Arc Raiders Embark developers have shed some light on how their looter shooter has changed since moving away from the free-to-play business model back in 2024. This apparently made Arc “significantly easier” to develop, in the sense that the Swedish studio felt less pressure to turn players into whales.
This is admittedly a pretty rough reading of the latest Arc Raiders. behind the scenes development videohow conveyed GamesIndustry.biz. Embark's previous multiplayer first-person shooter Final was free-to-play, and Arc Raiders was meant to follow in its footsteps, but as design director Virgil Watkins explains in the video, it made it harder to “respect the player's time” when planning a shootout to evacuate Arc.
“In a free-to-play game, you need to kind of make things a little more challenging than they would otherwise be, spend a little more time, a little more effort, just so that players have more incentive to stay in those loops, to continue playing your game, and ideally they have the incentive and inspiration to spend money on that game,” he says.
“In these types of games, it was difficult to respect the player's time in some areas related to item creation, sessions and the like. We almost wanted to “slow down a little.” It was a bit of a bad thing, so once that decision was made, we were able to make things take the amount of time that in many ways felt appropriate.”
Watkins offers several examples of how Embark changed Arc Raiders after deciding to charge upfront fees for it. “In crafting, there are no longer timers that you have to wait for, or the number of things we ask you to collect is a little more streamlined,” he comments. “Effort and outcome match each other a little more closely.”
Elsewhere in the video, Embark CEO and founder Patrik Söderlund makes the obvious point that Arc, being a F2P game, would attract more players. “Being a free-to-play game will attract a lot of players, and we may be able to attract tens of millions of players for a while,” he says. “But as we started building what would become the revival of Arc Raiders, the team started asking me questions: Is a free-to-play game right for us?”
Although Arc is now an old-fashioned “premium” version, it is still not far from many F2P games, as it relies on mining resources from maps. There are also microtransactions – hint recent dispute between players about prices, which are common in video games today, but are understandably more common in F2P releases.
“It's helped a lot, but on the other hand, launching it at a price, we still need ways to monetize that don't feel predatory,” Watkins admits of the move to upfront payments in the video. “It was an interesting challenge too.”
At the time of writing, Embark is preparing for the first Arc Raiders expedition. Essentially, this allows you to reset most of your progress – including your inventory, blueprints, player level, skill points, quest progress – by sending your raider to join the pioneer caravan as soon as you offer enough resources for the trip.
The expeditions operate on an eight-week schedule, with the first set to “depart” on December 21st. In exchange for sending your current character to the frontier, you'll receive increased experience gains, patchwork materials, bonus skill points, cheaper weapon repairs, and more stash space. This is a new way of characterizing the routine practice of returning players to their starting position, both for “prestige” and to give us an incentive to climb the ladder again.
