"Ultimately, we asked 'why are we doing this?'": the creators of Arc Raiders wildly underestimated how hard it is to make a live service game

# Embark's Arc Raiders Stumbles Under Live Service Burden

Embark Studios built Arc Raiders with live service ambitions it couldn't sustain. The extraction shooter launched with plans for monthly post-release content drops, a cadence the team discovered was wildly unrealistic once development collided with reality. Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal now admits the studio "wildly underestimated how hard it is to make a live service game."

The human cost became apparent quickly. Team members burned out. The studio found itself "constantly overshooting our capacity," pushing staff past reasonable limits to hit self-imposed monthly update windows. The cycle became unsustainable, forcing leadership to confront a basic question: "Why are we doing this?"

This confession matters because it reflects a persistent blind spot in the live service industry. Studios underestimate the operational overhead required to maintain these games. Monthly updates sound straightforward in pitch meetings. The reality involves content creation, bug fixes, balance patches, server maintenance, player support, and community management happening simultaneously across a live audience. One delayed patch derails the entire schedule. One critical bug can damage player trust weeks into a month.

Arc Raiders launched in 2023 as a free-to-play extraction shooter developed by Embark, a relatively young studio backed by venture capital. Extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov and DMz (the Call of Duty version) occupy a hardcore niche. Players expect regular content and balance updates to keep the meta fresh. Monthly updates became the initial promise.

Embark's situation echoes across the industry. Bungie faced similar struggles with Destiny 2, publicly reducing content cadence after burning out teams. Rocksteady Studios abandoned a live service Wonder Woman game after months of development, realizing the model didn't fit their game design or studio culture. Massive Entertainment shifted Star Wars: The Old Republic's update strategy after years of aggressive timelines.

The live service graveyard is crowded with ambitious schedules that collapsed under their own weight. Players demand frequent content. Publishers demand recurring revenue. Studios demand their teams maintain work-life balance. These three forces cannot all win simultaneously.

What separates successful live services from failures often isn't the game design but the operational planning. Fortnite, Valorant, and Helldivers 2 succeed because their studios built infrastructure and team sizes around sustainable content pipelines. They didn't inherit monthly update expectations from an unsustainable launch promise. They scaled expectations to match capacity.

Grøndal's honesty signals a shift at Embark. The studio is recalibrating what Arc Raiders can be and what its team can deliver without exhaustion. That recalibration should have happened before launch. It's a painful lesson that other studios currently in pre-launch live service development are watching closely.

For Arc Raiders specifically, the extraction shooter market is unforgiving. Player bases expect competition-level balance updates and regular meta shifts. If Embark cannot sustain a meaningful update schedule, retention suffers. The extraction shooter space is crowded enough that casual players have options elsewhere.

Embark's public acknowledgment of this failure serves a purpose beyond the studio itself. It validates the burnout complaints from industry workers. It demonstrates that live service games require fundamental honesty about scope and capacity from day one. Building the audience is easy compared to keeping them satisfied when your team is exhausted.