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Helldivers 2 became an instant success when it was released in February 2024. It has already sold millions of copies and sees over 200,000 concurrent players at most times of the day. Arrowhead Game Studios has also been adding a constant flow of new content including weapons and armor, new enemies, planets, mission types, and much more. However, some Helldivers 2 players are worried that the studio is starting to feel the effects of having a small team and is unable to keep up with its plans and schedule.
The Helldivers 2 Associate Community Manager SpitzerFX recently took to Reddit to respond to a player who questioned whether the developers spending time fixing bugs would mean that they wouldn’t be able to keep up with their plans to release a new Premium Warbond every month.
“This is patently untrue. Arrowhead still has a very small team compared to the success of the game, and while we have dedicated QA, the people fixing bugs with weapons and armor for example are the same people in charge of making new weapons and armor. It’s important to us to maintain the cadence that we promised – one warbond per month – but equally important to everyone to fix the glaring bugs and technical issues. There’s just only so much time in a work week.”
This has caused a lot of discussion within the Helldivers 2 community, with U/SmokyZnadPotoku posting a thread on Reddit titled “It seems Arrowhead has only one small team working on everything, which should have been obvious from the very beginning.” This post has over 15,600 upvotes and over 1,500 at the time of writing.
Many players do understand the position that the Helldivers 2 developers are in, with there being approximately 100 employees at Arrowhead Game Studios. U/ReganDryke pointed out that it takes time to hire new employees so the team could expand following Helldivers 2 selling over eight million copies in its first month saying “Even if they recruited after the game blew up. It’s been what 2 months at most. Onboarding takes time and recruiting too much will slow down development in the short term.”
U/Bumbling_Hierophant did note that sometimes it can be the wrong choice to hire people during a busy period as it takes time to train them and already busy developers will need to split their time further.
“If you have an overworked team, onboarding more people is not the solution as showing them the ropes requires taking time away from what you’re already understaffed to do so it slows even more and the managers start putting the pressure on everyone. So you end up having new hires off to fend for themselves as best as they can and take triple the time to start actually being productive, there’s no short-term solution.”
But, some players are calling for the team to delay the next Premium Warbond for a month or so to focus on fixing the game, as new weapons, armor, and cosmetics aren’t as important as having a functional game, with U/MaxPatriotism saying “They can just tell us up front that they want to delay, a warbond, and just focus on bugs for a month. This is just gonna be like Operation Health or medic bag. But just for a better game.”
Despite the developers facing some issues at the moment, it is undeniable that Helldivers 2 has been a huge success for Arrowhead Game Studios and it is impressive they’re able to continue pushing new content, including the return of the Factory Strider. If you want to jump in and do your part to save Super Earth, we highly recommend checking out our Helldivers 2 best weapons guide and best armor guides so you can build the best loadout for your play style.
