Helldivers 2 studio CEO says capacity issues aren’t just a case of ‘buying more servers’

The CEO of Arrowhead Game Studios has told players asking for more servers that the situation isn’t as straightforward as that.

The game was released on PS5 and PC on February 8, but has been particularly popular on the latter, comfortably breaking concurrent Steam player records for a Sony Interactive Entertainment published game.

However, this unexpected success has come at a price – the game has been facing technical issues, several of which appear to have spawned from the sheer number of players attempting to play it.

Over the past weekend the game was frequently reaching server capacity, with its official X account acknowledging the issue and explaining that the team has been working on a fix.

Now, as spotted by PCGamesN, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has responded to a (now-deleted) tweet from a player who asked why the studio can’t just buy new servers to deal with the crowds.

“It’s not a matter of money or buying more servers,” Pilestedt explained. “It’s a matter of labour. We need to optimise the backend code. We are hitting some real limits.”

Shortly after this, another user told Pilestedt to “stop tweeting and fix” the problem, causing him to reply that the developers needed space to work on the issue without extra pressure.

“Yes! Good idea,” he replied, “I will sit behind the engineers and ask them ‘are we there yet?’

“Or… I could let the engineers work independently, towards our common goal, without me as the CEO pestering them at every moment. I wonder which one will work best?”

Elsewhere, Pilestedt conceded that the studio probably shouldn’t have offered double XP to players to make up for the servers overloading, because it just resulted in players crowding the servers again to benefit from the offer.

“Yeah, in retrospect this was maybe not the best idea,” he replied, followed by a laughing emoji and the hashtag #MyFault.

Helldivers 2‘s popularity shows no sign of slowing down yet on Steam – at the time of writing, it broke its peak concurrent record again in the past 24 hours, hitting 411,359 concurrent players in total according to SteamDB.