Arc Raiders developers Embark have shed a bit of light on how their looter-shooter changed after shifting away from the free-to-play business model back in 2024. Apparently, it made Arc “drastically easier” to design, in the sense that the Swedish studio felt less pressure to turn players into whales.
That’s my admittedly rather blunt reading of the latest Arc Raiders behind-the-scenes development video, as passed on by GamesIndustry.biz. Embark’s previous multiplayer FPS The Finals was free-to-play, and Arc Raiders was due to follow in its footsteps, but as design director Virgil Watkins explains in the video, this made it harder to “respect the player’s time” when plotting out Arc’s extraction shooting.
“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,” he says.
“For this type of title, it made it kind of hard to respect the player’s time in some of these areas around crafting or sessions and things like that. We were almost like ‘slow down a little bit’. It felt a little bad so as soon as that decision came down, it made us able to make things take the amount of time that felt appropriate in a lot of ways.”
Watkins offers some examples of how Embark changed Arc Raiders after deciding to charge for it upfront. “Crafting no longer has timers on it that you need to wait out or the amounts of things we are asking you to collect are a little more rational,” he comments. “Effort and outcome match each other a little more precisely.”
Elsewhere in the video, Embark CEO and founder Patrick Söderlund makes the obvious point that Arc would have landed more players upfront as an F2P game. “A free-to-play game would attract a lot of players and we can maybe get tens of millions of players for a while,” he says. “But as we started building what would become the rebirth of Arc Raiders, the team started to ask me questions – was free-to-play the right model for us?”
If Arc is now an old-timey “premium” release, it’s still not worlds away from many F2P games in its reliance on grinding resources out of the maps. It also has microtransactions – cue a recent player controversy about pricing – which are ubiquitous among videogames today, but are more prevalent in F2P releases for obvious reasons.
“It’s helped a lot, but on the other side, launching it with a price point, we still need ways to monetise that doesn’t feel predatory,” Watkins concedes of the switch to upfront payments in the video. “That’s also been an interesting challenge.”
At the time of writing, Embark are gearing up for the first Arc Raiders expedition. This basically lets you reset much of your progression – including your inventory, blueprints, player level, skill points, quest progress – by sending your Raider off to join a caravan of pioneers, once you’ve offered up sufficient resources for the trip.
Expeditions operate according to an eight-week schedule, with the first one due to “leave” on 21st December. In return for packing your current character off to the frontier, you’ll get increased XP gain, Scrappy materials, bonus skill points, more and cheaper weapon repairs, and more stash space. It’s a novel way of characterising the routine live service practice of bumping players back to square one, both for “prestige” and so that we have an incentive to climb the ladder once again.
