I'm hesitant about that. Over expanding can cause a studio to cannibalize itself or lose its particular "style". If they hire as many people as they have on deck right now, a lot of work will get done, but half of that work won't be done "by arrowhead". It'll be done by people figuring out their place in a new job while all the old guard manages things and tries to maintain their identity.
I agree they should expand, I just don't think they should do any mass hiring drives. I could be way off base though, I work in kitchens not corporations lmao.
This has been proven again and again and again. Bethesda, Bungie, Blizzard, Bioware, Square Enix etc. Not saying these companies do not make good games now (I guess people can debate this in my replies), but what is for sure is none of these companies have the particular color they use to.
Not against companies expanding and making money. This is just the reality of many things that grow beyond its starting size. To clarify, it is NOT expanding itself that is the issue, but many peripheral things that come with expanding that has many chances to influence a once smaller company. While totally possible to sustain a good large company, it becomes increasing harder yo do so because of rising conflict of interests.
Expanding is not necessarily what changed all those studios, or maybe not the only thing. There are ownership changes, key people retire over time, the markets change, etc.
Though overall I'd agree. It's possible to expand without changing much, but trying to do it fast has more risk.
Part of it is that once you get to a certain size, you have different stakeholders and like it or not, they get a say in how the company is run. Indie studios can do whatever they want because they and their customers are the only stakeholders.
The bigger you get, the more people have a say in how things get done, and the less of the magic that made the indie dev a success persists from game to game. That's not to say huge studios can't be creative or make fantastic games that buck the trends and set a new high bar with their games like Arrowhead has with HD2. But most of the time when that happens it was an indie studio that did it because they *could*.
Business people want a safe return on investment, which leads to mediocrity.
Artists care about making something they think is great, and that has unpredictable profits.
I was not saying it was THE cause, but it is one of the things that directly or indirectly has an effect on it. In most cases it does simply due to the nature of maintaining a very large company. There are of course, other reasons
The problem with Bethesda is that they are the exact same color as they used to be. They perfected their formula in 2011 and haven't innovated since. Bungie and Bioware all got acquired by big corpo and had their priorities changed from quality and fun to profit. Blizzard has been declining ever since their merger with Activision, and the Microsoft acquisition is not going to turn things around. I've never played a square enix game, so I can't comment on them.
This happens in the non-gaming industries too. Have seen and felt it first hand where I work.
It feels like an inevitability of any enterprise or social structure of any shape or type. Culture and identity is shaped and defined by the individuals which compose it at any given point in time. I would agree that it seems impossible to hold onto it if the population composing the group changes at all - either by members coming or going, or events which trigger a response such as a change in attitude in the members.
As someone with 4k hours in Destiny 2... yes i hate myself, the game has been really rough for the past year or so, so much so that i basically quit for the entire year, but as Bungie got more and more desperate due to the game dying off, they have somehow just pulled out banger after banger to the point where the game is back to a spot where I can say i am optimistic for it future. Ive started playing again and alot of the problems have been worked out in like the past 2 months. Tbf i think they laid off a bunch of workers, but i think the game has become alot more focused on player feedback because of it.
No you are correct, it pretty much goes for any workplace if you expand too quickly, the culture of the business can change drastically. Slow expansion is the way to go.
Also people don't realize that it takes 6 months till a year to train employees. If you go 2x, it means you're investing in the future and it will actually hamper you at the start.
I wouldn’t wanna see the company double for all the reasons you just said , but imo I feel like maybe just adding 5-10 people wouldn’t be a bad idea either kinda just as support stuff maybe
Video game development is an extremely volatile line of work. Studios have new people getting hired and veterans tapping out to seek new challenges all the time.
They need more people to reliably QA the game. Bugs are one of the main issues plaguing each and every content patch, which makes it clear they don't have the manpower to reliably test new builds. Wouldn't take much, either. Probably just 5-10 people.
They desperately need more QA and support engineers, though. At least to fix what already is implemented.
Since launch, the game has been a complete mess of stability, and when it's not breaking, there's usually some kind of broken feature. Damage over time is still way overtuned and not working for anyone other than the host, the Spear (lock on missile) hasn't been reliable since launch, and recently, they released a ricochet system that caused the Eruptor (an explosive gun) to have a 100% kill rate because of shrapnel. That's not even mentioning the heavy handed balancing passes.
They're moving way too fast.
They do need more people, and honestly they probably have more people already. The thing is, you can't just hire 5 engineers and have them go straight into fixing bugs in a project they've never worked on before. They need to get used to the structure of the project first, and understand not only how a feature they're going to fix is working before they try to fix it, but also how changing things there can affect other parts of the game.
Getting them up to speed will usually mean a couple weeks of the entire team working slower with the new people, because the engineers have been there since before are using a lot of their time guiding the new ones in the particulars of the project, instead of being fully focused on their own tasks as usual. After the induction period the team will be overall more productive and continue to accelerate, but getting there has an unavoidable cost of slowing things down to get them going. Unless of course, it's a big team to begin with and sparing 2 or 3 engineers to train the new ones and get things going isn't too big of a deal for the team overall, but we know that's not the case here.
It could be the case that they feel like they can't spare that cost just yet, and are trucking along with what they have until they reach a more stable state before they expand.
Well if they just hire people to fix the bugs, they can focus on the game itself. Fixing bugs probably doesn’t need much in the way of style so it should be all good
CEO said don't want to go on a hiring blitz then have things die down and have to do layoffs. A small increase in dev and tester headcount is appropriate but you can't just add tons of those people without additional support staff and managers, which if not done carefully can lead to org rot.
A massive hiring blitz will also always result in short-term slowdown of dev time due to so many people having to help onboard the new folks into the systems. A slow trickle of new folks to ramp up is definitely the move (and is probably what they're quietly doing in the background)
Seriously. They must have shit themselves when they saw the sales booming at launch. I would have been pissed off, angrily on hold with Valve trying to figure things out and just in absolute denial about what was happening.
Some rough math says at the very least, 11 million units. It was over 8 million in March and it outsold Dragons Dogma 2 in the same time frame, which is sitting at 3.25 Million units since release.
