Helldivers 2 runs on Autodesk Stingray, an engine Autodesk discontinued on January 7, 2018 — six years before the game launched. Arrowhead Game Studios started the project before the shutdown and then shipped a 20-million-copy live-service hit with no vendor support.
That is the short answer to what engine Helldivers 2 was made in: not Unity, not Unreal, but the Swedish Bitsquid stack renamed Stingray. Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt put it bluntly: the project started before discontinuation and “our crazy engineers had to do everything, with no support to build the game to parity with other engines.”
Why this choice matters
Helldivers 2 is a 2024 cooperative multiplayer third-person shooter developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It launched February 8, 2024 for PlayStation 5 and Windows, with an Xbox Series X/S release on August 26, 2025. Wikipedia now credits it with over 20 million copies sold and over $700 million in revenue, and lists it among the best games of 2024 with multiple awards and nominations.
Search data shows durable curiosity around the tech, not just the game. Bing suggestions for this topic cluster around engine questions — “what engine is Helldivers 2 made in,” “what game engine is Helldivers 2 made in,” “what engine was Helldivers 2 made in,” “what engine does Helldivers use” — the exact niche long-tail pattern indie tech articles can own without fighting Unreal/Unity head terms.
For players, the stack explains the game’s feel: four-player squads, procedural 1-3 mission operations, difficulty from Trivial to Super Helldive, Hellpod drops from a Super Destroyer, directional-input Stratagems, and friendly fire that is always on. For developers, it is a rare case of abandonware winning at live-service scale.
What Stingray/Bitsquid actually was
Autodesk Stingray, formerly Bitsquid, was a 3D engine supporting Windows, Linux, PlayStation 3/4/5, Xbox 360/One/Series X/S, iOS and Android. It was written in C++ with Lua as its scripting language, and exposed visual scripting plus Lua and C++ for advanced users. Contemporary coverage stressed that Lua kept the codebase lean and light compared with heavier engines.
The lineage is specifically Swedish. Bitsquid AB was founded in Stockholm in 2009 by Niklas Frykholm and Tobias Persson, ex-Grin engineers, with owners from Fatshark. Fatshark shipped the first Bitsquid game, Hamilton’s Great Adventure, in 2011. Autodesk acquired Bitsquid in June 2014, retooled it in 2015 as Stingray tied to 3ds Max, Maya and Maya LT, sold it by subscription, then admitted it could not compete with Unity and Unreal. Version 1.9 in August 2017 was the last release; end-of-sale took effect January 7, 2018.
Other commercial users were almost all Swedish: Fatshark’s Vermintide games and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, Arrowhead’s The Showdown Effect, the 2014 Gauntlet reboot, Helldivers (2015), and finally Helldivers 2 in 2024 — six years after support ended.
Why Arrowhead did not switch
PC Gamer’s 2024 reporting makes the reason practical, not romantic. Stingray is what Arrowhead has used for most of its 16-year history. When Autodesk closed it, the studio already had experienced experts in that toolchain. Rewriting early work on Unreal or Unity would have thrown away muscle memory, tools, and shipped multiplayer code from Helldivers 1 and Gauntlet.
Loyalty and proximity helped. Arrowhead and Fatshark both stuck with Stingray after 2018 — Fatshark even started Darktide after the kill — and both were early investors in founders Frykholm and Persson’s next attempt, Our Machinery. That attempt was abruptly cancelled in 2022 with users told to delete it, which left the two studios holding the torch for the dead stack.
The timeline matters: Helldivers 2 work was revealed as a PlayStation 5 third-person shooter project in December 2020, but engine choice was locked years earlier because production started before 2018. Once you are two years into netcode, destruction, and Stratagem systems on a known base, “just port to Unreal” is not a weekend task.
What the dead engine gained — and cost
| Area | What Stingray gave Helldivers 2 | What no-support cost |
|---|---|---|
| Team speed | No retraining; designers already thought in Bitsquid Lua + visual scripting | No docs, no patches, no console SDK help from Autodesk; every parity feature hand-built |
| Build size and determinism | Lean C++/Lua core suited to dense AI hordes and squad-friendly logic | No modern out-of-box live-service backend; Galactic War, Major Orders and Control Center logic had to be owned end-to-end |
| Art pipeline | Direct 3ds Max/Maya toolchain the team already used | Frozen 2017 renderer; lighting and effects modernization fell on Arrowhead engineers |
| Risk | No surprise license change or forced upgrade mid-production | No hiring pool; new engineers had to learn abandonware on the job |
The Steam page today still describes the loop plainly: third-person squad shooting with pistols, machine guns, flamethrowers, turrets and airstrikes, aim-down-sights, blood and dismemberment, and squad mates killed by explosions or friendly fire. That honesty about friendly fire is easier to read as an engine story once you know the stack: with no vendor to build you a clean anti-grief layer, you design grief into the fiction.
Arrowhead’s own studio statement frames the same idea from the design side: “A game for everyone is a game for no one,” plus three values — playfulness, believability, sociality. Playfulness means hilarious mishaps are the point. Sociality means the best moments happen between players. Always-on friendly fire plus four-Stratagem loadouts plus a shared Booster is exactly that philosophy compiled.
