While Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has announced that he will be taking a sabbatical from working on the game, Arrowhead Game Studios itself wants to reassure fans that it can keep the title alive in the mean time.
On the official Helldivers 2 Discord channel, studio CEO Shams Jorjani wanted to reassure fans of the game by saying that development on the title will continue “as long as people play”. He also said that work on the game won’t stop even if it has to go on for 10 more years.
“As long as people play, pay and we can build a business case around it, we’ll support it to hell and back,” said Jorjani, according to GamesRadar. “If we can keep it going for 10 years we will.”
Jorjani went on to talk about Pilestedt’s break from development, and how it won’t do much to affect the pace of development on Helldivers 2 moving forward, since the title has been headed up by Mikael Eriksson for the last few years.
“The lead for the game is Mikael Eriksson and has been for the last few years,” explained Jorjani. “Johan’s role as a senior creative is to support all our projects. So he’ll absolutely still be involved – in the same way he’s been the past year – gives input on high-level plans and collaborates with designers on some stuff.” As Jorjani states, “The vast majority of Helldivers is a team effort – it’s not one Jesus figure.”
While Pilestedt was important in key creative areas of Helldivers and its sequel, Jorjani said that there were many others at the studio that helped in getting the game developed.
The title doesn’t seem to be in any danger of losing players, however. The game wrapped up its first calendar year by getting more than 15 million players. When it comes to hard sales data, it had sold 12 million copies back in May 2024.
Pilestedt announced his sabbatical earlier this week, stating that he needed the break after having worked on the Helldivers franchise almost non-stop since 2013.
“11 years of working “around the clock” on the same IP has made me set aside family, friends and my lovely wife… and myself,” posted Pilestedt when he announced his sabbatical. “I am going to take some time now to redeem what was lost from all of those that supported me for over a decade.”
Pilestedt’s sabbatical might involve a nice vacation, but he almost immediately kicked it off by hosting a game jam with his friends from the studio. While the game itself didn’t turn out too great, Pilestedt did mention that the team enjoyed it, and that sometimes the journey itself is the destination.
When it comes to Helldivers 2 itself, the title recently got an update that brought fixes for crashes related to Illuminate missions. This includes a fix for a crash related to Illuminate ships despawning, as well as jittering from players trying to use ADS with a scoped weapon.
Helldivers 2 is available on PC and PS5. For more details on the title, check out our review from back when it first came out.