‘Helldivers 2’ Dev Reveals How Six Million ‘Call of Duty’ Players Almost “Destroyed” Them
Helldivers 2 was released in 2024 and it quickly became a proper hit. The game ended up seeling more than 12 million copies within three months, which was a massive success, and it also won numerous awards.
And while the success of the game certainly made the devs very happy, it turns out that they didn’t really expect such a massive success after the initial launch, as the game experienced a lot of trouble.
This happened during a recent interview, during which Shams Jorjani revealed how the controversy almost ruined them as they had trouble adjusting to the market demands and new players.
If you remember the story, Helldivers 2 had a solid launch and at one point early in its release had 750,000 active players. But, with some controversial elements and updates, the players became more and more dissatisfied and the game ended up with an abysmal 19% Steam rating.
As Jorjani reveals, this was a major alarm for them. And while the devs reacted properly and fixed everything (raising the rating to 94%!), Jorjani revealed that it was a proper shock. Why did it happen? How did the devs end up being so shocked? Well, according to Jorjani, it was the Call of Duty players’ “fault”!
“So we did not make Helldivers for six million Call of Duty players. We absolutely didn’t,” he begins. “But six million Call of Duty players bought our game. And they are interested in different things compared to, say, the audience that comes from Escape From Tarkov or Arma, which were some of our more influential games.”
This demanded a quick adaptation, but that was a difficult process. “So ‘the summer of pain’, or whatever we want to call it, was painful in part because it was hard for us to reconcile how to stay true to the studio fundamentals, while dealing with the business realities of having so many different voices screaming at us,” he concludes.
It wasn’t easy for the devs to reconcile their basic ideas with the demands of the market, but Helldivers 2 remains a solid success story and a potential guide for other devs in the future.
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