Embark Studios has grown from a team of over 300 since its its founding in 2018. With a few hundred employees, the Swedish games company has launched two ongoing games: the free-to-play shooter The Finals and the new record-breaking extraction shooter ARC Raiders.
Founded by a team of former DICE employees who spent decades working on Battlefield, Embark is focusing on smaller teams delivering unique games instead of pushing thousands of employees onto a single project. For comparison, Battlefield 6, DICE’s most recent game, was made by a conglomerate of studios, so many employees that many are not even credited within the game.
Speaking in a recent documentary episode of “The Evolution of ARC Raiders”, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund explained that smaller teams are simply more efficient than teams filled with hundreds of employees.
“During my 20 years of building games or more, the first game we built, we were 7 people in an apartment, basically,” Söderlund said. “To then oversee productions with over a thousand people, are the games themselves better? There are more of them, they are higher fidelity, but are they actually better games? How do we move away from productions that are so large that they’re difficult to manage?”
At Embark, Söderlund and the other founders of the studios “making micro-pitches… creating a simple game concept and talking about it for just a couple of minutes,” explained art director Robert Sammelin. “Doing this over and over, we started seeing common thematics, they slowly formed into the initial pitches we wanted to see… one of these became The Finals.”
Nevertheless, even with less people to manage, the development of ARC Raiders wasn’t entirely smooth. Embark employees admitted that there were issues early on with so many people working on ideas without a cohesive whole to bind them together.
“We developed, I think, core mechanics at the same time we were testing out some initial ideas about the game mode itself,” said creative director Stefan Strandberg. “No one was thinking about a larger meta game at that time. Like, what is the actually economy that drives the players’ motivation, and so on.”
Of course, this was also important, with the team needing to find fun in the main mechanics, but it led to a long period of finding the long-term fun with the game. ARC Raiders started off completely differently to what it eventually became, and while it’s now beloved, that old version could’ve been the studio’s first flop.
For now, Embark is still a number of smaller teams working on different projects with The Finals crew toiling away on the popular free-to-play game while ARC Raiders’ team works on additional content for that experience. Additionally, there may be a number of employees working on new “micro-pitches” for new Embark games that launch in the future.
While Embark is still a growing company, it doesn’t seem like the studio will ever shove 1,000 employees onto a single game. While huge releases like Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 thrive on their quick turnarounds with thousands of workers all pumping into a factory of content, it seems that Embark is just into that, and that’s refreshing to see.
