Helldivers II game engine is a discontinued Autodesk Stingray — is it a problem?

Surprisingly, Helldivers II has been built on Autodesk Stingray — the engine discontinued in 2018. There won't be new projects on it since you can no longer get it legally — in 2018 it turned into 3Ds Max plugin and in 2022 even this form was discontinued as well. And players are now concerned if the studio will be able to keep up with the development of such a popular game since their primary tool is dead.

Previous versions of the engine (called Bitsquid back at a time) were used for Escape Dead Island, Hamilton's Great Adventure, Krater, Gauntlet, Helldivers, Magicka: Wizard Wars, Magicka 2, The Showdown Effect, War of the Vikings, War of the Roses, Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide.

As you see, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and Darktide are fairly recent projects and still have certain support. They are playable, look good and utilize modern technologies. But even for them Autodesk Stingray is a limitation. And overall there are only two major studios behind all these games — Fatshark and Arrowhead.

And this is why Arrowhead Game Studios engineers were checking Unreal Engine 5 as the alternative for the future games and even to transfer their modern projects. But this wasn't decided yet and it's too early to speculate. More than that: the team has the source and was able to modernize Stingray for their own needs without any support from Autodesk. And they are still able to keep their version up with some modern technologies.