"A lot of games would be canceled": Arc Raiders lead recalls cutting all but 25 people in "desperation" when Nexon "gave us one more try" to salvage the flailing shooter

Arc Raiders was one of the biggest games of last year and is still the extraction shooter top dog months after release, but there was a time when things weren't so smooth sailing for developer Embark Studios. In fact, at one point, the game's production became so rocky that the team had to cut almost 100 developers and send them back over to The Finals.

Embark's production director Caio Braga says as much in a panel from the Game Developers Conference 2026, attended by GamesRadar+, fittingly called WHEN YOUR GAME ISN'T FUN. The lead developer recounts a time when the studio "needed that bigger change, and that bigger change is what we called the reset."

According to Braga, "a lot of games would be canceled" if they were in Arc Raiders' old position, before the devs really nailed down what the game would eventually become, but the team were confident they had something special on their hands and just "had to convince our partners at [publisher] Nexon" that the shooter could be salvaged.

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"They had to have a lot of patience, and they had to make sure they trusted us, so we kept talking to them a lot, right? And they gave us one more try," Braga recalls. "We agreed that this game deserved another try, but again, it needed a reset. So we went down in size to 25 from those 120 and we stopped forcing the game we want, or the games we wanted, all of them. And we looked at the game we had, right? And we had a lot of good foundations in there – we had foundations for a very interesting extraction game, which was one of the options for us. And because we have so much PvP expertise at Embark – a lot of people [on the team] came from PvP games - we could leverage that and make our game even better."

The first thing Braga remembers feeling with the reset was "desperation," but the team soon channeled that into fixing their work flow. "As I said in the beginning, we keep changing the way we work, because phases and the people and what we're building is very different on almost a weekly basis. So it's a lot about hearing the team [to] see what works, throw away what doesn't, and be a bit disciplined about that."

The first thing Arc Raiders testers told Embark after the game pivoted to PvP was "they didn't like the PvP," and they didn't feel any better about its looting: "They were not very happy."