Embark Studios’ extraction shooter Arc Raiders was never intended to be a live-service game. While that was the case during its early free-to-play plans, it’s switch to a priced release came with plans for updates, but not to the sheer quantity expected of a fully live-service release.
On release, Arc Raiders was a colossal success, making back six times its budget in just over a month with millions of players across all platforms. While player counts have declined, this huge launch pushed the team to quickly switch to live-service development, which left many “super unhappy”.
“Transitioning to live service is going to be f**king hard,” executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told Game Developer in a recent interview. “Everyone said that to me. I’ve even said it to other people. I was mentally prepared for it to be hard, but I wasn’t completely prepared for how hard it was.”
After the launch of Arc Raiders, the game received almost weekly patches and monthly major updates, but that has since slowed down. Now, Arc Raiders is focused on a few major updates a year that are actually game-changing additions as the pace of earlier weekly and monthly releases burnt the team out.
“The team is super tired,” the producer said. “We’re putting out content as fast as we can, but it’s not enough, and perhaps it wasn’t necessarily interesting enough as well.” While Grøndal is “proud” of the work that was put out, they revealed that the team “were super unhappy” working on the game as it became a content churn rather than a place for real ideas to flow.
“They were running really hard milestones and that wasn’t fun and challenging, so we had to do something,” he said. “The players were also complaining, and I don’t think the consistency was high enough.”
The reality is that game development teams are filled with creative people, and the churn of live-service actually stifles creativity more than it helps it. There’s always something that needs to come out, and the rapid pace of content often dictates that anything releases rather than something of exemplary quality.
While every gamer wants more content for the games they love, Grøndal explained that burnout is devestating for a project. “I was burned out. We’d just shipped a Battlefield game [when I was at EA] and I kept pushing so hard that I had to take a break for five months and go on sick leave because I was completely broken,” he recalled. “We talk about burnout and it’s obviously bad, but being burned out feels super shitty to be honest. It’s terrible. I don’t recommend it to anyone. Also, it means we lose good people who might be out [of work] for a very long time.”
Right now, Arc Raiders is still in a healthy place, and more content is coming. While player counts may be lower, the game still has a dedicated community, and a dedicated development team working on the game. Yes, updates are slower now, but they should be more substantial, and there’s years of ideas still planned for the extraction shooter.
