Arc Raiders Dev Embraces Player Count Dip for Bigger Updates

Ever notice how every game's player count becomes a spectator sport on Steam Charts? For Arc Raiders, that spotlight has been intense since its huge launch, and the numbers have naturally dipped. But according to executive producer Aleksander Grøndal, the team at Embark Studios saw it coming and decided to push forward anyway.

In an interview with GamesRadar+, Grøndal opened up about the challenges of live service development. "Of course, as developers we look at all our numbers and discuss what we want to do," he says. "At the same time, when we did the change of the update cadence, we also accepted the fact that we would have less players over a period of time, with the hope that we could reengage those players with more interesting pieces of content like Frozen Trail."

That doesn't mean it's easy to watch. "It's not something that you look at and go, 'Oh, that feels great,'" Grøndal admits. "But at the same time, you have to stick to your guns a bit when you make a decision." The decision? Shift to a schedule where a Frozen Trail-sized update drops roughly every six months, instead of chasing an "unsustainable" pace of constant content.

The old way was burning out the team. "We used to work in a way that we had a big test every six months, and we decided what to fix... The team really wanted us to go back to that," Grøndal explains. "They felt like they did a better job. They could spend more time working on improving rather than just completing." The result? Better overall health and happier developers.

Embark knows they can't outmuscle the giant live service games. "We can't necessarily compete with the amount of stuff that some of the large games out there can do. We're just not that large," Grøndal says. Instead, they're leaning on instinct and trust. "What got us here in the first place was the trust in our own instincts... We should continue doing what we're good at, and kind of accepting that that will come with some drawbacks."

With Frozen Trail, it's almost like relaunching the game. The studio now has more experience running a live game, and they're giving bigger updates more room to cook. "There are issues that come up with just being online, and that kind of ate a lot of our capacity," Grøndal notes. "We needed more time to just take care of the integrity of the game, and at the same time give ourselves some space to produce the type of content that we really felt like we wanted to produce."

So if you're out of things to do in Arc Raiders, Grøndal says it's okay to "take a break and play some other games." That's a refreshing stance in a genre that often demands endless grinding. Will you be jumping back in for Frozen Trail? Let us know in the comments!