Throughout a current speak at Sport Developer’s Convention 2025, Arrowhead Sport Studios CCO and Helldivers 2 inventive director Johan Pilestedt instructed builders that extra dangers should be taken in recreation 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. Typically instances, regardless of main corporations doing fairly properly, their improvement groups are inclined to out of the blue endure large layoffs. Pilestedt ascribed this to the thought of improvement 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. “From time to time we lay off 1000’s of individuals out of the blue, and nobody understands why, and I believe 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 kinds 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 everyone 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 type of success that Arrowhead Sport Studios noticed with the discharge of Helldivers and its sequel. He referred to the “protected bets” that studios generally make in chasing traits like battle royale video games or extraction shooters “a demise sentence”.
“One factor I can assure is that these protected 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 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 completed for the way improvement of the sport would go, in the end resulting in the originally-projected improvement interval of 4 years into what in the end grew to become virtually 8 years.
“We have been throwing round some concepts, after which we obtained just a little cautious as a result of we’ve been burned earlier than by making video games which can be just a little 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 will probably be straightforward. We will 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 complete manufacturing of a recreation.
“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 thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of {dollars} in making a recreation.”
Helldivers 2 is offered on PC and PS5. Try our evaluation.
