Arrowhead Game Studios has no plans to make Helldivers 3, studio executive Johan Pilestedt has said, arguing that a sequel would mostly compete with a Helldivers 2 that is still healthy two years after launch.
Pilestedt made the comments in an interview reported by PlayGround.ru on 23 October. “The main competitor for Helldivers 3 would be Helldivers 2,” he said. “Building a separate sequel only makes sense if it is different enough that both games can exist side by side. Right now, it makes far more sense to improve Helldivers 2 every day than to throw away its potential.”
The progress problem every live-service sequel faces
Pilestedt’s reasoning cuts at a problem the whole live-service genre shares with Helldivers 2’s community-first Warbonds design: a numbered sequel resets player investment. A player who has spent two years earning weapons, Warbonds and battle scars has little reason to start over in a sequel that plays much the same. Helldivers 2 itself was a hard reset of the top-down original, moving to third-person shooting with realistic weapon handling, and Pilestedt has said that the only justification for a third game would be an equally sharp break.
“Right now I think a sequel wipes everything and forces players to start over,” he said. “A continuation turns the game into a lifelong hobby, like LEGO or Warhammer.”
Pilestedt contrasted Arrowhead’s approach with studios that he said treat players as a source of short-term profit. He argued that when a community is actively recruiting friends and keeping the game alive, no sequel is needed, a framing he has pushed before, having said in September 2025 he wanted to turn Helldivers 2 into an “eternal game.” He also described the game as a “third space,” a community players can leave for months or years and still find people waiting when they return.
What the studio is doing instead
PlayGround.ru reports that about 95% of Arrowhead’s roughly 150-person team is focused on Helldivers 2, with a small internal group prototyping the studio’s next game. The report also noted 47,097 concurrent players on Steam on 23 October, excluding consoles, a solid figure for a game that launched on 8 February 2024. Pilestedt did not name a release window for the studio’s next project.
