Helldivers 2 director criticizes publishers for "unnecessarily brutal" layoffs stemming from following trends
Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has described the ongoing industry-wide layoffs as "unnecessarily brutal," claiming that higher-ups' decisions to follow trends have resulted in the significant job cuts.
The details:
Speaking at this year's Game Developers Conference (via Eurogamer), Pilestedt blamed the recent wave of layoffs on higher-ups at publishers chasing trends, specifically the battle royale genre. He explained that the layoffs are "ridiculous" given the industry's growth and that if more risks were taken to create unique experiences, publishers would find more success.
Pilestedt stated that, while the industry will always go through cycles of "death and rebirth," its current wave of layoffs is "unnecessarily brutal" and stems from a lack of diversity in games themselves. "We are in the business of taking risks, and if you don't take risks, we're never gonna be able to achieve success," he said. "Few people believed that Helldivers would amount to anything, and yet here we are."
The director also shared his thoughts on game design, stating that a project attempting to recreate an existing title but "better" will likely fail to gain traction. He used the extraction shooter Escape from Tarkov as an example, claiming that if he had tried to make a similar title that was a "little bit" more in line with his own preferences, he would have simply created the same game. "Game design is about experiences," Pilestedt noted. "If you balance out all the chaos, you make an uninteresting game. Balance is the polishing of an experience... but if you smoothen that out too much, it will just be bland."
The gaming industry has lost an estimated 34,800 jobs since the beginning of 2022, with over 14,600 cuts in 2024 alone. While many companies have cited the current economy as the main cause of the layoffs, executives have been accused of failing to take responsibility for poor decisions. Following the short-lived release and shutdown of PlayStation's hero shooter Concord, it was questioned why Sony had invested millions of dollars in resources and years of development in the title, given that it had already missed the era of Overwatch-like team-based shooters.
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