It’d be an understatement to describe Arrowhead studios’ “Helldivers 2” as a success. With over 12 million copies sold on Steam and PS5, and 450,000 concurrent players on Steam, it’s been the only truly successful live service released during Sony’s high profile pivot to this controversial business model.

I recently jumped into the fray myself, and I can definitely see the appeal. The frantic, against-all-odds gameplay, the tongue-in-cheek hyper-nationalistic setting, and the drip make up a fantastic multiplayer shooter experience. And despite the fact that there is friendly fire for everything from your weapons to your stratagems, I have yet to run into a player intentionally trolling my team in over 50 hours of playtime. That speaks to the quality of the fanbase that has been cultivated by this game. 

For the uninitiated, you play as a Helldiver, a soldier for Super Earth, tasked with spreading managed democracy across the galaxy! Unfortunately, your liberty-inspired mission is under threat from the Terminids (giant freedom-hating bugs), the Automatons (socialist robots), and the Illuminid (democracy-hating squid people).

Your job is to drop onto a planet, and tackle various objectives to spread the good word of managed democracy! There is, however, one antagonistic force that permeates the world of “Helldivers 2.” A force that is faceless and unknown. A force that is so powerful that no orbital laser or napalm strike can touch it. A force known simply as “Joel.”

Joel is the soubriquet of the Arrowhead developers who serve as the Game Master controlling the enemy faction’s movements on the solar system map, Major Orders community-wide side missions that all players work towards completing for rewards, and Personal Orders for individual side missions. Joel serves to keep players engaged by making the galactic war more interesting, giving a strategic mind to enemy movement decisions, and giving players incentives to fight different factions instead of resting on their laurels.

Think of the Dungeon Master (DM) in “Dungeons & Dragons.” Joel serves as the DM for “Helldivers 2.” But unlike the beloved tabletop RPG, this is a live-service game. As such, there is a strong incentive for Arrowhead Studios to prioritize player engagement over everything else to keep the money flowing in. This leads me to wonder how much does Joel really put his thumb on the scale?

I’ve been DMing a weekly “D&D” campaign for four of my friends for over a year, and I’ve put my thumb on the scale from time to time. Typically, this is done for a few reasons:

1. I vastly overestimated the party’s ability to deal with a combat situation.
2. I vastly underestimated the party’s ability to deal with a combat situation
3. I’ve already rolled like four natural 20s in this combat scenario, and I don’t want a total party kill just because a bunch of goblins keep getting critical hits.

Like Joel, my interference is to keep my players engaged in the game. Unlike Joel, I am not financially motivated to keep my players locked in for days on end.

Now, I’m not here to claim that Arrowhead is solely motivated to keep engagement high at the expense of everything else. I’m sure many of the people who work there sincerely care about their players’ enjoyment. However, there was one move Joel made recently that made me question whether this was a purely financial decision to rob their playerbase out of completing a Major Order.

How “Helldivers 2” is monetized is surprisingly interesting. The base game itself is $40, but they have a battle pass structure called Warbonds. There’s one free Warbond, and the rest have to be bought using the premium currency. You can earn this currency in missions as well as getting them from the Warbonds themselves, so if you save them up, you can earn all the Warbonds in game.

To purchase something within a Warbond, you have to spend Service Medals — an in-game currency that you can find in gameplay, or by completing missions. The harder the mission, the more you get, but they cap out at the hardest difficulty around 15. You can also gain 15 Medals by completing Personal Orders. But, if the community completes the Major Order all together, you get to go home with a whopping 50 medals. These Medals can directly turn into premium currency. This leads us to what happened over the weekend of May 25, 2025.

During this recent weekend, the “Helldivers 2” community was about 80 percent completed toward a Major Order to complete missions against the Illuminid on Super Earth with 24 hours left before it expires. All of a sudden, a second Major Order popped up asking us to kill Automatons.

Now, I’ve never seen two Major Orders active at the same time, but to make things worse, the second Major Order was set to expire in 72 hours instead of the usual one week period. Again, a first for me.

Seeing this made me start to question why they would try to intentionally split the playerbase. The Automatons aren’t attacking Super Earth currently, so there’s no real lore reason to explain why you would send soldiers across the galaxy to fight a faction while your home base is being invaded by someone else.

If they wanted to switch up players’ faction incentives, they could have just waited a day. The only thing that really makes sense to me is that they were trying to split the player base to make it harder to get the Major Order reward. Which, of course, ended how you’d expect.

Players missed completion by two percent, and there are no consolation prizes. It felt like the DM wanted us to lose. And instead of wanting us to lose for a cool story reason that will pay off down the road, it feels like it was mostly to keep us on that engagement hamster wheel — running constantly, but not going anywhere.

Keep in mind, I’ve only been playing “Helldivers 2” for a few weeks now. Overall, I’m having a pretty great time. I enjoy the crazy missions, the unique story bits each week, and seeing how everything can play out differently from session to session.

However, what happened this past weekend really made me question how much players really impact the effect of the larger meta narrative, and how much is just a DM putting his thumb on the scale.      

Image Credit: “Helldivers 2,” Arrowhead Studios