ARC Raiders Changes Update Strategy After Live-Service Pace Exhausts Team

Embark Studios changed how it updates ARC Raiders after the demands of maintaining the live-service shooter left developers exhausted and repeatedly pushed the team beyond its available capacity.

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal said the studio underestimated how difficult the transition from shipping a finished game to continuously supporting millions of players would be. Embark has since moved away from monthly major updates in favour of two larger content releases each year, while smaller fixes and live-service work continue between them.

Grøndal said Embark entered live service with a plan for how much content it could produce and how frequently those updates would arrive, but the workload quickly became harder to control once ARC Raiders was in players' hands.

Developers were not only building new content. They also had to respond to bugs, exploits, balance problems and the constant maintenance required to keep the game running. Those tasks repeatedly consumed development time that had originally been set aside for future updates.

Grøndal said Embark was "constantly overshooting" its capacity, making it difficult to plan reliably. Content sometimes had to be reduced or reworked because there was not enough time to finish everything the studio had originally intended.

The pressure also began affecting the people doing the work. Grøndal described the team as "super tired" and said there was a period when developers were "super unhappy" while running a series of demanding milestones.

Embark was still getting updates out, but Grøndal felt neither the production process nor the consistency of the finished content was where the studio wanted it to be.

The studio responded by changing the structure of its post-launch development rather than simply asking the team to maintain the same pace.

Embark announced in May that major ARC Raiders content updates would move from a monthly plan to two larger releases each year. Regular live updates still continue for bug fixes, balancing, store changes and other maintenance, but bigger additions now have substantially more development time.

Grøndal said the previous model left too little room for iteration. Instead of repeatedly moving straight from one release deadline to the next, the slower cadence is intended to give developers time to test ideas, revise systems and produce updates that have a larger effect on the game.

The change is therefore not only about reducing workload. Embark also believes the longer development windows will result in more substantial content and a more consistent level of quality.

Protecting the development team is a particularly personal issue for Grøndal, who said he previously experienced severe burnout while working at Electronic Arts.

After shipping a Battlefield game, Grøndal said he had pushed himself hard enough that he eventually needed five months of sick leave. He cited that experience while explaining why Embark cannot build a long-term live service around developers continually working at an unsustainable pace.

For Grøndal, maintaining ARC Raiders over several years depends on keeping the people who created it healthy enough to continue doing their best work. He said Embark needs a production structure that allows developers to remain creative while preserving a reasonable work-life balance.

The first major release under that slower cadence arrives with Frozen Trail on October 8. Embark describes it as the biggest ARC Raiders update since launch, with the team having focused on it since the update strategy changed earlier this year.