Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt has slammed the current spate of video games industry layoffs as “unnecessarily brutal” and said that companies needed to learn lessons to avoid the same painful cycle of “death and rebirth” in future.
Speaking today at GDC 2025, in a session attended by Eurogamer’s Ed Nightingale, Pilestedt put the blame for layoffs on the decisions made by company bosses that they should chase industry trends such as yet more battle royales, just because a big few have become successful.
Instead, Pilestedt continued, the video game industry needed to take more risks and simply make a wider variety of games to cater to the medium’s ever-growing audience. That such widespread layoffs were happening despite more people playing games overall was “ridiculous”, Pilestedt commented.
“The games industry is caught in a vicious circle of death and rebirth,” he said. “Every so often we lay off thousands of people suddenly, and then nobody understands why, and I think it’s just because we converge.
“We will always go through the cycles of death and rebirth, but now that cycle is unnecessarily brutal because we don’t diversify enough. We need to make more types of games because people are playing more than ever and still we are unable to stay in business. It’s ridiculous.
“People are playing more than ever and still we are unable to stay in business. It’s ridiculous.”
“If everybody stopped making battle royales and made [different] games we wouldn’t be in this position.”
While the majority of video game workers losing jobs were those on development teams, the people calling the shots on which projects were getting greenlit were the ones deciding to “play it safe” by following trends, Pilestedt continued.
“A lot of publishers – I’m sorry, my dear publisher friends – try to play it safe by taking safe bets,” Pilestedt said. “But one thing that I can guarantee is that those safe bets are a death sentence for the studios that try to make it.
“We are in the business of taking risks, and if you don’t take risks, we’re never gonna be able to achieve success. Few people believed that Helldivers would amount to anything, and yet here we are.”
Earlier in the same talk, Pilestedt shared his thoughts on game design, and said that “experiences need to be spiky” in order to stand out.
“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.”
Too many games were trying to please too many people, in other words, or make something too similar to something else that has come before.
“You can’t overtake if you stay in the same lane,” Pilestedt continued, “making a game 10 percent better than something [that already exists].
“I love Escape From Tarkov, but if I were to make Escape from Tarkov that’s a little bit [more] my preference, I would just be making Escape from Tarkov. And I would not be able to compete because people would rather play Escape from Tarkov than play my Escape from Tarkov.
“Unfortunately everybody was chasing after the battle royales.”
“We have a convergence problem in the games industry. Minecraft is doing well. Battle royale is doing well. Live-service is the big next thing. All the developers move into the same position to compete for the same niche.
“And what happens? Lots of unsatisfied players are saying, ‘Well, what about my needs? I want to play some games and I have lots of money to spare.’ Unfortunately everybody was chasing after the battle royales.”
Concluding his session, Pilestedt challenged the games industry to “take more risks” in order to “avoid mass failures” from chasing trends.
“Make your games according to your studio’s foundation and style,” he said. “Don’t copy others instead, think about what you wanna make and take a gamble on it.”
Earlier this year, Pilestedt announced he would be taking a sabbatical after working for 11 years on the Helldivers series, but would start developer Arrowhead’s next game on his return. The sci-fi shooter has been a huge success for publisher PlayStation, with more 12m copies sold in three months and a Helldivers movie now on the way.