Helldivers 2 only had 20 devs working on it when development began, but High Command is now over 6 times larger and has continued to expand since launch

Helldivers 2 has been massive for Arrowhead Game Studios, and the team working on it has only continued to expand, with the current crew being over six times the size of the group that worked on the third-person shooter at the start.

In a talk at GDC, senior materials artist Romain Lemaire gives a brief timeline of the expansion of the dev team since work on the sequel began in 2016. "There were 20 people at the beginning of the project, and it [went] to 105 at release in February 2024," he explains. "Now we are currently approximately 130 people."

That's seemingly not counting the additional devs from the "other studios" assisting with Helldivers 2's "ongoing development," and even now, over a year on from its launch, the team still seems to be expanding – Arrowhead is currently hiring for Helldivers 2 product director, for example.

Despite the continued popularity of Helldivers 2, it sounds like Arrowhead is planning for the future. Right at the end of last year, creative director Johan Pilestedt confirmed he was already "working on the high concept" for the "next Arrowhead game," so we'll have to wait and see what that is. It's worth noting that the first Helldivers game was released in 2015, so just a year before work began on the sequel – who knows, perhaps a trilogy could be in the pipeline? Pilestedt also previously noted that "we are growing Helldivers 2 into Helldivers 3," though that could be more in relation to the ongoing support for the existing game rather than outright confirming plans for a threequel.

Arrowhead Game Studios just released a new Helldivers 2 patch that's made the shooter "a little bit harder," and announced the new Helldivers 2 Borderline Justice Warbond.