Throughout a current discuss at Sport Developer’s Convention 2025, Arrowhead Sport Studios CCO and Helldivers 2 artistic director Johan Pilestedt informed builders that extra dangers should be taken in sport design. As caught by PCGamer, Pilestedt spoke about a number of studios competing with one another to seize the identical area of interest, and that builders having a greater probability within the gaming market if they begin taking extra dangers.
Pilestedt additionally spoke concerning the fixed cycle of “demise and rebirth,” within the video games business. Usually occasions, regardless of main firms doing fairly effectively, their growth groups are likely to out of the blue endure large layoffs. Pilestedt ascribed this to the thought of growth studios not diversifying sufficient within the sorts of video games they make.
“The video games business is caught in a vicious cycle of demise and rebirth,” Pilestedt mentioned. “Once in a while we lay off hundreds of individuals out of the blue, and nobody understands why, and I feel it’s simply because we converge.”
“We’ll at all times undergo that cycle of demise and rebirth, however now that cycle is unnecessarily brutal as a result of we don’t diversify sufficient. We have to make extra forms of video games, as a result of individuals are enjoying greater than ever, and nonetheless, we’re unable to maintain our enterprise. It’s ridiculous. If all people stopped making battle royales and made [different kinds of] video games, we wouldn’t be on this place.”
He additionally mentioned that studios that don’t dare to take dangers can have hassle seeing the sort of success that Arrowhead Sport Studios noticed with the discharge of Helldivers and its sequel. He referred to the “secure bets” that studios generally make in chasing tendencies like battle royale video games or extraction shooters “a demise sentence”.
“One factor I can assure is that these secure bets are a demise sentence for the studios that attempt to make them,” he mentioned. “We’re within the enterprise of taking dangers, and if we don’t take dangers we’re by no means going to have the ability to obtain success. Few folks believed that Helldivers would quantity to something, and but right here we’re.”
Throughout GDC 2025, Pilestedt additionally spoke concerning the difficulties of growing Helldivers 2 because the studio determined to forego any pre-production work for the title. This meant that there was little planning accomplished for the way growth of the sport would go, finally resulting in the originally-projected growth interval of 4 years into what finally turned nearly 8 years.
“We had been throwing round some concepts, after which we obtained a bit of cautious as a result of we’ve been burned earlier than by making video games which are a bit of bit too sophisticated for what we’re able to, after which having to crunch. It takes a lot power,” Pilestedt mentioned. “So we mentioned, ‘This shall be simple. We will most likely do it in 4 years.’”
He went on to recommendation builders that they shouldn’t skip steps like pre-productions, and that they need to “do your homework” earlier than they begin spending cash on the total manufacturing of a sport.
“We already knew the place the sport was going to go and headed straight into manufacturing—it was a very, actually, actually unhealthy thought,” Pilestedt mentioned. “All the time do your homework earlier than you begin spending hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in making a sport.”
Helldivers 2 is offered on PC and PS5. Take a look at our evaluation.
