LogIn"I can give you 16-player lobbies tomorrow. And 16 FPS," jokes Arrowhead CEO.
From 1983's M.U.L.E. to 2025's PEAK, four-player lobbies have remained a staple of co-op video games for longer than many of those reading this article have been alive, with the list of titles sticking to this cap being far too long to name.
One that we will name, however, is Helldivers 2, a 2024 sensation that continues to attract tens of thousands of players every single day. One of those players has recently asked just how feasible it would be for Arrowhead to expand the game's lobbies to include more people, receiving a response from the CEO himself, who explained the studio's reasoning behind keeping the co-op capped at four.
Arrowhead
Still, there's a grain of truth in every joke. While Jorjani's 16-player example shouldn't be taken literally, it's very likely that altering something as integral as the maximum lobby size could unleash a chain of consequences that could potentially make the game unplayable, mostly due to the engine Helldivers 2 is powered by.
As we discovered in 2024, Helldivers 2 is running on the Bitsquid engine, a.k.a. Autodesk Stingray, which was discontinued in 2018 and declared dead by its own developers. As a result, Arrowhead had to heavily modify the engine themselves to run a 2024 game on it, suggesting their version of Stingray is held together with so much glue and duct tape that modifying core components could not only seriously harm optimization, but also other aspects of the experience as well. That, in turn, would almost certainly spark massive community backlash, lower player numbers, damage the game's reputation, reduce profits, and so on – all just to enable bigger lobbies. Clearly, not an exchange one would call fair.
Reaffirming this view is Arrowhead COO Johan Pilestedt, who said in 2024 that "the engine, network architecture, UI, performance, and difficulty can't cope" with bigger lobbies.
Previously, Jorjani also confirmed that the team is looking into the issue of Helldivers 2's size on PC nearly doubling since its release – from 70 GB to over 130 GB – and being almost four times larger than on consoles for no apparent reason.
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