Throughout a current discuss at Recreation Developer’s Convention 2025, Arrowhead Recreation Studios CCO and Helldivers 2 inventive director Johan Pilestedt instructed builders that extra dangers have to 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 likelihood within the gaming market if they begin taking extra dangers.
Pilestedt additionally spoke concerning the fixed cycle of “dying and rebirth,” within the video games trade. Usually occasions, regardless of main firms doing fairly nicely, their growth groups are likely to abruptly undergo large layoffs. Pilestedt ascribed this to the concept of growth studios not diversifying sufficient within the sorts of video games they make.
“The video games trade is caught in a vicious cycle of dying and rebirth,” Pilestedt mentioned. “Every now and then we lay off hundreds of individuals abruptly, and nobody understands why, and I feel it’s simply because we converge.”
“We’ll all the time undergo that cycle of dying and rebirth, however now that cycle is unnecessarily brutal as a result of we don’t diversify sufficient. We have to make extra varieties of video games, as a result of individuals are taking part in 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 could have bother seeing the form of success that Arrowhead Recreation Studios noticed with the discharge of Helldivers and its sequel. He referred to the “secure bets” that studios generally make in chasing traits like battle royale video games or extraction shooters “a dying sentence”.
“One factor I can assure is that these secure bets are a dying 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 individuals believed that Helldivers would quantity to something, and but right here we’re.”
Throughout GDC 2025, Pilestedt additionally spoke concerning the difficulties of creating Helldivers 2 because the studio determined to forego any pre-production work for the title. This meant that there was little planning executed for a way growth of the sport would go, in the end resulting in the originally-projected growth interval of 4 years into what in the end turned virtually 8 years.
“We have been throwing round some concepts, after which we received 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 vitality,” Pilestedt mentioned. “So we mentioned, ‘This can be straightforward. We are able to in all probability 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 extremely, actually, actually dangerous 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 out there on PC and PS5. Take a look at our evaluate.
