Embark says moving from free-to-play made designing Arc Raiders “drastically easier”

Swedish developer Embark Studios has said that moving away from free-to-play in favour of a premium business model made the games “drastically easier” to design in some ways.

In a new episode of the company’s ongoing ‘The Evolution of Arc Raiders’ behind-the-scenes video series, the firm discussed how it struggled to find the right balance between risk and reward in the extraction shooter genre.

The studio’s debut title, The Finals, launched as a free-to-play release, but Embark decided that this wasn’t the right fit for Arc Raiders; this move made creating the game “drastically easier”.

“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,” design director Virgil Watkins explained.

“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.

He continued: “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; effort and outcome match each other a little more precisely. 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. That’s also been an interesting challenge.

Embark CEO and founder Patrick Söderlund added: “How do we adapt to what the market wants? A free-to-play game would attract a lot of players and we can maybe get tens of millions of players for a while. 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?”

Arc Raiders was initially announced as a free-to-play co-op shooter back in 2021, but two years later, it transitioned into a PvPvE extraction shooter.

In June 2024, Embark revealed that the game had also shifted from free-to-play to a premium business model.

When it debuted in October 2025, Arc Raiders became the “most successful global launch” in Embark parent company Nexon’s history.