During Helldivers 2’s toughest moments, Arrowhead turned to Hello Games and No Man’s Sky for inspiration and motivation to stay resilient.

I’m not sure I’ve seen people swing back and forth on a game so rapidly like they have with Helldivers 2. It’s had a few hiccoughs here and there, which has made for some tough times for developer Arrowhead, at least in terms of battling the accursed “mixed” rating on Steam (and lower). In a recent interview with The Game Business, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani quite accurately noted that it’s been “one heck of a roller coaster year” for Helldivers 2, and also went on to speak about what it was like clawing its way back from low ratings – all the while having to explain to Sony about summer holidays in Sweden.

As Jorjani noted, at one point in time Helldivers 2 went as low as 30% positive on Steam, which as he says, “usually that’s the death knell for a game, but we came back from that.” The bigger problem came after some balancing tweaks which brought it down to 19%. “I think [19%] was the lowest. Games that get 19% user score do not generally recover.”

Except, at that point, everybody was on vacation. “When I was asked to step in [as CEO], they gave me the keys to the car… and told me: ‘we’re going off on vacation, because we haven’t been taking much over the last few summers,'” Jorjani explains. “And I was like: ‘we’re running a live service game, people can’t be off for the next three months!’ But that’s what happens in Sweden. We take our summer vacations very seriously.”

Jorjani had to explain this to SIE Studio Business Group CEO too, not exactly an easy task – “maybe the lowest point during my tenure so far” as the Arrowhead CEO put it – but a plan was formed, and reviews have swung back around to positive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jorjani said he was “inspired” by Hello Games and No Man’s Sky, perhaps one of the most infamous games of the past decade when it comes to changing the rhetoric surrounding it. “The game was hyped, then bombed, and then they put the head to the grindstone and just updated the game,” Jorjani noted.

Of course, Hello Games had a lot more work to do to right that spaceship, it took years to get it to where it’s at now. The response to Helldivers 2 has certainly been a lot more volatile, and one could pretty easily argue that that fact speaks to where we’re at with live service games: kick up enough of a fuss, and you’ll more or less get what you want. In any case, fingers crossed for Arrowhead that Helldivers 2’s second year goes a bit smoother.