Arc Raiders devs open up on launch exhaustion
An executive producer says the team was super tired and unhappy after the shooter's huge launch, prompting a slower content cadence.
Arc Raiders has had what looks like a dream first year for a live-service shooter, launching to huge numbers and holding a community through a steady cadence of updates. Behind that, leadership is now speaking plainly about the cost. Aleksander Grøndal, executive producer on the game, told Game Developer that moving to a live-service model was harder than he had prepared for, even after years working on major releases at EA including entries in Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront, which carried substantial offline options rather than the always-on demands of a shooter like this one.
Grøndal described a team worn down by answering to millions of players continuously. He said the developers were super tired, pushing out content as fast as they could while it still did not feel like enough, and that the group was deeply unhappy for a stretch, which he believes fed into player dissatisfaction too. The studio has since slowed its output, aiming for larger and less frequent rollouts rather than monthly drops, because constant bug fixes, exploit patches and upkeep left little time to plan. Grøndal pointed to his own past burnout as a reason to protect the team now.
Tags
- arc-raiders
- business
Sources
Where this story ran: one outlet on 29 September 2026. The summary above is written by GamersGuild; the links go to the original reports.
Games in this post
ARC Raiders
ARC Raiders is Embark Studios' extraction shooter: squads drop into a surface overrun by machines, take what they can carry and try to reach an elevator before other players do.