While Arrowhead Game Studios has been keeping itself quite busy with the post-launch support for co-op shooter Helldivers 2, studio CEO Shams Jorjani has revealed that, if it were to start work on a new game, the pre-production crew would be much smaller than what it was for Helldivers 2. As caught by GamesRadar, Jorjani spoke about this on the official Helldivers 2 Discord server while answering a question about the studio’s future.
While he didn’t talk about whether or not Arrowhead had made enough money from Helldivers 2 to fund its next game by itself, saying instead that “that’s quite the big question,” he did go into the hypothetical of what making this next game would involve.
“One is that we start pre-production with a small team,” he said about one of the many lessons that the studio learned from the development of Helldivers 2. “HD2 started with a big team and that was baaaaad.”
Some of the details surrounding the early development of Helldivers 2 were revealed back in March during a talk by CCO Johan Pilestedt during Game Developer’s Conference 2025. In his talk, Pilestedt spoke about how the co-op shooter’s development was a bit of a mess, and while the studio was aiming to wrap up development in four years, things ended up taking almost twice as long.
“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 also noted that development on the game was not helped by the fact that Arrowhead had decided to not spend too much time in pre-production.
“We already knew where the game was going to go and headed straight into production—it was a really, really, really bad idea,” Pilestedt continued. “Always do your homework before you start spending millions and millions and millions of dollars in making a game.”
As for what was originally planned for Helldivers 2, head of product testing Patrik Lasota had earlier revealed that the title was originally designed around having five players in the team, rather than its current incarnation where a team can only have four players.
“Helldivers 2 was originally designed for five people, actually,” said Lasota. “That was Johann’s call because he had thoughts around ‘when you’re four people playing and a fifth joins you, suddenly you’re a three-stack and a two-stack, and it creates this imbalance. But if it’s five people and someone joins then you’re two three-stacks, and with three groups instead one becoming a pair.’”
However, the concept “just didn’t work”, and Lasota said that the fifth player in a squad ends up just “standing around, not really participating in the action.”
As for the future of Helldivers 2, Jorjani had mentioned that a sequel to the game “is hopefully many years away”.
In the meantime, Helldivers 2 is available on PC and PS5. The game is also coming to Xbox Series X/S on August 26. Jorjani has said that praise for the decision to bring the title to Xbox should go to PlayStation. Check out our review of the original release for more details.
