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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.
"It got to the point where I actually tweeted this," Pilestedt continued, reading out the text of a February 2024 Twitter post: "'If you have no cash, get the game later. While we made a really fun game, it's worth waiting until the servers can support capacity. I mean, as CEO, I would, of course, want the game to be as profitable as possible, but if you spent your last dollars and got stuck in server queues I'd be heartbroken.'"
The idea of a CEO suggesting players not buy their game generated headlines at the time, and Pilestedt said it "took 5 minutes until I got a call from the friendly people over at PlayStation asking what the fuck I was smoking. 'Don't recommend that people do not buy your games' - it's incredibly conventional wisdom."