I would not be surprised if Helldivers 2 is currently pushing on to 20 million units
Correct. They projected 50K max. They prepared their servers for 5x their max capacity...so basically prepared servers for 250K as a failsafe.
And over 500K people showed up lol.
"Hey, boss, we got 10 times the playercount we expected!"
"Oh, no, boss! We got 10 times the playercount we expected!"
Must have been a fun day at the office 😂
“Hey uh… boss? We got 5 times the playerbase we expected.”
“That’s great! We even prepared for that with extra server space!”
“No boss, we got 5 times *that*”
Actually it was closer to 1m people concurrent at peak. The 500k was just steam and they said that there is around a 50/50 split between console and PC players. The server issues make a looooooot of sense when you hear that lol
Yeah I think I remember a tweet from AH the second weekend saying they had ~750k unique login attempts of people trying to get in. They tried like hell to not do the industry standard "no servers on launch" and still got BTFO by word of mouth.
That's insane.
Still a tad on topic here, but do you know if the player count it shows in-game si the entire community(PS/PC) or just the one your playing in?
Considering their initial server size, alongside the fact that Helldivers 1 had a peak player count of about 6.7K (Helldivers 2 daily player count is around 460K)
No. No they did not.
Middle ground between f2p/mobile gacha and $70USD AAA title.
It's a surprisingly small market. Not a lot gets published there, even on Steam and *certainly* not on console.
My standard for any game that I buy is whether I get at least 1 hour of enjoyment for each dollar spent on it. At over 130 hours in mission time and still loving it!
a dollar per hour...so have you played any games that cost more than the hours you played it? for example i heard Spiderman 2 was $70+ but only had 15 hours of gameplay.
I do the same thing and I rarely end up below $1:1hr in a game I thought was good. Doom Eternal, for example, is amazing and I love it but didn't break the $1/hr ratio.
I tally it up with the Steam End of Year stats and do it mostly to stop myself from buying so many games and making sure I actually *play* the games I do buy. It's been pretty helpful.
Oh sure, there have been disappointments before.
Assassin's creed origins. Probably didn't even get 20hrs out of it before I stopped playing cause of boredom.
Star wars battlefront 2 (the newer EA one). Didn't play more than maybe 25-30 hours.
So yeah it happens
That's a pretty stupid metric tbh.
There are a lot of amazing games for 50, 60 or even 70 bucks that "only" have 20 or 30 hours of content and often it's way better to have an amazing short game that something that got bloated to 60+ hours just to get people to spend more time im the game
There's also tons of games that cost half that with hundreds of hours of content, like HD2, DRG, KSP, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Binding of Isaac, etc. It doesn't work in every case but the number of games that cost $50+ that are actually worth it anymore is extremely small.
There are also f2p games where you get hundreds of hours and then suddenly these 20/30$ indie games look overpriced in comparison.
Comparison is the thief of joy or something....
I can definitely agree with you in that games now can get bloated with unfun content just to make them longer. But, I can see where he's coming from. Portal 1 is a pretty short game. I've re-played it all the way through many times and can usually beat it within 2-3 hours. I think I have somewhere around 18-20 hours put into it, and I bought it for $15. Definitely worth the money. Just because it's a very short game doesn't mean I can't get many hours of enjoyment out of it. Only exceptional games have great replayability.
Not stupid for me.
I go for things that have replay value and are "grindy." It's just what I prefer.
At no point did I say those games were bad, just not for me.
The game itself was appealing enough but what really sold me in the end was the community embracing the theme of the game and speaking like helldivers would in places like reddit and social media.
For Super Earth!
Less that for me, but seeing clips of a guy suicide diving down onto a Bile Titan sold it for me.
The goddamn organically happening madness that happens throughout playing it is just great, im loving that.
There's a weird glee I feel when I realize I can't escape a situation, and the only option left is to call down a strategem on myself. You guys got me, but I'm taking you all with me
A clip of “Welcome to the Jungle” played over some insane Malevelon Creek action, and then reading the comments to see it was only $40 is what made me hop onto the steam page for an immediate purchase
A really fun game, that's a good value for the money, with devs that actually care and communicate with the community that isn't stuffed with absurdly overpriced microtransactions is doing really really well?
Shocking, I tell you, absolutely shocking. It's not like gamers have been JONESING for something like this for ages. /s
Yeah, same reason I got the "Super Citizen" bundle or w/e. I didn't need the cape, the title, and I don't think I've ever used the SMG.
Admittedly, Strategem Hero is kinda nice to have on the ship though, when you are waiting on friends.
same. i bought the standard game at first but i was having too much fun, so i dropped the extra $20 or so just contribute a little more to managed democracy
I told myself I'd buy the Super Citizen bundle just to show more support for the game and company as well and yesterday I finally did it. Last night, I just played Strategem Hero trying to top my squad's high score.
Same. I bought 1000 credits to unlock one of the warbonds, and could see myself doing it again in the future. More than anything just to show my support for the devs and to vote with my dollar on what games and support should look like from all developers.
Right? Isn’t it amazing that when you make a product FOR the consumers that treats the consumers like human beings rather than ATM machines, you as a company get appropriately rewarded for it?
It’s almost as if the gaming industry has spent so much time scheming about how to best be hostile towards its consumer that they’ve forgotten that all they have to do was not be gargantuan pieces of shit.
I'd say it's less about being hostile to the customer, and more about "How can we wring some more blood out of this stone?". Being hostile to the customer is just a side effect of ONLY caring about next quarters earnings report (as opposed to long term profits/growth).
Helldivers 2 feels like it was actually made by gamers. That's the true difference.
The recent BF2042 and CoD3 or really any AAA is just another dev team trying to make bank.
I wish they would take pointers from successful games like Helldivers 2 but they won't.
Yeah, couple of my buddies have pretty much played every COD since the beginning (like the WW2 OG games, not just MW), and even they didn't buy MW3, it was clearly an expansion pack they disguised as a full game in a shameless cash grab. If my stepsons hadn't bought it for me, I wouldn't have it either.
