Helldivers 2 was built on an obscure Swedish engine discontinued in 2018: 'Our crazy engineers had to do everything with no support'

You've heard of Unreal Engine and Unity, two engine juggernauts that power most of your Steam library, but you've probably never heard of Bitsquid. It was an obscure game engine used in a handful of notable Swedish indies of the early 2010s. In 2014, Autodesk bought Bitsquid, renamed it Autodesk Stingray, then discontinued it in 2018.

One of the last games released using Stingray was Fatshark's Warhammer 40,000: Darktide in 2022. The newest Stingray game is Helldivers 2.

Responding to an article on game development blog 80 Level, Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilestedt confirmed that their smash hit, PlayStation-published co-op shooter is running on abandonware.

«The project started before it was discontinued,» Pilestedt tweeted. «Our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines.»

One might reasonably think that if Helldivers 2 was still early on in development when Autodesk hung the «closed forever» sign on Stingray, a good option would have been to start over on a different engine, but it's not that simple—Stingray isn't just the Helldivers 2 engine, it's the engine Arrowhead has used in most of its games over its 16-year history, including The Showdown Effect, the 2014 Gauntlet reboot, and the original Helldivers.

Stingray is what the studio knows, and when you have an experienced group of experts in a specific set of tools, you don't give that up lightly. Just ask the fellow co-op shooter aficionados at Fatshark who also stuck with Stingray for Darktide despite starting development after Autodesk killed it.

This is true. Our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines.And yes. The project started before it was discontinued. https://t.co/mz61TnYNGNFebruary 21, 2024

Loyalty could be a factor, too. Arrowhead and Fatshark seemingly have a close relationship with the original Bitsquid founders Niklas Frykholm and Tobias Persson, two Swedish industry