‘Helldivers 2’ Dev Believes the Gaming Industry Is Currently “in a Vicious Cycle of Death and Rebirth”
We all know that the gaming market has been a volatile one full of competition since… well… always. But in recent years, we cannot but observe that the market has become fiercer and that it is, for many, a “make-or-break” situation with each new release.
News about companies being shut down or sold, people being fired on a grand scale… all of these have been much more common in recent years than, say, 10+ years ago. The market is changing, the market is becoming fiercer, and sometimes, it is very difficult to predict how the fans will react to a game.
In a recent interview with the press, Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt commented on these trends and how they affected the development of the game. “The games industry is caught in a vicious cycle of death and rebirth,” he began. “Every so often we lay off thousands of people suddenly, and then nobody understands why. And I think it’s just because we converge. We will always go through the cycles of death and rebirth, but now that cycle is unnecessarily brutal, because we don’t diversify enough.”
Some games, Pilestedt says, earned a lot of money (e.g. Fortnite and similar games), and companies believe that it is easy to replicate that, which leads to developers copying other formulas, which doesn’t necessarily have to work.
“A lot of publishers try to play it safe by taking safe bets, but one thing that’s guaranteed is those safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make it,” he elaborated. “We are in the business of taking risks, and if we don’t take risks, we’re never going to be able to achieve success. Few people believe that Helldivers would amount to anything, and yet here we are.”
And this is, also, the general message Pilestedt had for developers, saying that “we have to take more risks if we want to avoid mass failures. We have to stop chasing traps. It’s too risky for us as a business to do that in the long run. And make your games according to your studio’s foundational style. Don’t copy others, instead, think about what you want to make and take a gamble on it.”
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