A little over a week after the arrival of the new war bonds, the new bugs accompanying this content (excessive fire damage and poor armor specification in particular) are still not fixed and are added to an already long list of known issues. A discontent that is increasingly being heard among a group of players who would prefer that Arrowhead concentrate more on resolving its bugs, rather than on adding new regular content. Enough to relaunch the debate on how to maintain a long-term service game, in which the CEO of Arrowhead came to participate.
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The scales of Helldivers 2
The whole discussion started from a statement from the community manager of Helldiverse 2 from a player complaining about the pace of bug fixes. “It's important for us to maintain the pace we promised – one war bond per month – but just as important as fixing bugs and technical problems. There's only so much time in a work week. » And it's on a Reddit thread speaking about community expectations, that director Johan Pilestedt, who is never the last when it comes to interacting with his players, took the floor to give an interesting take on the subject.
“We want to offer the best in the industry and we calibrate our efforts between corrections and new features. It's easy to say 'just fix it, don't add it', but in reality the competitiveness of this industry means we have to do both to stay relevant.” The brutal reality of the service game model explained simply, where the provision of regular new content is vital to maintain high player retention. A need that Arrowhead must fill, while the studio has chosen not to grow disproportionately, even after the explosion in popularity of its game upon its release, to avoid the painful moment when the studio will have to lay off en masse in a few years when the game has less momentum. Still according to Pilestedt, the studio now has around a hundred people in its team and promises to “do better in the future.”
The man specifies that the studio is still looking for a balance between these two missions and takes care to specify that Sony has nothing to do with the studio's prioritization choices. “Arrowhead is independently owned by the people working at the studio and is not influenced by shareholders in the traditional sense. Of course, we have a great partnership with Sony where we agree on our objectives to achieve. But there is no requirement or forcing per se. »