Helldivers 2 was one of the biggest surprise success stories of last year, selling over 10 million copies and becoming a cultural phenomenon. The alien shooter’s creative director kicked off 2025 by asking fans about their hopes and dreams for Arrowhead Game Studios’ future projects, culminating in a brief exchange about “DEI” and politics in games.
“With 10 minutes to 2025,” Arrowhead CEO-turned-chief-creative-officer Johan Pilestedt tweeted on December 31, “what are your expectations and desires for what the next Arrowhead game will be? I am working on the high concept, but I would love to hear your speculation.”
Hundreds of fans responded. One wrote back, “Never add dei to your games,” referencing the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives which anti-woke culture scolds often use as shorthand for perceived efforts to force progressive values into video games and other art and entertainment. Despite its innocuous roots, DEI has become a loaded term in online debates, not because of what it actually means but for what it symbolizes to certain reactionary groups.
Pilestedt, who has a reputation among the sprawling Helldivers 2 community for speaking often and openly on social media, replied with a more general and ambiguous proclamation about development. “If it doesn’t add to the game experience, it detracts,” he tweeted back. “And games should be a pure pursuit of amazing moments.”
“How would DEI have benefited Helldivers 2?” asked another user. Pilestedt responded, “I don’t like labels. But mankind is united in its extreme xenophobia on Super Earth. #Inclusion so, maybe that’s DEI? I really don’t care. Make good games, don’t make a contemporary political statement.”
The irony of the tight-rope being walked—distancing Helldivers 2 from the current online culture wars while not outright rejecting them—is that the sci-fi shooter is loaded with political allegories, satire, and parodies of fascist propaganda. One of the central wars players fight in the game is for oil. “Helldivers 2 lore is funny and unapologetically political: bugs are oil, bots are commies, ‘Managed Democracy’ is a scam,” reads a PC Gamer headline back at launch.
Pilestedt might mean that Helldivers 2 simply steers clear of any direct references to hot-button issues in contemporary news headlines. That might offer enough distance to inoculate the game from certain modern political controversies, but it also might be a distinction without a difference when it comes to people who consider any game that makes a point they disagree with to be unnecessarily political.
For others, “DEI” is just code for criticizing any game that doesn’t star white guys, as the idiotic reaction by some to Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet reveal trailer has made nauseatingly clear.
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