Games should “earn the right to monetise”, says Helldivers 2 director

Helldivers 2 creative director and Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt believes games should “earn the right to monetise”, adding that whilst players are welcome to “support this title” by buying microtransactions, Arrowhead is “never forcing anyone to do so”.

The comments come in an X/Twitter thread in which Pilestedt responded to a tweet in which a player pointed out that super credits can be earned just by “playing the damn game”.

“We really applied ourselves to not make it [pay-to-win] even though items are functionally different,” Pilestedt said (thanks, PCGN). “The only item that’s [pay-to-win] is the revolver – which will win you any ‘cool gun’ competition.

“Only (minor) problem is that it’s not that good.”

Replying to a comment further down in the thread, Pilestedt added: “‘You have to earn the right to monetise’ – I truly believe that.

“If people want to support this title they have an option, but we are never forcing anyone to do so.”

Arrowhead Game Studios pushed out a “rapid patch” on Steam on Friday to address its matchmaking issues. Yesterday, it deployed the same patch to PS5 players, too.

However, director Mikael Eriksson did admit earlier on the game’s Discord channel that “a full matchmaking solution is in works” but may take “a few more days” to test, so players may still experience some issues until a more permanent solution is rolled out across both platforms.

Helldivers 2 is now Playstation’s biggest Steam launch, clocking up over 150,000 concurrent users on the PC platform over the weekend.

Until this point, Sony Santa Monica’s God of War reboot held the record with 73,529 simultaneous users, which is less than half of Helldiver 2’s current peak of 155,926.