No one expected the success of Helldivers 2.
The cooperative third-person shooter, published by PlayStation and developed by Arrowhead Games, was released in February and sold 12 million copies in three months. It is now the fastest selling PlayStation game – bigger than God of War, Spider-Man or Uncharted.
“Depending on who you are, you’re always going to point to different things [as to why it was successful],” says Arrowhead Chief Creative Officer Johan Pilestedt. “If you’re a business executive at a major publisher, you’d say the live service element is what keeps players coming back and the lower price. If you are a game designer, you will point out the systemic nature of the game. If you’re an artist, you’ll talk about the cycle of day and night, devastating environments, and beautiful worlds. It is the balance between all these elements.
“But speaking personally, I’d say the fact that we’re doing something with Helldivers is beyond the inflection point of where the games industry is going. What you see through these cycles in the industry is people taking inspiration from each other, and building on that, but it means that people build towards a single point, because you lose something through each iteration.
“With Helldivers, we’ve made a firm decision that we’re not going to go with the status quo. We’re going to push ourselves outside of that by making a lot of mechanics that aren’t generally seen in games. We always have friendly fire. I think people are surprised that we make games this way. They’re surprised it’s a responsibility not to blow up your friends.”
For Pilestedt personally, the success of Helldivers 2 was the realization of a dream he’s had since he was eight years old.
“I asked my dad ‘how do I start a video game company?’ And he said ‘get really good grades’, of course that was a lie,” he laughs.
The problem with realizing a dream (albeit a good problem) is working out what to do next.
“We pride ourselves on being an independent studio.” Johan Pilestedt, Arrowhead
“Helldivers 2 put me in a weird mindset,” he admits. “Because the problem with achieving such wild success, achieving your calling, is that you have to choose your next chapter. It doesn’t come from within like knowing what you want to do from the age of eight.”
This led Pilestedt to Shams Jorjani. Jorjani’s history with Arrowhead goes back to the very beginning. He was one of the organizers of the Swedish Game Awards, which won the Arrowhead with his game Magicka. Jorjani then joined Paradox Interactive, who had just signed the game, and he was assigned to the project. He helped launch that, and then Arrowhead’s second (and much less successful) game, The Showdown Effect.
“Then we had intense negotiations over Magick 2, which was finally settled in an Icelandic hotel room overnight,” Jorjani said. We were both drunk then and decided ‘no, we’re not going to do that project’.
But the two stayed in touch. And then in 2021, Jorjani left Paradox.
“I had a bit of ‘big company PTSD,’” he continues. “Paradox was 800 people, ten studios in six countries and a public company. After I left Paradox, I came to Johan and said ‘let’s do something together. We might kill each other, but we’ll have fun’. And Johan, as much as wise as he was, he told me to ‘fuck off’, because he had a game to send.”
That game was Helldivers 2. Eventually, however, Jorjani started advising Arrowhead, and then, when Helldivers 2 came out, Pilestedt asked him to become CEO.
The move means Jorjani will take over the day-to-day running of the business, allowing Pilestedt to focus on game creation.
“We were both at a stage where we were wondering what was next in our careers,” says Jorjani. “And we realized that we probably couldn’t quite get to those places if we didn’t have someone else to help us get there.”
Pilestedt adds, “When it comes to the overall direction of the organization, I’m still the president. So myself and Shams will still have strategic conversations about how we take Arrowhead into the future.”
Jorjani again: “My job is to make it possible for him and other creative people to be able to do more games. And it’s also important for the players. I play Helldivers and I hear my friends asking me… ‘are we going to get more stuff?’ And I say ‘yes, soon, because Johan will have more time for that’ ‘We want more enemies!’ I’ll tell Johan.”
Part of Jorjani’s role will be helping Arrowhead manage the impact of the success of Helldivers 2. The company was already a successful developer. The first Helldivers game sold four million copies, while Magicka was also a real hit. “They were all massive games in their respective genres,” notes Pilestedt.
But Helldivers 2 is on another level. And from the very beginning, the team had to contend with a series of problems, starting with “servers burning to death.”
“We tried to fan it … but you shouldn’t fan the flames,” says Pilestedt. “I told people not to buy the game until we could manage the servers… but it actually increased the number of users, unfortunately.”
Then there was the issue of adding the need to log into the PlayStation Network to play the game, which resulted in fan backlash and Helldivers 2 becoming unavailable in certain markets. Sony eventually dropped the request.
Additionally, there are other general issues with the live service, such as concerns about game balancing.
“This is something the organization has seen before,” Pilestedt tells us. “We had a terrible Magicka launch, which was really problematic, and me and Shams realized that we had to communicate with the community, talk to them in an honest way and tell them what was going on as much as we could. And then take immediate action to fix the problem. We’ve seen it before and been through it, although this time the stakes are higher.”
