Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Shams Jorjani took to the official Helldivers 2 Discord server to address something the community has suspected for a while: the studio underinvested in its engine, and the technical state of the game is still not where the team wants it to be. The admission came amid growing frustration from players over crashes, performance drops, and stability issues that have persisted through multiple updates.
Jorjani was direct about it: “We’ve underinvested in our tech that we’re now finally doing something about.” He also pushed back on the idea that the engine itself is the core problem, telling fans that “engines, including Unreal, yield back what you put into them,” and that “one isn’t ‘better’ than another,” even if they’re technically discontinued. The real issue, according to him, is that Arrowhead simply didn’t invest enough in it, and now they’re paying the price.
Helldivers 2 runs on Autodesk Stingray, the discontinued game engine originally known as Bitsquid. Autodesk killed the engine in 2018, but Arrowhead had already been building on it for years, the studio used Stingray across most of its games, including The Showdown Effect, the 2014 Gauntlet reboot, and the original Helldivers.
Switching engines mid-development would have meant throwing away years of institutional knowledge, so they pushed forward. Today, Arrowhead is one of the very few studios still holding a Stingray license, alongside Warhammer 40,000: Darktide developer Fatshark, which means they’re largely on their own when it comes to improving the tech.
The technical debt that’s been quietly piling up
The situation didn’t appear out of nowhere. Jorjani has been open throughout 2025 about the state of the game’s foundations, and the picture he’s painted isn’t pretty. He explained that Helldivers 2 “started as a AA game” before it “grew in scope, then pivoted to a launch title for PS5, then pivoted to F2P, then back to premium,” leaving the game with foundations that were “made for a little bungalow on the beach”, nowhere near equipped to support the massive live service it became.
Jorjani has openly stated that “the technical debt is crippling,” and described the situation with a blunt analogy: “Tech debt is like a garage filled with stuff you just chucked in. We really need to put up shelves in the back to get organized.”
Things came to a head with the Into the Unjust update in September 2025. The update brought a wave of new content, underground hive tunnels, venom-spewing dragon enemies, a massive sand worm, but it also triggered a wave of complaints.
Players on PC reported hard freezes and crashes, while PS5 players saw framerates drop noticeably after previously running smoothly. Jorjani went into the Discord and spent hours responding to frustrated fans, admitting the game’s performance “is not good enough” and that fixes for the most immediate issues were being prepared.
When players pushed for a dedicated performance-only update, the CEO said he’d prefer to avoid that route, but acknowledged he’d do it if necessary, adding that “no one update will tackle all tech debt.” And when the community suggested a repeat of the 60-day action plan Arrowhead used previously, Jorjani shut it down quickly: two months “wouldn’t be enough” because “the fixes that are required are deep engine stuff that take longer to fix.”
What Arrowhead is actually doing about it
Despite the grim diagnosis, Arrowhead isn’t standing still. Jorjani confirmed the studio is now actively investing in improving Stingray internally, with plans to support Helldivers 2 with content for years to come. He’s pointed to RuneScape as the long-term model, saying Arrowhead has “no plans” for a sequel and intends to keep building on Helldivers 2 for as long as the game can go.
One concrete result of that refocused effort already showed up at the end of 2025. In early December, Arrowhead reduced Helldivers 2’s PC install size from roughly 154GB down to about 23GB through a new optional beta, by eliminating duplicated assets that had originally been created to support older mechanical hard drives, cutting the game’s footprint by around 85% with no functional differences.
It was a significant move that showed what the team can do when engineering resources are pointed at a specific problem.
COO Johan Pilestedt acknowledged that the constant pressure to ship updates, new features, and multi-platform support, the game now runs on PS5, PC, and Xbox, has caused technical debt to accumulate faster than the team can address it.
Now that the Xbox launch is behind them, the studio says it has more room to focus on stabilization. Whether that translates into a noticeably smoother experience for players in 2026 remains to be seen, but at least Arrowhead is being upfront about the problem instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
So, are you okay with Arrowhead taking this long to address the engine situation, or do you think they should have acted sooner? Tell us in the comments, we want to know what you think!