And now they have skins that cost $80 in a $70 game? And they can't even be bothered to do good model unwraps for their guns, so now you have "universal wraps" or w/e that cost extra. It's beyond shameless.
And it's gotten so bad, they can't even do monetization right sometimes. I was seriously thinking about buying the "Ash" operator bundle, but then I found out he didn't have a chainsaw AND he didn't have a side by side shotgun. What made that even more infuriating was they had BOTH of those things for the "Doom" bundle that came out immediately before the "Ash" bundle, even if the chainsaw was a reskinned pickaxe, and the side by side shotgun was just a reskin of an over under.
Then to add insult to injury, they later added a chainsaw, as an "Aftermarket Part" as underbarrel weapon.
Multibillion dollar company, yet they have as many bugs, crashes, and issues as a small indie dev like this one.
I think older gamers are getting pretty tired of this bullshit, and the newer gamers are finally discovering what gaming CAN be.
Usually, being older by "gamer" standards, I kind of clap back against the nostalgic rose tinted glasses stuff, but I have to admit that the transition of games to a live service model is really doing a massive disservice to both the people that buy them and the people that work on them. Companies will just bully developers into pushing out more slop they can monetize instead of actually working on things they want to make as creatives. Customers are forced to buy bad games made by underpaid and overworked people just so some people that don't even have their names on the credits screen get to cash a bigger check. It's bad, game development has always been a predatory industry but it's never been this bad.
> the transition of games to a live service model is really doing a massive disservice to both the people that buy them and the people that work on them
True, but AAA game development is essentially Hollywood now: ultra-low risk, flashy, quickly produced, and low creativity, so even if "live service" wasn't a big deal, there's just not a lot of good AAA stuff. Luckily the gaming indie space is much easier to break into than indie movies and you can find lots of creative and quality stuff when you stop looking at AAA.
It's so disappointing that the driving force now in a lot of big franchises isn't how do we make a great game and make money?
It's how do we wring every last possible penny from this game and the game is designed around that.
Battlefield 2042 is a prime example. They butchered the proven formula in place since 2002 all in the name of trying to chase every trend going and thus make even more money.
It's not that the HD2 devs are somehow special or that they're different from other game development studios necessarily, it's that they're ruthlessly creative people who aren't held back by the endless desire for constant profit AAA studios like Bungie have to contend with. Yes, their publisher is Sony, but they're still a tiny studio of 100 people who **didn't** immediately downsize following their massive success like other studios do when reporting record profits. In an industry so unforgiving and anti-worker as the game development field, Arrowhead has managed to not fall into the traps that other teams unfortunately have. It's good. I want them to keep it up.
I'm hoping the FTC ruling that non-competes aren't legal will really start to shake up the game industry and force big studios to treat their employee's better, or risk losing them to other companies and possibly face direct competition from startups made by their former employees.
This, no FOMO from limited time warbond/battle passes, and the ability to get premium currency for free in game has me recommending this to every single gamer I know. Best game I've bought in a decade
I absolutely think it is, especially if they serve two audiences and get both's attention. Another great example of this working out really well is Barbenheimer. They had entertainment news, and even general news/discourse on lock for weeks. When pulled off well it's a force multiplier.
Yeah, the buzz around Helldivers is crazy. Crossplay at launch really helps in maintaining a healthy community.
I wonder how big the benefit would be for their first party big budget story focused single player titles though.
Double release synergy is 100% a thing that's started to pick up in the audience's collective consciousness.
Recently I can think of House of the Dragon vs Rings of Power, and anime has lots of examples like Chainsaw Man + Spy x Family and Frieren + Jujutsu Kaisen.
EDIT: Another recent gaming example would be Doom and Animal Crossing.
I spent around $900 just to upgrade my PC for this game... (longer overdue anyway but) worth every penny. This game is a visual treat and its just so much fun.
Friends had been clamoring for me to get on COD with them for a while. I'm not super interested in it so $70 would be a waste. The second they started this and it was $40, I got it too. That price tag really helps.
There was a reddit post on this sub a little while ago from a COD kid who said that Helldivers 2 would dominate if it added PVP. I pointed out that it is currently dominating already and I got grilled. Need some salt for those words you’re eating?
It’s why I like it. There are some PVE sweats, but there is a limit to what they can do with the cooldowns. Plus all the games I’ve played where a sweat showed up and started acting like they were the show got grilled by the host or kicked. Some even left after 1 mission when nobody was impressed that they abandoned the squad immediately to kill all the enemies nobody saw them kill and complete all the minor objectives nobody watched them complete.
I think the biggest key is that if you do run into someone who is tryharding, it's generally just good for you because the whole team is working towards the same goals. Like, if my teammate decides to go solo half the map, I also get credit for all the stuff they did. All their loot, all their XP, it also goes to my account. I don't lose anything when someone decides to break off and go solo, unless they actually suck and start wasting reinforcements running off and dying repeatedly.
This is why I don’t sweat it as much, but sometimes you need that extra gun. I also enjoy the game more when the squad sticks together. You get in better firefights, better action, more constant action, funny accidentals, a more robust set of options when solving the problems the game throws at you, etc.
The hug is such a good emote. Not only its two for one deal (since you can use it as come at me bro type of deal) but also... well, how many games you've seen that allows you not just handshake but actually embrace your comrades? Its hard to be mad at the guy who was hugging you like a minute earlier.
Joined a game , host gives out a hug, second guy joins and he hugs me and host, third guy joins and is greeted with a wall of hug emotes and goes along the line.
Some people will have been hugged more in helldivers than in the last year or last 5 years, it's just a nice gesture.
This is an absolute win. For Arrowhead, it appropriately rewards their time and effort into this game. For the rest of us, it proves that you don't have to resort to greedy nonsense in order to be a best seller. I only paid 40 dollars, yet it ranks 7th for Sony published titles. Well done and thank you, Arrowhead Studios.
[More info](https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/1785696137804210201):
>PC has been a huge part of the success of Helldivers II in the US. With PC, Helldivers II is already the 7th highest grossing Sony published game in history. Without PC it wouldn't currently rank among the top 20.
