«Asked me what the fuck I’m smoking?»: PlayStation doesn’t appreciate Arrowhead head’s advice not to buy Helldivers 2

The boss of Helldivers 2 gave players honest advice, but his frankness was not appreciated by PlayStation.

Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pylestedt publicly advised against buying the game. But he did not want to discredit the project. The reason for this is excessive popularity of Helldivers 2 immediately after its release.

The project became a hit, and players rushed into cooperative battles en masse, while the servers… well, they simply could not withstand such an influx. The game sold at a frantic pace, and even the developers did not expect such a rapid success. The CEO, realizing the problems with online, decided to take care of it. He wrote to social networks. The company says that those with a limited budget should not rush to buy:

If you have no cash, get it later. While we made a really fun game it’s worth waiting until the servers can support the capacity.

I mean, as a CEO I of course want the game to be as profitable as possible, but if you spent yr last $ and got stuck in server queues I’d be 💔

— Pilestedt (@Pilestedt) February 20, 2024

When he publicly stated that those who don’t want to deal with problematic servers should hold off on buying Helldivers 2, the call from the publisher was not long in coming. It’s quite logical advice, isn’t it? But Sony didn’t think so. Pylestedt admitted that after this post on social media, he received a call quickly:

The situation demonstrates perfectly how developers and publishers can have different views on the success of a game. Although, PlayStation was right to be unhappy that the studio’s CEO was publicly recommending against buying their product right now.

Today, despite server problems, Helldivers 2 remains incredibly popular. Arrowhead has been implementing temporary solutions, such as login queues, to ease the load. Last year, players organized «rebellion» via PlayStation Network and work restrictions in 170+ regions, so Sony had to change its mind. By the way, because of this, the manager of the Helldivers 2 community on Discord was in trouble.

A game designer from Ensemble Studios told a similar story. Two decades ago, Microsoft forced the developers of Age of Empires 2 to add another faction almost before the release Haste and historical inaccuracies led to the arrest of an employee. Cases like this prove that even when developers sincerely want to take care of their community, publishers have one priority — sales.

Source: PC Gamer