Helldivers 2 has by far been the year’s most fascinating success story so far, having launched after a prolonged development cycle to far wider and more universal success than acclaim than even Sony and developer Arrowhead Game Studios could have predicted. As of early May, the game had sold over 12 million units, becoming the fastest-selling PlayStation-published game of all time. And during a recent talk at the Nordic Game conference, Arrowhead Game Studios founder and Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt offered more insight into the game’s success and its development.
During his talk, Pilestedt revealed that at its peak, Helldivers 2 hit a peak of over 750,000 concurrent players across both PS5 and PC. We know that the co-op shooter’s peak concurrent users count on Steam is over 458,000 players, so assuming that that’s when the game hit its overall peak across all platforms as well, that would mean it has seen a peak of at least 300,000 concurrent players on PS5 to date.
During his talk, Pilestedt also reiterated that Helldivers 2 took nearly 8 years to develop. Specifically, as per Pilestedt, it took seven years, eleven months, and 26 days, which, it turns out, was more than twice what Arrowhead had originally expected. To be precise, at the outset of the game’s development in 2016, Arrowhead had though that it would take three years to make.
As you would expect, the longer development cycle also wen hand-in-hand with a larger budget, with Sony more than doubling Helldivers 2’s budget during production, as well as expansions for developer Arrowhead Game Studios, which went from over 30 people to a hundred over the course of development.
Check out PIlestedt’s full talk below for more details.
Recently, it was announced that Pilestedt had stepped down as CEO of Arrowhead, instead becoming the studio’s chief creative officer and recruiting Shams Jorjani as the new CEO. Interestingly, Pilestedt and Jorjani have both spoken about wanting to ensure that Arrowhead doesn’t grow too much too quickly.