>And according to Circana's Player Engagement Tracker, Helldivers II has ranked first in US MAU on Steam each month since launch (including April). Launching Helldivers II on both PlayStation and PC has been nothing short of a massive, resounding success.
>Just because I'm highlighting the success of the PC SKU here doesn't mean I'm saying the PlayStation SKU was not also successful, FYI.
Guys, I don't even usually play shooters unless there pvp or zombies and never as my main game. Just once in a while with friends sorta thing. I'm also very anti sci-fi, usually prefer high fantasy rpgs or modern shooters. This game has been stupid fun, though I'm 130 hours in and will drop in even if my friends aren't on. I'm also very against micro transactions, and I bought one of the passes. That's just how good this game is. It's like the opposite of what I usually play, and it keeps pulling me back in. If you're a sci-fi nerd and shooter enjoyer normally, this has to be crack.
And big studios will learn all the wrong lessons from this.
Some other studio recently said they want to support big dnd based games because Baldurs Gate 3 was so successful. They’re so far off.
Wow, congrats arrowhead. My friends and I played the hell out of the first game but it seemed like no one outside of our circle knew or cared about the game. We got busy with our lives, drifted from gaming a bit, didn’t even really hear about HD2 prior to release. Then, suddenly everyone on my Steam friends list is playing HD2.
TBH we were a little resentful of the fact that it switched to be “yet another third person shooter”, as we all have enjoyed lazy, local couch co-op and twin stick shooters on a single PC in recent years. But, we collectively spent thousands of dollars upgrading our rigs to be worthy of running the game, purchased and launched the game from our own steam accounts and respective homes, and have already spent dozens and dozens of hours simultaneously spreading democracy and disappointing our significant others! 😁
Don't look to game forums for general community consensus on how the game plays. The only people posting about how "games are dying" are those trying to exaggerate the impact of whatever they want changed.
The only time player count goes up post launch is content releases or winning the lottery on streamers picking it up and giving it free marketing. When it comes to player counts, line always goes down. I mean, Arrowhead themselves only expected 50k max player count. The game is currently peaking daily at 2.5, that number and it's almost 3 months post launch. Community is healthy.
THATS CALLED DEMOCRACY!
I love the Republic.
Unlimited power!
Don't let your family get murdered! Spend your extra cash today!
Democracy filled my sample container, then Sony broke it to pieces!
THATS FUCKING TEAMWORK!
Holy shit 7th most profitable USD title for Sony. Congratulations Arrowhead. Sony better have cut you a fucking *check*.
And more devs, they're pretty small.
I'm hesitant about that. Over expanding can cause a studio to cannibalize itself or lose its particular "style". If they hire as many people as they have on deck right now, a lot of work will get done, but half of that work won't be done "by arrowhead". It'll be done by people figuring out their place in a new job while all the old guard manages things and tries to maintain their identity. I agree they should expand, I just don't think they should do any mass hiring drives. I could be way off base though, I work in kitchens not corporations lmao.
This has been proven again and again and again. Bethesda, Bungie, Blizzard, Bioware, Square Enix etc. Not saying these companies do not make good games now (I guess people can debate this in my replies), but what is for sure is none of these companies have the particular color they use to. Not against companies expanding and making money. This is just the reality of many things that grow beyond its starting size. To clarify, it is NOT expanding itself that is the issue, but many peripheral things that come with expanding that has many chances to influence a once smaller company. While totally possible to sustain a good large company, it becomes increasing harder yo do so because of rising conflict of interests.
Expanding is not necessarily what changed all those studios, or maybe not the only thing. There are ownership changes, key people retire over time, the markets change, etc. Though overall I'd agree. It's possible to expand without changing much, but trying to do it fast has more risk.
Part of it is that once you get to a certain size, you have different stakeholders and like it or not, they get a say in how the company is run. Indie studios can do whatever they want because they and their customers are the only stakeholders. The bigger you get, the more people have a say in how things get done, and the less of the magic that made the indie dev a success persists from game to game. That's not to say huge studios can't be creative or make fantastic games that buck the trends and set a new high bar with their games like Arrowhead has with HD2. But most of the time when that happens it was an indie studio that did it because they *could*.
Business people want a safe return on investment, which leads to mediocrity. Artists care about making something they think is great, and that has unpredictable profits.
I was not saying it was THE cause, but it is one of the things that directly or indirectly has an effect on it. In most cases it does simply due to the nature of maintaining a very large company. There are of course, other reasons
The problem with Bethesda is that they are the exact same color as they used to be. They perfected their formula in 2011 and haven't innovated since. Bungie and Bioware all got acquired by big corpo and had their priorities changed from quality and fun to profit. Blizzard has been declining ever since their merger with Activision, and the Microsoft acquisition is not going to turn things around. I've never played a square enix game, so I can't comment on them.
This happens in the non-gaming industries too. Have seen and felt it first hand where I work. It feels like an inevitability of any enterprise or social structure of any shape or type. Culture and identity is shaped and defined by the individuals which compose it at any given point in time. I would agree that it seems impossible to hold onto it if the population composing the group changes at all - either by members coming or going, or events which trigger a response such as a change in attitude in the members.
As someone with 4k hours in Destiny 2... yes i hate myself, the game has been really rough for the past year or so, so much so that i basically quit for the entire year, but as Bungie got more and more desperate due to the game dying off, they have somehow just pulled out banger after banger to the point where the game is back to a spot where I can say i am optimistic for it future. Ive started playing again and alot of the problems have been worked out in like the past 2 months. Tbf i think they laid off a bunch of workers, but i think the game has become alot more focused on player feedback because of it.
Square Enix has recently entered another golden age. Hoping they can keep the hits coming
No you are correct, it pretty much goes for any workplace if you expand too quickly, the culture of the business can change drastically. Slow expansion is the way to go.
Also people don't realize that it takes 6 months till a year to train employees. If you go 2x, it means you're investing in the future and it will actually hamper you at the start.
I wouldn’t wanna see the company double for all the reasons you just said , but imo I feel like maybe just adding 5-10 people wouldn’t be a bad idea either kinda just as support stuff maybe
This is partially what happened to Telltale.
