Helldivers 2 boss told launch players not to buy until servers calmed down, and it "took 5 minutes until I got a call from the friendly people over at PlayStation asking what the f*** I was smoking"

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"'Don't recommend that people do not buy your games' - it's incredibly conventional wisdom"

Helldivers 2 screenshot showing a fully geared/armored diver standing with gun in hand as three jets soar the skies behind him
(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

You can partly attribute the success of Helldivers 2 to the relationship developer Arrowhead Game Studios has built with fans, who have greatly appreciated creative director and former CEO Johan Pilestedt's straight-talking attitude. But when Pilestedt suggested that cash-strapped players hold off on buying the game until the servers were stable, well, that talk was a little too straight for some of the folks at publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Around the time of the Helldivers 2 launch, "the community was super excited about the gameplay that we put up, and everybody flocked in, and it became wildfire," Pilestedt said in a Game Developers Conference panel attended by GamesRadar+. "Everybody told everybody that you need to play this game, and it crushed us under success," he said, referring to the game's early server issues.

Dustin Bailey
Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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