Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that ‘easy’ additions and updates are sometimes really hard: ‘That’s half a year’s work. That takes six months’

I don’t envy game developers sometimes, nor do I envy the assumptions they have to hear time and time again from their players. Assumptions like, ‘Why didn’t they add a theft/crime system?’ or ‘Why don’t they just do this, it’s so simple?’ and, most infuriatingly, ‘These devs are so lazy’. As a critic, I might absolutely dunk on the end product—but I’m never in doubt that folks worked hard, even when it’s a stinker.

That same frustration comes clear in some responses to a recent mega-interview by GamesRadar‘s Austin Wood—which is well worth a read. It’s an assemblage of dozens of developers across the industry, who’re keen to dispel myths about how they make their games.

Both Arrowhead’s CCO Johan Pilestedt and Palworld’s publishing manager John Buckley got their say and, as two studios who found recent, unexpectedly massive success, they both have some very similar takes on the subject.

“The one thing people misconstrue the most is—if you think about when movies are made,” Pilestedt explains, “You get an actor and they’re there, and you tell them what to say. But games are so meticulously crafted. You have to build the actor from the ground up.”

Players, Pilestedt adds, often say, “‘Can’t they add this or do that’,” but “most of the time, the decisions you make (especially the larger the game gets) have so many consequences that cascade. [It makes] something that seems easy really hard, or something that seems really hard super simple. It’s unintuitive unless you’ve worked in games to see how they’re created.”

Buckley echoes this later in the piece, as well—though he also side-eyes the live-service churn of our modern gaming landscape. “I think gamers have just become so used to this kind of constant cycle that they’re now applying it to every game they play.”

It does seem that way, sometimes—and while I’m guilty of having a moan about game content cycles myself on this very site (though I maintain that Square Enix isn’t a small studio, and probably has enough money to hasten Final Fantasy 14’s glacial patch schedule a bit) I try to at least understand that those issues, as always, stem from outside and logistical factors rather than the sin of sloth.

Buckley adds: “A new island in Palworld, that’s half a year’s work. That takes six months. And when it comes out, people are super excited, but you just get so many nasty comments before that about these things. And you try to explain it, and there’ll always be a few gamers who get it, and they really appreciate that dialog, but quite a lot of them don’t.”