“The big difference is the amount of threats and rude behavior that people in the studio get from some really shitty individuals within the community”Johan Pilestedt, Arrowhead
He adds: “When we look at the challenge ahead, we feel like Frodo and Sam heading towards Mordor. An unconscious ‘we’ll take it one step at a time and then solve the problems as they come’ approach. Arrowhead’s strength is the camaraderie we share between the team and the desire to help each other. We know that we are there for each other and that we will be able to accept any challenge, almost, and come out stronger on the other side.”
Pilestedt says the experience so far has been “extremely pleasant and a little scary.” Helldivers was inspired by Dragons & Demons (the Swedish answer to Dungeons & Dragons), and the team enjoyed playing the role of game master with their community.
“Our game design is about transferring our love of pen-and-paper RPGs into games that don’t necessarily have dice rolls and stats. A lot of those pen-and-paper sessions are based on a serious premise, which turns into a farce. We’re looking at it through the way the community interacts with Helldivers 2, but also how we interact with them.”
But with 12 million fans, there were some challenges with the community that the team hadn’t experienced much before.
“The big difference now, which is horrible, is the amount of threats and rude behavior that people in the studio get from some really crappy individuals within the community,” says Pilestedt. “It’s something new that we have to deal with.”
Pilestedt says frustration is part of the essence of Helldivers: “If you don’t have those lows, you can’t get those highs.” And while that’s something die-hard gamers understand, when you reach 12 million people, it’s not something everyone will appreciate.
“Arrowhead’s philosophy has always been ‘a game for everyone is a game for no one,'” explains Jorjani. “That’s the company tagline. That’s how our games are designed. You can feel it in every feature. I think that’s one of the big reasons Helldivers 2 is so successful. It feels fresh because it does a lot of unpopular things.
“When you get this big, much bigger than anyone thought—Sony, us, everybody—what happens is the game finds an audience outside of that niche fan base. So you get this amplification of different voices. Almost all games have a little bit of toxicity in them. community, but with these big numbers you have so many, so we need to work with the community to get them to self-moderate, give people the tools to talk to each other in a positive way, so we can continue to talk openly with players as more voices are added to makes the choir more complex.”
“We will see growth, but growth as a means to achieve goals, not as an end in itself”
Shams Jorjani, Arrowhead
He continues: “Valve is reportedly launching a new PVP game and I’m sure they’ve put hundreds if not thousands of hours into how to deal with toxic players, as they have that experience from DOTA and Counter-Strike. It’s rooted in their product development and they can only elevate those systems. All those investments and processes that we’re painfully learning now will carry over to the next thing, whatever that is.”
It’s something that’s also a bit of a learning curve for PlayStation. Sony is not the most experienced publisher when it comes to live service products, although it is starting to invest in this area through new games and acquisitions of companies like Bungie.
“It’s been a great partnership and we’re learning together, and they recognize that Arrowhead can be a leader in learning how [live service] better in the future,” says Jorjani. “It’s great to have someone with you as you figure this out.”
Pilestedt adds, “We’re always chasing our tail in one way or another. We have to lay the rails while the train is moving forward. There are optimizations and workflow improvements we can make. We go in and adjust the organization to have teamwork to a reasonable degree, because right now , to some extent, we’re burning the candle at both ends and we want to get to the point where we’re producing as many candles as we’re burning.”
Today the focus is on Helldivers 2 and getting that balance right. But the studio feels confident, has a strong financial position, strengthened its leadership team and is now looking ahead to what comes next.
“We feel like we have so much more to give and so many more games we want to make,” says Pilestedt. “The level of ambition and the appetites of the organization have increased significantly. Now we have a taste for blood and we want more.”
But this does not necessarily mean exponential growth in the number of employees, acquisitions or going public. For Pilestedt and Jorjani, it’s all about what it takes to make the games they want to make.
“We pride ourselves on being an independent studio,” says Pilestedt. “We have to see what the future holds, but there’s nothing in the plans where we want to be bought. I want to see how high we can fly. And by bringing in Shams, we have good potential to realize that future of becoming the next From Software or Blizzard.”
Jorjani adds, “The studio’s goal is to make really great co-op games. We really want to make Arrowhead a flagship studio, where people who want to make games like this say to themselves, ‘I want to work at Arrowhead.'” When we were growing up, we really wanted to work at Blizzard , it was one of the best places to work.
“But that doesn’t mean we have to be a 500-person company. In fact, a 500-person company is pretty painful in a lot of ways. We’ll see growth, but growth as a means to an end, not like we don’t have plans to go public. Moderate growth it allows us to make an amazing game.
Pilestedt concludes, “We’re not in business for monetary gain. Modesty and the desire to simply make great games is the only reason we exist.”