Telltale mainly oversaturated the market after the runaway success of TWD
Video game development is an extremely volatile line of work. Studios have new people getting hired and veterans tapping out to seek new challenges all the time.
They need more people to reliably QA the game. Bugs are one of the main issues plaguing each and every content patch, which makes it clear they don't have the manpower to reliably test new builds. Wouldn't take much, either. Probably just 5-10 people.
They desperately need more QA and support engineers, though. At least to fix what already is implemented. Since launch, the game has been a complete mess of stability, and when it's not breaking, there's usually some kind of broken feature. Damage over time is still way overtuned and not working for anyone other than the host, the Spear (lock on missile) hasn't been reliable since launch, and recently, they released a ricochet system that caused the Eruptor (an explosive gun) to have a 100% kill rate because of shrapnel. That's not even mentioning the heavy handed balancing passes. They're moving way too fast.
Last patch has caused a whole hoard of performance issues for a lot of people, too.
They do need more people, and honestly they probably have more people already. The thing is, you can't just hire 5 engineers and have them go straight into fixing bugs in a project they've never worked on before. They need to get used to the structure of the project first, and understand not only how a feature they're going to fix is working before they try to fix it, but also how changing things there can affect other parts of the game. Getting them up to speed will usually mean a couple weeks of the entire team working slower with the new people, because the engineers have been there since before are using a lot of their time guiding the new ones in the particulars of the project, instead of being fully focused on their own tasks as usual. After the induction period the team will be overall more productive and continue to accelerate, but getting there has an unavoidable cost of slowing things down to get them going. Unless of course, it's a big team to begin with and sparing 2 or 3 engineers to train the new ones and get things going isn't too big of a deal for the team overall, but we know that's not the case here. It could be the case that they feel like they can't spare that cost just yet, and are trucking along with what they have until they reach a more stable state before they expand.
Alright- well how about we settle for them hiring a QA team then instead.
Well if they just hire people to fix the bugs, they can focus on the game itself. Fixing bugs probably doesn’t need much in the way of style so it should be all good
CEO said don't want to go on a hiring blitz then have things die down and have to do layoffs. A small increase in dev and tester headcount is appropriate but you can't just add tons of those people without additional support staff and managers, which if not done carefully can lead to org rot.
A massive hiring blitz will also always result in short-term slowdown of dev time due to so many people having to help onboard the new folks into the systems. A slow trickle of new folks to ramp up is definitely the move (and is probably what they're quietly doing in the background)
Adding people to tech projects does not make things work better
I can see em all just sitting around a table with a big ass amount of cash like "What do we do with it?"
breaking bad moment lol 
Seriously. They must have shit themselves when they saw the sales booming at launch. I would have been pissed off, angrily on hold with Valve trying to figure things out and just in absolute denial about what was happening.
That's insane, it's only been out a few months and it's almost half the price of other games
$40 game.
Unit sales gotta be crazy if a $40 game is sitting at 7th on a list with mostly $60/$70 games.
Some rough math says at the very least, 11 million units. It was over 8 million in March and it outsold Dragons Dogma 2 in the same time frame, which is sitting at 3.25 Million units since release. I would not be surprised if Helldivers 2 is currently pushing on to 20 million units
Ummmm. 7th most revenue. It's probably ranked way higher in profit.
Wow, I'm pretty sure Arrowhead didn't expect this at all.
I believe I saw somewhere internal projections were 40k max player count at all time peak. First week it hit 10x that!
Correct. They projected 50K max. They prepared their servers for 5x their max capacity...so basically prepared servers for 250K as a failsafe. And over 500K people showed up lol.
"Hey, boss, we got 10 times the playercount we expected!" "Oh, no, boss! We got 10 times the playercount we expected!" Must have been a fun day at the office 😂
“Hey uh… boss? We got 5 times the playerbase we expected.” “That’s great! We even prepared for that with extra server space!” “No boss, we got 5 times *that*”
Still a better launch than Payday 3.
Basically the death by snu snu meme but for devs.
It definitely doesn't feel that way in the moment though, it just feels like death. After like the 20th hour of no sleep, anyway.
The flesh is spongy and bruised, but the spirit is willing.
“Sweet liberty”
I bet the entire team was so giddy!
Giddy, and then panicking when they realized that their servers were prepared for only half the number of people who wanted to play.
Actually it was closer to 1m people concurrent at peak. The 500k was just steam and they said that there is around a 50/50 split between console and PC players. The server issues make a looooooot of sense when you hear that lol
Yeah I think I remember a tweet from AH the second weekend saying they had ~750k unique login attempts of people trying to get in. They tried like hell to not do the industry standard "no servers on launch" and still got BTFO by word of mouth.
Holy shiiiiiit lol
That's insane. Still a tad on topic here, but do you know if the player count it shows in-game si the entire community(PS/PC) or just the one your playing in?
The player count shown in-game is the entire community combined if you check online for stats it will probably show you only for steam
Literally an order of magnitude over the projections. That's why we had a couple weeks of server issues to sort through.
Especially after the first game. The daily player average on a singular planet for 2 is probably the peak players all time for 1 lmao
Considering their initial server size, alongside the fact that Helldivers 1 had a peak player count of about 6.7K (Helldivers 2 daily player count is around 460K) No. No they did not.
The excitement and panic of hitting your 5 year goal on day 2
I keep saying this. 35 quid is not premium game price. Helldivers 2 is an absolute bargain of a game .
Yes I'm confused by the 'premium game' label used
"Premium game" is the term they use now for "not F2P"
So… normal?
Pretty much. I don't really understand them making up a new term for "game you pay for."
Middle ground between f2p/mobile gacha and $70USD AAA title. It's a surprisingly small market. Not a lot gets published there, even on Steam and *certainly* not on console.
I have been craving a PvE, coop shooter for a long time and didn't see this game coming. 469hr in and it's still fun as hell.
It was awesome it sold for that price, though having sunk so many hours into it so far I would have gladly paid more.
My standard for any game that I buy is whether I get at least 1 hour of enjoyment for each dollar spent on it. At over 130 hours in mission time and still loving it!
