayStation machine.
“We are proud to be an independent studio,” he said Gamesindustry.biz today in a new interview. “We will have to wait and see what the future holds, but there are no plans for anyone to take over. I want to see how high we can fly.” Pilestedt also announced today that the studio has hired former Paradox Interactive executive Shams Jorjani as its new CEO, as he moves into the role of chief creative officer to strengthen its position to concentrate on Helldivers 2 a top 10 live service hit.
The pair say Arrowhead now has the ambition to become a flagship studio that can compete with the best in the world, especially in the highly competitive environment of online co-op gaming. “Growing up we really wanted to work at Blizzard, it was on our bucket list,” Jorjani said. “I think Arrowhead has the potential to do that.”
But Helldivers 2The overnight success of has also made it a flashpoint for controversy and assholery. When the game launched, the servers were so overloaded that Pilestedt told people to stop buying the game, an unusual move for any CEO, but he said this only “fueled the fire.” This will further increase the number of players in the game. More recently the PSN login fiasco led to a Steam review bombing campaign that also some Arrowhead employees a target for the game’s more toxic players.
“The big difference, which is shocking, is the amount of threats and rude behavior that people in the studio get from really shitty people in the community,” Pilestedt says told Gamesindustry.biz. He continued:
When you have such a big success, much bigger than anyone imagined – Sony, us, everyone – then the game finds an audience outside of that niche fan group. So you get this amplification of different voices. Almost all games have some level of toxicity in the community, but with these large numbers there are just so many, so we need to work with the community to get them to moderate themselves and give people the tools to communicate with each other to speak in positive fashion so that we can continue to speak openly with the players. The more voices are added to the choir, the more complex it becomes.
While Arrowhead executives said the team’s plans will only get more grandiose, there are no plans to reach the size of a full-fledged AAA studio any time soon. It will also slow down the pace Helldivers 2‘s updates to keep quality amidst the chaos. “We want to take a little more time this and potentially between future patches as we feel the cadence was probably a little too high to be able to maintain the standard of quality we want and you deserve,” community manager Twinbeard recently wrote on the game’s Discord.
At least it sounds like that at the moment, but new players will still be added War Bond Battle Passes almost monthly. Hopefully fewer patches will mean fewer nerfs to the new weapons players are falling in love with.
