Helldivers 2's meteoric rise to fame has been a double-edged sword for Arrowhead Games. As a consensus panel of other veteran developers noted earlier this month, the only way studios can prepare for server loads is through fortune telling – and when those predictions are wrong, chaos ensues. Speaking to PC Gamer, Johan Pilestedt, CEO of Arrowhead Games, described the atmosphere at the studio's headquarters as it quickly became clear what a daunting task his team had ahead of them.
“I don’t know if it’s because we’re Swedes or something,” Pilestedt jokes. “We tend to have a lot of self-doubt about what we actually do. I mean, we knew we had a special game… there are several people there.” [at the studio] who have, you know, over 2,000 to 3,000 hours in the game.”
But a development team's fondness for its product is rarely a predictor of success – fate, discoverability and market conditions can be cruel for even the best games. “Of course, as the release got closer, people started to get a little more worried, wondering, 'What's going to happen?', 'The pre-orders are looking really good'.”
Arrowhead didn't notice the wind changing for the better (and chaos) until the game was almost over: “[We thought]: If this matches Magicka, it means that first day sales would be 10 times higher in the first week and 3 times higher in the first month. We started doing the math.”
Two days. That's the amount of warning Arrowhead Games has received about something big happening could will come.
“The realization comes quite suddenly, around February 6th (two days before the game's release): If these numbers hold up, will our servers keep up? No, not at all,” says Pilestedt, laughing. “Like, 'What do we do now?'” Still, “The team hit the ground running right away… I was like, Phew, let's make sure we can move around here to some extent, because this is a lot more than we ever expected had.”
Despite the work the studio put into preparations, the full extent of the player count lovebomb only became clear once the good ship Helldivers 2 was already off the dock. Pilestedt paints a picture – a celebration around a war room in which the alarm quickly sounded.
“So: release night. We had a celebration in the studio where we streamed the game and had fun with the community… but a lot of people were in what we call the “war room” where we watched the performance. At some point it became clear that in a few hours this was actually going to be a big problem.'”
Even when things collapsed, it came like a tidal wave. “We saw the graph, simple – players go up and up. The people we watched could play the game well, and most of the time it held up? But then all of a sudden we got this massive drop and the servers started freaking out – backend engineers fixed the issue in no time.”
Despite the problems that followed, the team was “ecstatic,” says Pilestedt. “Very incredulous – both from a 'we have to solve the problems' point of view, but also from the reception of the players… a lot of players were still able to play, but those who couldn't, of course, had a very loud voice.” Opinion on that, and of course we want everyone to be able to play.
For the most part, Helldivers 2 is running at full speed. The server capacity was increased to a whopping 700,000 players, and at least from my personal perspective, I haven't had many problems playing since then – with a few exceptions, some tricky matchmaking and a rare crash here and there. It was a rocky start, but Arrowhead Games came out the other side just a little bruised and battered and with bright plans for the future.
