After a shakeup at the top of the business and the enormous sales success of Helldivers 2 behind it, developer Arrowhead has said it has a grand ambition to become the next Blizzard or FromSoftware.
In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, former Arrowhead CEO and now Chief Creative Officer Johan Pilestedt and new CEO Shams Jorjani insisted they have no plans to sell the company, but do want to realize their ambition of taking it to the next level, with the developers behind the critically acclaimed and commercially successful World of Warcraft and Dark Souls games a particular inspiration.
"We pride ourselves on being an independent studio," Pilestedt said. "We have to see what the future holds, but there’s nothing in the plans where we want to be acquired by somebody. I want to see how high we can fly. And bringing Shams on board, we have a good potential to realize that future of turning into the next From Software or Blizzard."
Jorjani added: "The goal of the studio is to make really great co-op games. We really want to turn Arrowhead into a flagship studio, where people who want to make these kind-of games say to themselves: ‘I want to work at Arrowhead.’ When we were growing up, we really wanted to work at Blizzard, it was one of the bucket list places to work at. I think Arrowhead has the potential to be that.”
Arrowhead will inevitably grow in size after Helldivers 2 sold 12 million copies in 12 weeks to become the fastest-selling PlayStation game of all time. However, Pilestedt and Jorjani insisted Arrowhead wants to focus on “measured growth”, and has no plans to go public.
“We don’t run the business for monetary gain,” Pilestedt said. “The humbleness and the desire to just make great games is the only reason we exist."
Meanwhile, Arrowhead has sald Helldivers 2's success has brought with it a huge amount of toxicity to deal with even as it works to add more content to the game's live service. To that end, Arrowhead has indicated it plans to take more time with patches in order to get them right.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
