During a recent talk at Game Developer’s Conference 2025, Arrowhead Game Studios CCO and Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt told developers that more risks need to be taken in game design. As caught by PCGamer, Pilestedt spoke about several studios competing with each other to capture the same niche, and that developers having a better chance in the gaming market if they start taking more risks.
Pilestedt also spoke about the constant cycle of “death and rebirth,” in the games industry. Often times, despite major companies doing quite well, their development teams tend to suddenly suffer massive layoffs. Pilestedt ascribed this to the idea of development studios not diversifying enough in the kinds of games they make.
“The games industry is caught in a vicious cycle of death and rebirth,” Pilestedt said. “Every so often we lay off thousands of people suddenly, and no one understands why, and I think it’s just because we converge.”
“We will always go through that cycle 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 sustain our business. It’s ridiculous. If everybody stopped making battle royales and made [different kinds of] games, we wouldn’t be in this position.”
He also said that studios that don’t dare to take risks will have trouble seeing the kind of success that Arrowhead Game Studios saw with the release of Helldivers and its sequel. He referred to the “safe bets” that studios sometimes make in chasing trends like battle royale games or extraction shooters “a death sentence”.
“One thing I can guarantee is that those safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make them,” he said. “We are in the business of taking risks, and if we don’t take risks we’re never going to be able to achieve success. Few people believed that Helldivers would amount to anything, and yet here we are.”
During GDC 2025, Pilestedt also spoke about the difficulties of developing Helldivers 2 since the studio decided to forego any pre-production work for the title. This meant that there was little planning done for how development of the game would go, ultimately leading to the originally-projected development period of 4 years into what ultimately became almost 8 years.
“We were throwing around some ideas, and then we got a little cautious because we’ve been burned before by making games that are a little bit too complicated for what we’re capable of, and then having to crunch. It takes so much energy,” Pilestedt said. “So we said, ‘This will be easy. We can probably do it in four years.’”
He went on to advice developers that they shouldn’t skip steps like pre-productions, and that they should “do your homework” before they start spending money on the full production of a game.
“We already knew where the game was going to go and headed straight into production—it was a really, really, really bad idea,” Pilestedt said. “Always do your homework before you start spending millions and millions and millions of dollars in making a game.”
Helldivers 2 is available on PC and PS5. Check out our review.
