Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders has been a massive success since its launch. Despite being a paid multiplayer game, the new extraction shooter has managed to sell millions of copies, with concurrent player counts besting titles like Helldivers 2.

Early on in development, the extraction shooter was planned as a free-to-play game, similar to Embark’s previous project, The Finals. However, as the team continued to develop the game, they realised that the concessions needed for free-to-play made the game irrespective of players’ time.

Speaking in the ongoing “The Evolution of Arc Raiders” online docu-series, design director Virgil Watkins explained that a free-to-play product makes certain concessions to ensure income, heightening the grind to keep players contained within the gameplay experience for as long as possible.

“In free-to-play, you need to, in some ways, make things a little stickier than they would be otherwise, take a little more time, a little more grind just so players are more incentivised to stay in and stick into those loops and keep playing your game, and ideally are incentivised and inspired to spend money on that game,” they said.

However, for Arc Raiders, Watkins discovered that strategy “made it kind of hard to respect the player’s time in some of these areas around crafting or sessions and things like that.” When the game was made for a free-to-play business model, the team just didn’t think it was as satisfying as a paid experience.

“It felt a little bad,” Watkins said. “So as soon as that decision came down, it made us able to make things take the amount of time that delt appropriate in a lot of ways… crafting no longer has timers on it so that you need to wait out, the amount of things we are asking you to collect are a little more rational”.

There was also the fact that this opened up Embark to a lot of risk. Arc Raiders was not cheap to develop and, as CEO Patrick Söderlund explained, “a free to play game would attract a lot of players”. However, while the team could “maybe get tens of millions of players for a while”, keeping them required making a game that felt rewarding instead of drawn out.

Arc Raiders has launched as a budget release, but Watkins explains that the team “still need ways to monetise that doesn’t feel predatory”. In game, this has resulted in premium cosmetics for the player and their pet rooster Scrappy (who is based on a real animal). While many players likely won’t jump at the bit for these cosmetics, they’re simply an extra way for Embark to make money on the game.

Right now, Arc Raiders is one of the most popular multiplayer titles around, with players even creating community watchlists to keep track of naughty backstabbers and griefers. It’s a refreshingly unique title, and one that will hopefully be around for years to come.

At the time of publication, Arc Raiders’ next major content drop is the upcoming Cold Snap update. This update will add a brand-new weather condition to the game as well as a new Raider deck and more. Perhaps the new update will bring about a shift in the game’s weapons meta and preferred skill options.