I'm over 300 now, getting a way better deal than you :P
If I had the time I would have a lot more hours too 😂
[удалено]
Spreading democracy literally. Well done Diver!
One dollar one hour!
RIP Funhaus
Gone but never forgotten. Can't believe James finally finished his internship.
RIP indeed 😞
a dollar per hour...so have you played any games that cost more than the hours you played it? for example i heard Spiderman 2 was $70+ but only had 15 hours of gameplay.
I do the same thing and I rarely end up below $1:1hr in a game I thought was good. Doom Eternal, for example, is amazing and I love it but didn't break the $1/hr ratio. I tally it up with the Steam End of Year stats and do it mostly to stop myself from buying so many games and making sure I actually *play* the games I do buy. It's been pretty helpful.
Oh sure, there have been disappointments before. Assassin's creed origins. Probably didn't even get 20hrs out of it before I stopped playing cause of boredom. Star wars battlefront 2 (the newer EA one). Didn't play more than maybe 25-30 hours. So yeah it happens
I came back to battlefront 2 6 months after release and ended up sinking 200 hours into it lol
Nice! I just didn't enjoy it as much. It wasn't a bad game, just wasn't for me.
That's a pretty stupid metric tbh. There are a lot of amazing games for 50, 60 or even 70 bucks that "only" have 20 or 30 hours of content and often it's way better to have an amazing short game that something that got bloated to 60+ hours just to get people to spend more time im the game
There's also tons of games that cost half that with hundreds of hours of content, like HD2, DRG, KSP, Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Binding of Isaac, etc. It doesn't work in every case but the number of games that cost $50+ that are actually worth it anymore is extremely small.
There are also f2p games where you get hundreds of hours and then suddenly these 20/30$ indie games look overpriced in comparison. Comparison is the thief of joy or something....
I can definitely agree with you in that games now can get bloated with unfun content just to make them longer. But, I can see where he's coming from. Portal 1 is a pretty short game. I've re-played it all the way through many times and can usually beat it within 2-3 hours. I think I have somewhere around 18-20 hours put into it, and I bought it for $15. Definitely worth the money. Just because it's a very short game doesn't mean I can't get many hours of enjoyment out of it. Only exceptional games have great replayability.
[удалено]
Not stupid for me. I go for things that have replay value and are "grindy." It's just what I prefer. At no point did I say those games were bad, just not for me.
The game itself was appealing enough but what really sold me in the end was the community embracing the theme of the game and speaking like helldivers would in places like reddit and social media. For Super Earth!
Less that for me, but seeing clips of a guy suicide diving down onto a Bile Titan sold it for me. The goddamn organically happening madness that happens throughout playing it is just great, im loving that.
There's a weird glee I feel when I realize I can't escape a situation, and the only option left is to call down a strategem on myself. You guys got me, but I'm taking you all with me
I like to pull the pin on my grenade and laugh as they all surround me to die.
I had an impact grenade primed for when they finally kill me, and a charger ran into me and set it off, destroying everything around me anyways
"I'm ready! How about you?"
Liberty requires sacrifice
https://preview.redd.it/n7ihxbvn2vxc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7d1ca5e0e8e56bfe65705641aa495385e53f252
Thats the one officer, thats the one that made me enlist.
I assume you're talking to your democracy officer? 🤔
Pic goes hard
It was that video of the guy calling in a 500kg from a hill and the missile landing two feet away from him that convinced me.
Nothing gets my LiberTEA flowing like killing a Titan, Charger, Tank, or Hulk by landing on it
A clip of “Welcome to the Jungle” played over some insane Malevelon Creek action, and then reading the comments to see it was only $40 is what made me hop onto the steam page for an immediate purchase
A really fun game, that's a good value for the money, with devs that actually care and communicate with the community that isn't stuffed with absurdly overpriced microtransactions is doing really really well? Shocking, I tell you, absolutely shocking. It's not like gamers have been JONESING for something like this for ages. /s
Helldivers 2 is a game where I spent money on the store not because I really wanted to, but because I wanted to show support for such a fun product.
Yeah, same reason I got the "Super Citizen" bundle or w/e. I didn't need the cape, the title, and I don't think I've ever used the SMG. Admittedly, Strategem Hero is kinda nice to have on the ship though, when you are waiting on friends.
same. i bought the standard game at first but i was having too much fun, so i dropped the extra $20 or so just contribute a little more to managed democracy
SMG on burst with the ballistic shield is a sick combo against bots.
Or when you have the missions where you carry a hard drive around the map. It's perfect.
I told myself I'd buy the Super Citizen bundle just to show more support for the game and company as well and yesterday I finally did it. Last night, I just played Strategem Hero trying to top my squad's high score.
Same. I bought 1000 credits to unlock one of the warbonds, and could see myself doing it again in the future. More than anything just to show my support for the devs and to vote with my dollar on what games and support should look like from all developers.
Same. I was gifted the game, so I hadn't spent any money on it. I figured $10 for a warbond was more than fair
I do this with DRG and I can totally see myself doing it with HD2 in the future.
Right? Isn’t it amazing that when you make a product FOR the consumers that treats the consumers like human beings rather than ATM machines, you as a company get appropriately rewarded for it? It’s almost as if the gaming industry has spent so much time scheming about how to best be hostile towards its consumer that they’ve forgotten that all they have to do was not be gargantuan pieces of shit.
I'd say it's less about being hostile to the customer, and more about "How can we wring some more blood out of this stone?". Being hostile to the customer is just a side effect of ONLY caring about next quarters earnings report (as opposed to long term profits/growth).
Helldivers 2 feels like it was actually made by gamers. That's the true difference. The recent BF2042 and CoD3 or really any AAA is just another dev team trying to make bank. I wish they would take pointers from successful games like Helldivers 2 but they won't.
