We've spoken a bit about Helldivers 2 because it is the property on everyone's mind for a bunch of very good reasons. It's a glowing reminder that big companies can facilitate small teams to punch out pure gold in the exact right circumstances, and even the absolute pits of the industry itself holds some small nugget of potential that can be nurtured appropriately. Who'd have thought I'd ever consider anything stronger than disdain for Live Service games? Certainly not myself! And whilst Suicide Squad is busy drippling out the remainder of it's content to increasingly lacklustre results, Helldivers is busy sizing up it's theoretical unending war of content. Hell, it all makes me wonder if there's someone out there crazy enough to make a pure survival game which I don't find to be utter pants. Wait... I guess that was already made and it was Minecraft, wasn't it. Shucks- I wanted something to look forward too...
But with Helldivers 2 perched where it is, at the height of their pride and ambition, the danger for them falling off is all the greater. I mean sure, the game has already waxed from being at the eminence of gaming pop culture, but that's natural solidification of 'next big thing' players versus entrenched and enfranchised players. Same thing happened with Palworld and I'm sure we'll see a spike in those game numbers with the coming of their first major content update in the next few weeks. I'm talking about the big blunders that flew across the world like a swift wind. I'm talking about the Sony account debacle that sparked a mass dislike campaign across Steam and cost a community manager their job when they told the audience in too-plain-English how to assert dominance over the big faceless megacorpo. How do you prepare for the stumbles, not just the recovery method, but sheer avoidance from the get-go?
That is surely the great dragon that Arrowhead Games are shaping up to face in the coming years as they buckle down their studio to aim for becoming an evergreen studio with the respect and aplomb of former Blizzard. As essential to Sony as Naughty Dog, but with a focus on Co-op friendly games of a higher class that bring back that much ignored sub-genre of gaming. Their ambition is lofty but I'm glad someone is trying to fill that gaping maw left in the industry after Blizzard lost literally everything that made it a place worthy of respect and devolved into whatever it is you'd call the company now. A mistake? I'm happy with 'A Mistake'. But in that pursuit we've already felt some shockwaves of the changes coming which signal some sort of change in the status quo- even if what that change might be can only be predicted by soothsayers.
Founder of Arrowhead, Johan Pilestedt has stepped down as the CEO of Arrowhead in order to focus more closely on his roles as Chief Creative Officer and Chairman, and needless to say this has sent something of a cold chill across the spines of those investing themselves in Helldivers' continued success. On the hand that Johan is probably favouring, the man appears to be more of a creative than a business man, thus giving ground to people better suited for those roles expediates the running of Arrowhead. On the otherhand- Johan seemed to be one of the few games company CEOs who really had a good head on his shoulders. He believed in the right aspects of the hobby and genuinely seemed to push the company that direction. People born to naturally navigate CEO roles are best suited typically because they don't value the same things that actual humans do. They are clinical, statistical and they tend to ruin creative ventures. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Inevitably. I can't say whether or not Arrowhead is making the right move.
The history of the games industry is full to the brim of examples presenting player-first studios that lost that special spark chasing something else- typically the corporate mandate. Bethesda, for one, were beloved heroes of their player base after turning out several 'Game of the Year' contending games which ruled both the Fantasy and Sci-fi genre of open world games. Bethesda were the kings of the open world and if you partake in mods one might argue that they still do. However it would be straight ignorant to just brush past the very plain fact that Bethesda don't appear to be where they were in terms of fan respect. Fallout 4 made some very odd choices, particularly with the pricing of genuinely non-functional DLC. Fallout 76 was a strange diatribe off in a direction that Bethesda had no experience in as a company which resulted in an immensely predictable disaster. And Starfield kind of feels like it wasn't made with any of the series fans in mind. Is this the future that awaits going the more corporate friendly route?
Because at the end of the day we're talking about companies that have to abide by a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to increase value, but how that is translated really depends on the mind interpreting the concept of value. A creative mind might deduce that value relates to the goodwill of the brand and the quality of their output, and thus would justify prioritising decisions that raise the prestige of the art championing that knock-on. A analytical and corporate mind might see a much more direct route to value being upping the avenues for which the company can extract funds from the player, decreasing the prestige of the brand, but scoring quicker revenue bumps for show and tell. Arguably both achieve the goals they set out to, but one certainly scuppers the future of the artform and industry much more tangibly than the other.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this is, rather coincidentally enough consider the quoted intent of Arrowhead, Blizzard. Once upon a time that company stood for the very heart of championing the player and what they want out of their games, which fostered the kind of brand loyalty that most other companies would just kill for in the modern age. But somewhere along the way the talent that mattered started to peel off on their own ventures, and the corporate culture began to shift and pervert in a direction that quickly became cynical and out-of-touch. Just comparing the amount of penny-pinching avenues in the Diablo Immortal Mobile scam compared to Diablo 3 is enough to show where modern mandates place the priority for the company- and it's result ended up coring the entire company.
But there's plenty of examples why the move that Arrowhead is doing is exactly what the company needs in order to go that extra level- until we see what comes of this shift in leadership it's impossible to say for certain what direction this will lean them. On one hand I'd like to think that the team know what they're doing, who they're putting in charge and that there's a certain level of trust implicit there. On the otherhand, I've seen plenty bigger companies that very much should have known what they were doing fall the way of the easy payday. You can't ever convince me it wasn't a cognizant decision to ship Cyberpunk 2077 before it was done, it was a gamble made and ultimately lost that the backlash would be outweighed by the profits. I pray Arrowhead never find themselves plopped in front of a similar switch as a direct result of this decision.
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