Arc Raiders' success burned out the team, and Embark slowed the update schedule to fix it
Executive producer Aleksander Grondal says Embark kept overshooting its own capacity after Arc Raiders took off, leaving staff exhausted and unhappy. The studio dropped monthly updates to pull the pressure back.
Arc Raiders was one of last year's genuine breakouts, and Embark Studios' executive producer has now described what that did to the people making it.
What Grondal said
Speaking to Game Developer at Gamescom, Aleksander Grondal said he was not completely prepared for how hard running a live-service game would be, and was blunt about the state the studio got into. The team is super tired, he said. We're putting out content as fast as we can but it's not enough.
The mechanism he describes is not crunch imposed from above so much as a treadmill nobody could get off: we were constantly overshooting our capacity, he said, and so it was hard to plan. With more than 16 million players by that point, the gap between what the audience expected and what a studio of Embark's size could actually ship kept widening - and, by his account, the team's unhappiness eventually showed up in player sentiment too.
What changed
Embark's answer was to stop shipping monthly. Roughly four months before the interview the studio dropped that cadence in favour of a slower one, on the reasoning that it needed to play to its strengths and that what it produced would be better, more interesting and higher-quality for it.
Grondal frames this as personal as well as operational. He described being burned out at a previous job at EA, taking five months of sick leave because he was completely broken, and said it is important to Embark to build a framework that allows the studio to be creative while keeping a reasonable work-life balance.
Why it matters
Live-service studios almost never explain why the update schedule slowed down, and this is a rare case of one saying plainly that the old pace was hurting the people keeping it.