Helldivers 2's developers at Arrowhead Game Studios have a lot to consider when it comes to maintaining and improving their third-person shooter, and one of those things is making sure they balance their approach beyond simply looking at what streamers and players on Reddit are saying.
In an interaction in the official Helldivers Discord server, Jorjani is asked for thoughts on the level of influence that streamers have on Helldivers 2, with one fan suggesting that content creators have collectively "made so much content for the game" that they now only focus on the explosive, "OP weapons" and think that "everything else is bad." They add that "this game was never made to be played for 4,000 thousand hours" in the first place.
Responding to this, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani acknowledges that "this is a challenge for all games," with streamers representing "the playstyle of a minority" even if they "set standards for many as they have a platform to broadcast and many who look." As for Arrowhead's approach to this, he says, "we balance things out internally by looking at a lot of data, metrics and qualitative data like said streamers."
It appears that Jorjani sees streamers as a loud minority of Helldivers 2's playerbase, as he says: "The vast, vast majority silently play the game – they don't post here or on Reddit. And when we do good we [see] this in the stats – and when we don't we also see it – sometimes it overlaps with what influencers or people say in social media – often it does not. So we use different tools to calibrate our compass."
Even though Arrowhead is aware of these things and knows not to rely on any one factor too much, that "doesn't mean we always get it right (we screw up all the time)." With that said, Jorjani positively thinks "we keep learning and improving (as proven by the recent appreciation, player numbers and sales)."
