The CEO of Arrowhead, Shams Jorjani, has explained how the developer learnt to cater to its new fanbase following Helldivers 2's massive success. 

Speaking to The Games Business, the exec said that his company's mantra was that making a game for everyone was in fact making a game for no one; it had a specific audience in mind for Helldivers 2. However, after it brought in millions of players after its massive launch, Arrowhead had to change how it thought about development. 

"We did not set out to design Helldivers for a wide audience," Jorjani explained. 

"But if you make an uncompromising game experience for a very specific audience, you have the ability to resonate far outside of it. We've seen this happen many times in video games and even outside the games. From Software were very brutally hard when every other game was about hand-holding, and now there’s an entire genre born out of that.

“So we did not make Helldivers for six million Call of Duty players. We absolutely didn't. But six million Call of Duty players bought our game. And they are interested in different things compared to, say, the audience that comes from Escape From Tarkov or Arma, which were some of our more influential games.

“So ‘the summer of pain’, or whatever we want to call it, was painful in part because it was hard for us to reconcile how to stay true to the studio fundamentals, while dealing with the business realities of having so many different voices screaming at us.”