In the past month, a rumor spread that one of Sony’s exclusives will soon be released on another platform, with fingers pointing directly at Helldivers 2.
While Helldivers 2 players can currently only spread democracy between game communities on PC and PS5, one of Arrowhead’s community managers says it could “hypothetically” be released on Xbox at some point as well – though the decision is not up to the developers.
Recently, community manager Thomas ‘Twinbeard’ Petersson responded to a fan on the official Helldivers Discord server who claimed that an Xbox release “will never happen.” In response, Petersson simply said, “Who said it will never happen?”
He explains further:
“It’s not up to us but to Sony and Phil [Spencer, head of Xbox] to discuss between them, but hypothetically, if both partners think it will benefit them financially/brand-wise, it may happen. If Sony thinks it won’t happen, it won’t.”
This likely ties back to a point Petersson reiterated in a separate discussion – Sony ultimately owns the rights to the Helldivers title. For this very reason, Arrowhead cannot decide on the platforms Helldivers 2 will be released on, although people like Petersson “wish there were a lot of cool things” for the fans. He explains this by saying:
”When it comes to legal and intellectual property matters, the ‘Helldivers’ brand is owned by Sony, so they have the final say on such matters. But we [of course] provide input and have discussions about it.”
So, it is out of Arrowhead’s hands, but it is reassuring that there is no explicit technical reason preventing the release of Helldivers 2 on Xbox at all, it seems. For some of the most challenging missions, it will certainly be convenient to have support from another army of players, so we hope that Super Earth will be able to liberate Sirius X at some point in the future.
