Johan Pilestedt, soon-to-be-former CEO of Arrowhead Games, will be stepping down to take on new responsibilities at the company as revealed by the man himself on Twitter today .
This move comes off the back of a difficult month for Helldivers 2, as the game suffered tremendous backlash over a controversial decision —courtesy of Sony—to require PC users to sign up for a PSN account in order to continue playing the game.
That’s not the only sign of trouble in intergalactic paradise, though. A mixture of comments from Pilestedt (as well as dev team sentiment passed on by community managers) paints a picture of a studio re-evaluating itself in the wake of massive success, and looking to maybe slow down the pace .
That’s not to say the rapid-fire deployment of Warbonds and new content in Helldivers 2 hasn’t been exciting, but I’m glad to see I wasn’t off the mark when I said the studio was burning the candle at both ends , wrestling with balance issues and technical difficulties since day one. It feels like everybody needs a breather.
Pilestedt is looking to “spend MORE time with the team and 100% of my focus on the games and community!” as Arrowhead’s Chief Creative Officer—which is a commendable move, considering that CCOs tend to rank under CEOs on the corporate ladder. Pilestedt seems committed to leading from the front.
(Image credit: @Pilestedt on Twitter/X.)
In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Pilestedt further outlined his thoughts behind the change. “I realised that running an organisation of over 100 people,” he reasons, would put him between a rock and a hard place: “I will [have to choose] between deepening my love for game creation, or the business track.”
Replacing Pilestedt will be Shams Jorjani—who gained over a decade experience at Paradox interactive before leaving the company in 2021 . “I reached out to Shams,” explains Pilestedt, “We had a lunch, and we asked him that if I was to reconsider running Arrowhead for the next decade, and I needed to hire a new CEO, would he be interested?
Jorjani himself has high hopes for the future as Arrowhead Games’ resident business guy: “What I’ll be bringing to the table is organisation and leadership … It’s a lot of the, frankly, boring business administration stuff that is a necessary part of running a company, which is hard to do when you’re also juggling the chairman’s hat and the creative director’s hat and also being the one who is in the trenches doing a lot of the designing that Johan has been doing over the years.”
Pilestedt has always been remarkably outspoken and involved in the community for a CEO—cheekily hinting at upcoming stratagems , denying the existence of flying bugs , and stepping in when relations between the community and its development team got a little hairy on the game’s Discord. In other words, this shift makes a certain kind of sense:
“I finally came to the proper conclusion that I will have to follow my heart,” says Pilestedt. “It’s not only right for me, but it’s also right for the organisation. Having a reluctant CEO is not something that will turn out that well, I think.”
