Head of a Hit on Steam and PS5 Explains the Mistake Studios Make That Causes Their Failure

The multiplayer shooter Helldivers 2 was the big surprise hit of 2024 on Steam and PS5. The game came out of nowhere and thrilled hundreds of thousands of players, especially in the first months. The creative director of the game is making a statement to the gaming industry to take more risks. Studios that play it safe and follow the current trend will die.

How successful was Helldivers 2: Helldivers 2 was one of the big success stories in the gaming year 2024:

• On Steam, the game peaked at 458,000 people.
• This initial momentum was maintained by Helldivers 2 for five months. Only in July 2024 did the initial momentum fade. Since then, Helldivers has repeatedly recovered from slumps. Currently, the game has an average of about 40,000 players on Steam.
• Behind the success is also the ironic tone that the game strikes. The hooray-patriotism is strongly reminiscent of Starship Troopers.

Helldivers head criticizes studios chasing trends

What is the thinking error that gaming studios fall into? The idea that many studios have seems to be: If I develop a game in the genre that is currently popular, then I’m on the safe side – but exactly that is seen as a problem by Pilestedt.

This is what the head says now: The man behind the game Helldivers 2, Johan Pilestedt, recently said at the Game Developer Conference that the flood of new live service games, especially battle royales, is only a symptom of a problem in the gaming industry:

• Many gaming studios try to occupy the same niche as soon as it becomes apparent that it is trending.
• This leads to countless players wanting to play something different, but then finding nothing because the same type of games keep appearing – in this case, only battle royale.
• The oversupply of battle royale games, all competing with each other, leads to studios going bankrupt and having to close their games that rely on the supposed trend.

The gaming industry is caught in a vicious cycle of death and rebirth. From time to time, we suddenly lay off thousands of people, and no one understands why […]

We will always go through this cycle of death and rebirth, but now this cycle is unnecessarily brutal because we do not diversify enough. We need to develop more types of games because people are playing more than ever, and yet we are unable to sustain our business. That is ridiculous. If everyone stopped making battle royales and made [different types of] games, we wouldn’t be in this situation.

Death sentence for studios

He sees this as a problem: According to Pilestedt, studios strive for safety and therefore decide to develop the game according to the current trend. But that is exactly the wrong path:

One thing I can guarantee: These safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make them. In our business, it’s about taking risks, and if we don’t take risks, we will never be able to succeed. Very few people believed that Helldivers would become something substantial, and yet here we are.

Is he right? Yes, but …

The problem is that some studios that play it safe and copy the currently trending game but improve it are incredibly successful:

• Blizzard has repeatedly managed to identify, copy, and polish trends, becoming a legendary studio in the process. Games like WoW (Everquest), Hearthstone (Magic: The Gathering), or Overwatch (Team Fortress) all have clear role models.
• Bluehole was an unknown studio until it decided to pick up an Arma 3 mod and develop it professionally: This became PUBG.
• Epic Games freed itself from total irrelevance by copying PUBG and creating a billion-dollar game with Fortnite.
• The currently trending Marvel Rivals builds heavily on Overwatch.

However, this small number of successes is indeed countered by a multitude of flops, where developers now surely regret having tried to make a game in line with the current trend. Thus, practically all MOBAs after LoL and DOTA 2 failed, even though the role models are extremely successful.

What Pilestedt addresses with battle royale is something we previously experienced with hero shooters that appeared in droves and then disappeared. And yet another game generation earlier, it hit MMORPGs, where before 2014, two or three would appear each year trying to be like WoW but often not surviving long: The 5 biggest “WoW-killers” that were killed by WoW