Johan Pilestedt, creative director of last year’s multiplayer breakout hit Helldivers 2, has come forward to speak candidly on the state of the video games industry, noting how studios are chasing trends to their own detriment, and that taking risks should instead be the key to success.
Speaking at a panel during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Pilestedt spoke on the ailing state of the industry, stating that it is “caught in a vicious cycle of death and rebirth”, with the culprit being “convergence”, how developers are competing to follow the next big trend, which leads to genre fatigue and subsequent poor performance, bringing up live-service games like battle royales as an example to his point.
“We will always go through that cycle of death and rebirth, but now that cycle is unnecessarily brutal because we don’t diversify enough,” he explained. “We need to make more types of games, because people are playing more than ever, and still, we are unable to sustain our business. It’s ridiculous. If everybody stopped making battle royales and made [different types of] games, we wouldn’t be in this position.”
Pilestedt then directed his criticisms on publishers, those who called the shots on projects but did not have to face the immediate consequences of a game’s failure – with the unfortunate position instead being filled by its developers – explaining that their desire to “play it safe” was what led to their downfall.
“A lot of publishers — I’m sorry, my dear publisher friends — try to play it safe by taking safe bets. But one thing that I can guarantee is that those safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make it,” he concluded, “We are in the business of taking risks, and if you don’t take risks, you won’t be able to succeed. Few people believed that Helldivers would amount to anything, yet here we are.”
Pilestedt’s statements certainly hit hard considering just how many recent games have flopped because of their push to follow trends, such as Warner Bros. Games’ Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which both suffered from the decision to adopt a live service format, or the more infamous case of Firewalk Studios’ Concord, which tried and failed to enter the already saturated hero shooter genre without providing any substantial gameplay innovations. It might be too much to ask for, but here’s hoping his comments serve as a stark reminder and a lesson for game companies to learn from moving forward.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
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