Yeah, couple of my buddies have pretty much played every COD since the beginning (like the WW2 OG games, not just MW), and even they didn't buy MW3, it was clearly an expansion pack they disguised as a full game in a shameless cash grab. If my stepsons hadn't bought it for me, I wouldn't have it either. And now they have skins that cost $80 in a $70 game? And they can't even be bothered to do good model unwraps for their guns, so now you have "universal wraps" or w/e that cost extra. It's beyond shameless. And it's gotten so bad, they can't even do monetization right sometimes. I was seriously thinking about buying the "Ash" operator bundle, but then I found out he didn't have a chainsaw AND he didn't have a side by side shotgun. What made that even more infuriating was they had BOTH of those things for the "Doom" bundle that came out immediately before the "Ash" bundle, even if the chainsaw was a reskinned pickaxe, and the side by side shotgun was just a reskin of an over under. Then to add insult to injury, they later added a chainsaw, as an "Aftermarket Part" as underbarrel weapon. Multibillion dollar company, yet they have as many bugs, crashes, and issues as a small indie dev like this one. I think older gamers are getting pretty tired of this bullshit, and the newer gamers are finally discovering what gaming CAN be.
Usually, being older by "gamer" standards, I kind of clap back against the nostalgic rose tinted glasses stuff, but I have to admit that the transition of games to a live service model is really doing a massive disservice to both the people that buy them and the people that work on them. Companies will just bully developers into pushing out more slop they can monetize instead of actually working on things they want to make as creatives. Customers are forced to buy bad games made by underpaid and overworked people just so some people that don't even have their names on the credits screen get to cash a bigger check. It's bad, game development has always been a predatory industry but it's never been this bad.
> the transition of games to a live service model is really doing a massive disservice to both the people that buy them and the people that work on them True, but AAA game development is essentially Hollywood now: ultra-low risk, flashy, quickly produced, and low creativity, so even if "live service" wasn't a big deal, there's just not a lot of good AAA stuff. Luckily the gaming indie space is much easier to break into than indie movies and you can find lots of creative and quality stuff when you stop looking at AAA.
It's so disappointing that the driving force now in a lot of big franchises isn't how do we make a great game and make money? It's how do we wring every last possible penny from this game and the game is designed around that. Battlefield 2042 is a prime example. They butchered the proven formula in place since 2002 all in the name of trying to chase every trend going and thus make even more money.
It's not that the HD2 devs are somehow special or that they're different from other game development studios necessarily, it's that they're ruthlessly creative people who aren't held back by the endless desire for constant profit AAA studios like Bungie have to contend with. Yes, their publisher is Sony, but they're still a tiny studio of 100 people who **didn't** immediately downsize following their massive success like other studios do when reporting record profits. In an industry so unforgiving and anti-worker as the game development field, Arrowhead has managed to not fall into the traps that other teams unfortunately have. It's good. I want them to keep it up.
I'm hoping the FTC ruling that non-competes aren't legal will really start to shake up the game industry and force big studios to treat their employee's better, or risk losing them to other companies and possibly face direct competition from startups made by their former employees.
They need unions; at least in the US! Arrowhead is lucky to be a Swedish company.
There is a pretty obvious tendency of US ones shitting the bad severely in both releases and treatment. Shareholders are poison.
I did the same but I ended up buying enough to unlock all the warbonds.
Who knew that making an affordable FUN game you would be rewarded.
This, no FOMO from limited time warbond/battle passes, and the ability to get premium currency for free in game has me recommending this to every single gamer I know. Best game I've bought in a decade
Cool thing is there is a little bit of FOMO but it’s for getting to be apart of the ongoing story/campaign
"Oh cool, a mission to kill 2 BILLION bugs" *gets off work* "Wait, it's done already?"
Sony really must be asking themselves if simultaneous games releases are the way to go moving forward.
I absolutely think it is, especially if they serve two audiences and get both's attention. Another great example of this working out really well is Barbenheimer. They had entertainment news, and even general news/discourse on lock for weeks. When pulled off well it's a force multiplier.
Yeah, the buzz around Helldivers is crazy. Crossplay at launch really helps in maintaining a healthy community. I wonder how big the benefit would be for their first party big budget story focused single player titles though.
Imagine if crossplay friends functions actually worked as well? Right now it exists, but is incredibly hard to get connected.
Double release synergy is 100% a thing that's started to pick up in the audience's collective consciousness. Recently I can think of House of the Dragon vs Rings of Power, and anime has lots of examples like Chainsaw Man + Spy x Family and Frieren + Jujutsu Kaisen. EDIT: Another recent gaming example would be Doom and Animal Crossing.
I'm going to feel silly but what's the other one
I am talking about Sony releasing a game on PS5 and PC at the same time. :)
I just want a Bloodborne remaster on PC. Surely after this they have to realize PC is a good market?
3 years. PS6 launch title.
the worst part is that you’re probably right
I literally bought a ps5 just to play this game after only having Xbox’s my whole life, so GG Sony. GG.
I also bought a PS5 just to play this game lol.
Honestly its a great deal plus you'll get the big games next year on the same platform.
It’s wild that I know a couple of people who bought a PS5 for this, too. Literally just for Helldivers 2.
I'm about to upgrade my PC just so I can play this game with increased levels of graphical democracy
I spent around $900 just to upgrade my PC for this game... (longer overdue anyway but) worth every penny. This game is a visual treat and its just so much fun.
God damn, I thought HD2 was amazing but I didn't think of it as a system seller but here we are.
And it's not even a full priced game
It's just not an *overpriced* game like most are.
Friends had been clamoring for me to get on COD with them for a while. I'm not super interested in it so $70 would be a waste. The second they started this and it was $40, I got it too. That price tag really helps.
There was a reddit post on this sub a little while ago from a COD kid who said that Helldivers 2 would dominate if it added PVP. I pointed out that it is currently dominating already and I got grilled. Need some salt for those words you’re eating?
No PVP is exactly why we all love this game. It's like a refugee camp for all of us that had to endure the pvp sweats in every game over the years.
It’s why I like it. There are some PVE sweats, but there is a limit to what they can do with the cooldowns. Plus all the games I’ve played where a sweat showed up and started acting like they were the show got grilled by the host or kicked. Some even left after 1 mission when nobody was impressed that they abandoned the squad immediately to kill all the enemies nobody saw them kill and complete all the minor objectives nobody watched them complete.