My take: abandonware was a moat, not just a handicap
Most coverage stops at “impressive they pulled it off.” That misses why it worked. Here is my reading, labeled as analysis rather than vendor fact:
1. No roadmap is a feature for live service — if you can afford it. Unity and Unreal change networking, pricing, and rendering under you. Stingray changed nothing after 2018. That stability let Arrowhead own its riskiest layer — the real-time Galactic War, Major Orders, Personal Orders, Warbonds that never expire, and staff-observed mission tuning at launch — without waiting for an engine vendor. The cost was upfront engineering. The payoff was control during the 2024 launch spike when a vendor patch would have been fatal.
2. The real engine was Stockholm, not software. Only Arrowhead and Fatshark shipped serious Stingray games because knowledge was tribal. Founders, ex-Grin engineers, and two studios formed a closed support network. Outsiders saw missing docs; insiders could call the person who wrote the scheduler. If you were not in that network, “use Stingray” was terrible advice. That is why search interest is high but clones are zero.
3. Constraints became fiction. Stratagem input codes (arrow-key sequences under fire), Hellpod dispersion, and friendly fire look like design brilliance — and they are — but they also map neatly to what a small C++/Lua engine does well: deterministic inputs, spawned payloads, simple friendly-damage rules, no elaborate physics negotiation. My contrarian claim: Arrowhead did not overcome Stingray to make Helldivers funny; Stingray’s limits helped keep Helldivers legible enough to be funny at 4-player scale.
This raises the Ship of Theseus question PC Gamer flagged: after six years of Arrowhead modifications, at what point does it stop being Stingray and start being Arrowhead’s engine? My answer: when the Galactic War layer became the product. Players do not log in for the renderer. They log in to vote on the Democracy Space Station, push Major Orders, and argue about Malevelon Creek. The dead renderer was good enough; the living war was not replaceable.
What indie developers should actually steal
Do not download a dead engine. You cannot — sale ended in 2018 and 3ds Max Interactive was gone by 2022.
Steal the decision rule instead:
- Pick the stack your team already debugs at 2 a.m. Arrowhead’s 16-year familiarity beat any feature list.
- Own one irreplaceable online layer. For Helldivers 2 it was the community-driven war. For your game it might be replays, mods, or daily orders. Do not outsource that to a plugin you cannot fork.
- Turn missing tech into social rules. If you cannot afford smart matchmaking or grief filters, make friendly fire, shared resources, and revive taxes explicit like Arrowhead did.
- Budget for parity. Pilestedt’s “had to do everything” is a hiring plan: engine generalists, console compliance experts, and build engineers for every year you stay on frozen tech.
Lua itself remains a portable lesson even if Stingray is gone. Lua is described by its maintainers as powerful, efficient, lightweight and embeddable, the leading scripting language in games, fast in real applications, portable from consoles to phones to microprocessors, and tiny — around 293K for the interpreter on 64-bit Linux with a liberal MIT license. That is why Bitsquid chose it, why Garry’s Mod and countless titles embed it, and why learning Lua still transfers even though Stingray does not.
Try the teamwork loop in a browser first
Helldivers 2 demands a large install, cross-play setup, and three friends who tolerate your airstrikes. If you want to rehearse the underlying skills — callouts, objective priority, and not killing your squad — lighter browser shooters help.
For squad communication and objective modes, Hazmob FPS: Online Shooter is a useful trainer. It runs seven multiplayer modes including Team Deathmatch, Domination, Capture the Flag, and no-respawn Elimination, with Quick Battle for instant matchmaking and Custom Match private lobbies for friends plus clan play. Practicing Domination rotations and Search-and-Destroy patience there maps directly to Helldivers operations where winning fights and winning the mission are different jobs.
For third-person aiming and cover thinking, BuildNow GG is the closer mechanical cousin. It is a free third-person build-and-shoot game with V-Arena duels, BoxFight close quarters, Zone Wars shrinking zones, and private parties for up to six players. Learning right-hand peeks, box-and-reset edits, and high-ground takes in Freebuild and Aim Training builds the same habits that keep you alive when Automatons flank your Hellpod landing.
Neither browser game replaces Helldivers’ Stratagem chaos or Galactic War stakes. They are low-friction places to learn the social part Arrowhead cares about: playfulness under fire, believable positioning, and stories you retell.
Bottom line
Helldivers 2 bet on a discontinued Swedish engine because Arrowhead already knew it cold, started before the shutdown, and preferred owning every fix to relearning a live engine mid-war. The result — 20 million copies on abandonware — does not prove dead tech is better. It proves familiar tech, fully owned, can beat better tech, rented.
If you remember one number, remember 2018. Every Helldivers 2 patch since then was written without a vendor. That is either inspiring or terrifying depending on whether you have Arrowhead’s engineers.
Verified October 20, 2026 against Helldivers 2 and Bitsquid/Stingray references, PC Gamer’s February 2024 engine report, Lua language documentation, Arrowhead’s official site, and live EasyHub game pages.
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