A little over a year ago, Helldivers 2 felt inescapable. The live-service third-person shooter was everywhere, its memes were plentiful, and its player count was almost unheard of.
Flash forward to today, and things could not be any different. It seems like Helldivers 2 is less and less of a talker, and its player count has gone from an all-time peak of nearly 500,000 on Steam to just 30,636 over the last 24 hours, with the Arrowhead Studios’ title routinely dipping into the low 10,000s.
Now in a new Q&A, Helldivers 2’s team recognizes the mistakes it’s made and the price it’s now paying. It’s equally informative and also quite heartbreaking to say the least.
Arrowhead Had A Really Good Thing Going With Helldivers 2
As first spotted by GamesRadar, in a new Q&A published on YouTube titled “A Democratic Conversation with Mikael Eriksson Part 2,” Eriksson, who is Helldivers 2’s Game Director, flat-out recognized that optimization was not something the team prioritized, and now it’s being punished for it.
“The calls are coming from inside of the house,” Eriksson said. “Now we’re paying the price a little bit for this. So that is why we’re so focused right now on addressing this and rethinking a little bit about how we’re developing the game.”
The game’s most recent update, Patch 4.1.0, does address a number of issues, but as Eriksson noted, the team simply kept ignoring things for far too long, much to its detriment.
“We keep getting away with things that we really shouldn’t be getting away with,” Eriksson said. “And since we do keep getting away with it, we sort of just get used to it, and then we just keep developing the game as we normally do.”
The ultimate issue? According to Eriksson, by focusing on “new” things and “not enough on fixing the issues that we have,” the team finds itself in a rather difficult predicament. It’s hard to say whether Helldivers 2 would’ve taken off like it did without such support, and equally hard to determine if it would be in a better spot with faster optimization. It’s a conundrum that likely no game dev is envious of, but one that Arrowhead must quickly sort out.
- Released
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February 8, 2024
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Developer(s)
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Arrowhead Game Studios, Nixxes
- Publisher(s)
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Sony Interactive Entertainment, PlayStation Publishing
