At the Dice Summit, Arrowhead Game Studios won four awards for its Helldivers 2 game. The title is a great multiplayer co-op game where four soldiers land on an alien or robot planet and try to take out as many enemies before being extracted.
It was so popular when it debuted on February 8, 2024, that Stockholm, Sweden-based Arrowhead had trouble keeping the game available for the tons of players flooding in. During that time, it was tough to get an interview with a few of Arrowhead Game Studios’ leaders. I was always curious how the team pulled together and stabilized the game amid the huge popularity. The game eventually sold more than 12 million copies.
But as the team won four awards at Dice, they came by the green room where I was doing short interviews with the winners. And so I was able to string together these questions as an interview with the winners.
They included Johan Pilestedt, chief creative officer at Arrowhead Games, and game music composer Wilbert Roget II. The subjects are a bit random but I enjoyed my chat with them. You can look forward to a Helldivers movie coming from Sony.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: I just interviewed some guys who are narrative experts, and they say that game developers are awesome at iterating on gameplay every day. But maybe in the last three months, they think about how they might design the intellectual property around the game. How do you think of IP design?
Johan Pilestedt: Helldivers One already had so much of the foundation of what the Helldivers IP is. And really what it comes from is that we wanted to talk about totalitarian regimes. How could Germans fall for the Nazi regime back in, back in the 1930s, and really in Helldivers, you can see it’s so easy to get swept away with it. So you have to, as humans living in a society, be aware of those tendencies of getting into that us versus them mentality. Yeah, you have to challenge those kind of notions. So I think for the Heller’s IP, He just tries to do two things, is that, of course, having a great, great time playing the game, but at the same time, it should, the players themselves should reflect on like, right this, even though this is fantasy, this might actually happen for real, and has happened for real several times
GamesBeat: Are you, as some of us in the United States are, concerned that democracy is in danger.
Pilestedt: I think democracy is always in danger. Like if we see anything from any era in history, there is a tendency always for people in power to grasp for more power and take control. I think it’s a natural state of the world that power sort of breeds arrogance, egoism and lust for more power. And people that have power want to stay in power, which is dangerous thing. And we the people, we the many, have the chance to do something about it. But if we don’t, there will always be somebody that takes control. Look at the Soviet Union. You can look at Rome when it turned from a republic to an empire. I’m not going to pass judgment on what’s going on right now because it’s so hard to see when you’re in it, and only history is the true, true judge.
GamesBeat: What was that book you were showing around as you won the music award?
Wilbert Roget II: I’m slightly more traditional than other composers. This is my score book. It’s my music sketches, like notation sketches.
GamesBeat: Is it technologically impossible to keep a game up and running when you have a popular online game?
Pilestedt: I think it’s fundamentally impossible to have a smash hit and not have your service crash. So the problem is you hope for the best and plan for the worst. But the problem is, if you’re gratuitously over scoped. it’s going to make for a not great launch. It’s more catastrophic because you have to pay for server costs up front. So you always have to just play it as safe as possible. But then when a smash hit happens, it’s like impossible to take all of that into consideration. The launch of Helldivers 2 — we have gotten better at it. And now we have a community. We can engage it. But I remember the launch day of Diablo 3, sitting there and we can’t get into the game. And it’s like, if Blizzard can’t do it ….
GamesBeat: If they can’t do Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, with Azure, then it’s not technologically possible?
Pilestedt: It’s not technologically possible. It’s business impossible.
GamesBeat: Perhaps it’s a good problem to have. Then the more interesting question is how do you start recovery and get the game back online?
Pilestedt: I think it’s just a lot of hard work. I remember sitting and being on Discord, talking to the head of backend at 4 a.m. in the morning, when people are playing. And we both have this same beautiful moment. We both had the same ambition, like we were thinking if we could just get five more gamers in, 10 gamers, 20 maybe 1,000 gamers in — that will be a great night for those 1,000 gamers sitting there trying to log in.
So we’re pushing it. And eventually we broke the entire game, and nobody could play. But I think it embodies the Arrowhead philosophy. Can we can just make other people’s days or lives better — to have a happy day. It’s worth it. Thinking like those 1,000 people. It might be somebody had really shit a day, and they just want to try to play Helldivers. And they can’t get in. It’s like you have to push it. It’s so easy to look at user numbers and say, ‘Well, we had 800,000 concurrent players, and that’s a big number.’ But it’s a person behind every single one of those numbers. A person with their own story, their own reason for playing, their own friends and so forth. It’s important to not just see numbers and see people.
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