Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilested spoke about the success of Helldivers 2 and revealed details about the development.
During a recent appearance at the Nordic Game conference, Arrowhead Game Studios founder and Helldivers 2 director Johan Pilestedt spoke about the game's success. At its peak, Helldivers 2 reached 750,000 concurrent players on PS5 and PC. The co-op shooter is known to have a peak concurrent user count of over 458,000 players on Steam, so assuming that's when the game peaked overall across all platforms, that would mean it peaked on PS5 at least at 300,000 concurrent players.
During the talk, Pilestedt also confirmed that Helldivers 2 took almost 8 years to develop. Although in 2016, Arrowhead assumed that it would take three years to create. As you might expect, the longer development cycle also came with an increase in budget, with Sony more than doubling the budget for Helldivers 2 and also expanding Arrowhead Game Studios' development staff, which grew from 30 people to one hundred during development.
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Cover artist: Arrowhead Game Studios. Cover source: Gamingbolt