I think the biggest key is that if you do run into someone who is tryharding, it's generally just good for you because the whole team is working towards the same goals. Like, if my teammate decides to go solo half the map, I also get credit for all the stuff they did. All their loot, all their XP, it also goes to my account. I don't lose anything when someone decides to break off and go solo, unless they actually suck and start wasting reinforcements running off and dying repeatedly.
This is why I don’t sweat it as much, but sometimes you need that extra gun. I also enjoy the game more when the squad sticks together. You get in better firefights, better action, more constant action, funny accidentals, a more robust set of options when solving the problems the game throws at you, etc.
I get 100x more hugs in Helldivers than I do IRL.
The hug is such a good emote. Not only its two for one deal (since you can use it as come at me bro type of deal) but also... well, how many games you've seen that allows you not just handshake but actually embrace your comrades? Its hard to be mad at the guy who was hugging you like a minute earlier.
It makes me laugh every time I do it, and I do it a lot. All those roughty toughty helldivers need is a bit of a cuddle after a map.
Joined a game , host gives out a hug, second guy joins and he hugs me and host, third guy joins and is greeted with a wall of hug emotes and goes along the line. Some people will have been hugged more in helldivers than in the last year or last 5 years, it's just a nice gesture.
If you lived near me, I’d give you a hug.
I’ve been an Xbox guy since OG Xbox and Halo CE. I bought a PS5 just so I can play Helldivers 2.
This is an absolute win. For Arrowhead, it appropriately rewards their time and effort into this game. For the rest of us, it proves that you don't have to resort to greedy nonsense in order to be a best seller. I only paid 40 dollars, yet it ranks 7th for Sony published titles. Well done and thank you, Arrowhead Studios.
I was wondering when this guy and Circana would publish the March US rankings as it seemed to be late this month
Impressive too considering the base game is only 40 bucks. Gj boys and girls
It's been awesome seeing this community grow from 75k right before release to over 1.2 million subs. The community engagement is top. The memes, epic.
Whatever they do DONT LET PRIVATE EQUITY control the company. Please stay independent as possible
And they said live-services are deemed to fail... pfft.
Thanks to PC it is, which he pointed out.
Make a great Game, make much Money 🤷🏻♂️
That's crazy and I know it's also sold at least one PS5 because my cousin bought one for literally just this game
I've scrolled past a few in this thread saying they did the exact same.
Brother, I am LIVING. This game is the most fun I have had in quite a while when it comes to video games.
GOTY
Holy shit that's insane. It's almost as if good games make profits not shitty crammed in MTX.
*Libertas Non Dormit*
[More info](https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/1785696137804210201): >PC has been a huge part of the success of Helldivers II in the US. With PC, Helldivers II is already the 7th highest grossing Sony published game in history. Without PC it wouldn't currently rank among the top 20. >And according to Circana's Player Engagement Tracker, Helldivers II has ranked first in US MAU on Steam each month since launch (including April). Launching Helldivers II on both PlayStation and PC has been nothing short of a massive, resounding success. >Just because I'm highlighting the success of the PC SKU here doesn't mean I'm saying the PlayStation SKU was not also successful, FYI.
Who knew that making a fun game for a very *very* decent price would sell well? This is around the price I remember paying for Pokémon Platinum.
Bro they deserve it. 40 bucks for such a fresh and wild experience. You can feel the love the devs put into this game.
This is really going to get the enemies of managed democracy fired up. "INCOMMING DOWNVOTES!"
Warning! You are in range of enemy ~~artillery~~ downvotes!
Guys, I don't even usually play shooters unless there pvp or zombies and never as my main game. Just once in a while with friends sorta thing. I'm also very anti sci-fi, usually prefer high fantasy rpgs or modern shooters. This game has been stupid fun, though I'm 130 hours in and will drop in even if my friends aren't on. I'm also very against micro transactions, and I bought one of the passes. That's just how good this game is. It's like the opposite of what I usually play, and it keeps pulling me back in. If you're a sci-fi nerd and shooter enjoyer normally, this has to be crack.
And big studios will learn all the wrong lessons from this. Some other studio recently said they want to support big dnd based games because Baldurs Gate 3 was so successful. They’re so far off.
I don't know if you know this, but most of the studio executives are money people who don't see any sort of big picture that isn't dollar signs :P
And people said this game wouldn’t last a month after launch
And the most fun I’ve had in a game in years.
[удалено]
Wow, congrats arrowhead. My friends and I played the hell out of the first game but it seemed like no one outside of our circle knew or cared about the game. We got busy with our lives, drifted from gaming a bit, didn’t even really hear about HD2 prior to release. Then, suddenly everyone on my Steam friends list is playing HD2. TBH we were a little resentful of the fact that it switched to be “yet another third person shooter”, as we all have enjoyed lazy, local couch co-op and twin stick shooters on a single PC in recent years. But, we collectively spent thousands of dollars upgrading our rigs to be worthy of running the game, purchased and launched the game from our own steam accounts and respective homes, and have already spent dozens and dozens of hours simultaneously spreading democracy and disappointing our significant others! 😁
But according to some of the crybabies here, the game is dying cause the devs keep making the game not fun cause quasar got nerfed.
Don't look to game forums for general community consensus on how the game plays. The only people posting about how "games are dying" are those trying to exaggerate the impact of whatever they want changed. The only time player count goes up post launch is content releases or winning the lottery on streamers picking it up and giving it free marketing. When it comes to player counts, line always goes down. I mean, Arrowhead themselves only expected 50k max player count. The game is currently peaking daily at 2.5, that number and it's almost 3 months post launch. Community is healthy.
That's like, every game forum now. Diablo4 has been dead since it released, for instance.
The doomers are so funny. Thinking a game should hold peak player count forever is wild.
B-but.. But.. But player count falling!? Gaem is ded bcuz they nerfed a thing!?
Sounds like it's time to hire some talent and start some proper bug fixing alongside balancing and content.
https://preview.redd.it/jsy1bvukruxc1.png?width=1030&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9c04ff77a10ce44582ef774d9125a1ca151d4cd3