Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has commented on the current state of the video game industry, saying it’s “caught in a vicious circle of death and rebirth” that has contributed to the raft of mass layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations in recent times.
“Every so often we lay off thousands of people suddenly, and then nobody understands why, and I think it’s just because we converge,” he said at GDC 2025 this week, as reported by Eurogamer. “We will always go through the cycles of death and rebirth, but now that cycle is unnecessarily brutal because we don’t diversify enough. We need to make more types of games because people are playing more than ever and still we are unable to stay in business. It’s ridiculous.”
Pilestedt went on to say that it might have been possible to avoid the unfortunate current reality of things “if everybody stopped making battle royale” games and instead made other types of titles.
“A lot of publishers–I’m sorry, my dear publisher friends–try to play it safe by taking safe bets,” Pilestedt said. “But one thing that I can guarantee is that those safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make it. We are in the business of taking risks, and if you don’t take risks, we’re never gonna be able to achieve success. Few people believed that Helldivers would amount to anything, and yet here we are.”
Also during the talk, Pilestedt said the video game industry is facing a “convergence problem.” With games like Minecraft doing well, as well as battle royale and live-service titles, developers are chasing these trends and trying to “compete for the same niche,” he said.
“And what happens? Lots of unsatisfied players are saying, ‘Well, what about my needs? I want to play some games and I have lots of money to spare.’ Unfortunately everybody was chasing after the battle royales,” he said.
Helldivers 2 was a gigantic success for developer Arrowhead and publisher Sony, finishing 2024 as the No. 3 best-selling game of the year.
In addition to ongoing support for the game, a Helldivers movie is in development, and Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani would like to see some A-list celebrities get violently killed off on-screen.