At this year’s Montreal International Game Summit (MIGS), I had the chance to sit down with Linda Tiger, COO of Arrowhead Game Studios, to talk about leadership, live-service challenges, and navigating the explosive success of Helldivers 2. Tiger’s journey into games was anything but linear—from her early days gaming on the Commodore 64, to QA roles in the UK, to production roles at studios like Ninja Theory, Grin, and eventually Paradox Interactive.

After seven years at Paradox, an unexpected phone call from a former colleague convinced her to consider Arrowhead, though she admits she originally anticipated joining a studio in crisis, not one launching one of the biggest surprise hits of the year.

Tiger joined two weeks after the release of Helldivers 2, during the game’s astronomical rise in player count, and suddenly found herself helping to steer a live-service title unlike anything she had worked on before. “There was no playbook,” she told me. “I expected damage control – but instead it was: go, go, go.”

The rapid scaling, combined with the studio’s commitment to keeping its culture intact, forced Arrowhead to rethink its structure while maintaining the intimacy and identity of a 100–150-person team. “That spark that made Arrowhead Arrowhead—we can’t lose that,” she emphasized.

Our conversation also touched on live-service design, community-driven storytelling, and the unique chaos that makes Helldivers 2 feel alive. Tiger spoke about the studio’s “game master” approach, where planned scenarios can be derailed by unexpected player choices, like the moment the community collectively rejected a “cool” reward to instead “save the children.”

For Arrowhead, these moments are the magic of a living game. Balancing this unpredictability with technical limitations, platform demands, and long-term planning remains one of the studio’s biggest ongoing challenges. As for the future, Tiger stayed tight-lipped, but hinted at “interesting times ahead” for Super Earth and its defenders.

Arrowhead remains fully committed to Helldivers 2 while quietly developing ideas for future projects. A key point Tiger and the team is committed to is cultivating the game to be a “hobby” for players, something they can leave, return to over and over again and feel welcomed back into the experience by the community itself.

You can hear the full conversation above, where we dive deeper into live-service strategy, studio culture, and how Arrowhead plans to keep its unexpected mega-hit thriving.