Helldivers 2 studio CEO steps down to take on creative leadership role

After successfully shipping Helldivers 2, Arrowhead is going through some changes. Internally, the studio's outspoken CEO, Johan Pilestedt, has decided to step down, passing on the CEO role to Shams Jorjani, who was previously part of the team that shipped Arrowhead's 2011 game, Magicka.

While Pilestedt will no longer be CEO, he will be more involved than ever in the Helldivers community. Now, he will be taking on the role of Chief Creative Officer and Chairman, allowing him to spend more time on the creative side of Arrowhead's projects, like Helldivers 2.

Speaking with GI.biz, Arrowhead's new CEO, Jorjani, expanded a bit further on the decision, saying: “We were both at a stage where we're wondering what's next in our careers, and we realised we probably couldn't quite get to those places if we didn't have the other one to help us get there.”

Adding on to this, Pilestedt said: “When it comes to the overall direction of the organisation, I am still the chairman. So me and Shams are still going to have strategic conversations on how we are going to take Arrowhead into the future.”

On Twitter, Pilestedt gave a more lighthearted statement, saying he cares “more about weapon balance than QBRs”. In this context, QBR means quarterly business report, it seems quite clear that Pilestedt has wanted to devote more of his time to creative aspects of game development, rather than the business side.

This news also comes shortly after learning that Arrowhead wants to slow down its content rollout cycle a little bit. So far, the team has been shipping a new ‘Warbond' for Helldivers 2 every month, and weekly major orders have kept players engaged with the narrative side of the game. However, weekly and monthly content updates aren't easy to keep up with as a small studio of around 100 employees. As a result, we may start to see slightly longer gaps between Warbonds.

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KitGuru Says: As much as I love Helldivers 2 and the work Arrowhead has been doing so far, the content updates have been rapid. This pace didn't seem that sustainable to me, so I hope Arrowhead can find a middle-ground to give the game some extra longevity, and give the developers more time to polish up new content.

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