Former Arrowhead CEO and Helldivers head honcho Johan Pilestedt, who's now leading a new project at the studio as creative lead, reckons the Helldivers 2 community got this one right: the game really is a cycle of "it's so over" and "we're so back."
Speaking with GamesRadar+ at the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, where Helldivers 2 was nominated for the "Still Playing Award" as the hit shooter approaches the end of its second year, Pilestedt comments on the rhythm the game has followed and the work that led to this point.
"It's absolutely amazing" to be nominated for an award like Still Playing at this point, Pilestedt says. "Especially for the team that continues to truck on. Helldivers development was seven years, 11 months, and 26 days – a number I won't forget. And now the team is still working on the same game almost a decade later, and for them to be recognized by the efforts that they put in is just amazing."
Weighing in on the occasionally rocky road that Helldivers 2 has traveled, Pilestedt reckons "the community has coined it really well. It's a never-ending ping pong between 'it's so over' and 'we're so back,' and I think that's sort of the way that we'll continue developing the game."
Obviously, the folks at Arrowhead aren't sitting around a table deciding how to purposefully engineer the next "it's so over" arc. These things just happen. "I mean, we're trying to get better with each update," Pilestedt adds. "But then again, I think the essence of the team is what you see in the game as well. And I think that's true for almost all game development studios.
"You see the efforts of those individuals that are there at the time, and the mentality of the people that are there at the time. And when you make a game that's about bumbling fools, you can sort of realize where that comes from."
Most recently, Helldivers 2 has been grappling with technical issues that finally boiled over to the point that the dev team had to take a step back from releasing new content and instead focus on improving game stability, as it was "starting to break at the seams."
Earlier this year, we spoke to Pilestedt and many other developers about the realities of game development, and he reasoned that, "Most of the time, all of the decisions that you make, especially the larger the game gets, have so many consequences that cascade, making something that seems easy really hard, or something that seems really hard to be super simple. It's unintuitive unless you've worked in games to see how they're created."
Here are all the Golden Joystick 2025 winners.
