Lately, there’s been a rather disturbing trend in the video game industry from the developers/publishers. They tend to make video games that “aren’t complete” or “aren’t polished” by the time they launch, and then dedicate tons of time to trying to “fix it” in post-launch updates or try to have plenty of post-launch content announced before they even know if the main game will be a success. This has backfired on many teams, and it’ll continue to do so when the quality isn’t there. However, in the case of Helldivers 2, despite a few bumps at launch, they’re doing well on PC and are actively trying to bring in more people to help create more content for players as a result.
The game is averaging about 200K in concurrent players over on Steam, which is a huge deal and proof that they’re doing right by the gamers. Yes, they are having to patch things to fix some of the game’s issues, but they’ve been cranking out those patches and fixes quickly so gamers can enjoy the title. Once they did, things grew even more.
So much so that Johan Pilestedt, the game’s director and CEO at developer Arrowhead, has revealed on Twitter that his team is going to be recruiting more devs to further help refine the game and “beef up” their content plans:
“With the success of Helldivers 2, we are going to start looking for more amazing developers that can help us accelerate and beef up our content plans. Jobs will be going up soon, but if you are a senior dev there’s always the “open application”. Enlist today with Arrowhead Game Studios.”
So, why does this little piece of news matter so much? Well, it would’ve been easy for the Arrowhead team to go the path of other developers and state that they had “long post-game launch plans” and focus more on them than the main game. Instead, they made their main game, launched it, fixed the launch bugs that almost everyone has, and now that they KNOW that people are enjoying their title, they will do more post-launch content to keep them entertained.
One of the reasons that gamers are seeing issues with Xbox, Sony, and many developers under their banners is that they ASSUME that gamers will come to their titles just because of what they show and stay once it’s launched. But that’s not how things work! Make a quality game, THEN build up from there once the fanbase is locked in. That’s how it SHOULD work.
