Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt reckons game developers are spending too much time on balance and not enough time on fun.
There's no doubt that balance is one of the most buzzed-about topics in live-service games, with titles like Diablo 4, Marvel Rivals, and Overwatch constantly pushing out patches largely dedicated to nerfs and buffs in an effort to make the experience as fair to all players as possible.
However, Pilestedt argues that a perfectly balanced game is an illusion not worth chasing save for a small percentage of development time.
Speaking during a Game Developers Conference 2025 panel that GamesRadar+ attended, Pilestedt made the case for minimal balance updates in favor of interesting game design.
"Balance is a myth. Fun first, balance later," he said. "Game designers nowadays are obsessed with balance. Balance is 5% of the work that you should be doing. It's the polishing state of game design. If you start thinking about balance and using that as the method for success, you're an idiot.
"Balancing is not game design. Game design is about experience. If you balance out all the chaos, you've made an uninteresting game. Balance is the polishing of the object, and if you smoothen that out too much, it will just be a non-experience."
While Pilestedt sounds pretty unbothered here, Helldivers 2 is among the many online games that have struggled to find the harmony between balance and fun since launch.
Game director Michael Eriksson told GamesRadar+ in December that the game's road from launch was a "rollercoaster" that Arrowhead was nonetheless "privileged" to be on.
Meanwhile, Pilstedt himself has attributed the game's myriad balance patches to "a leadership issue more than anything."
Despite Arrowhead trying to fix it twice, Helldivers 2 still features a chaotic bug that lets you slide around like a snake, and "it's even more hilarious" after the latest update.
