Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilestedt recently commented on a reddit thread on the nature of the discourse surrounding Helldivers 2. Reddit user /u/thegentlemanceo argued that the community was “riding a fine line between constructive input and whiny entitlement” prompting Pilestedt to weigh in.
Some members of the community feel Arrowhead should prioritize fixing the game above all else, while others want to see new content, but according to Pilestedt, the studio needs to balance delivering both, stating:
“It’s easy to say ‘just fix, don’t add,’ but the reality of the competitiveness in this industry is that we have to do both to stay relevant.”
There’s a good deal of truth to those words. Pocketpair took the opposite approach after the meteoric rise of Palworld, laying out a roadmap that prioritized fixing the game’s major pain points above all else, which earned a lot of good will from the community. But Palworld has since dropped from its eye watering two million concurrent user record in January to highs in the 70K range over the past week.
Meanwhile, Helldivers 2 has been holding steady at around 200K concurrent users (down from its 458K peak) for some time now. Threading the needle between feeding the beast and fixing issues appears to be the way to go.
