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Making games is hard. It requires ingenuity, dedication, and no small amount of luck to ship anything decent. Ciao Braga, the production director on Arc Raiders, spoke about how failure shaped that game at GDC 2026, and he used a particularly pointed clip from former Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pro Michael 'Shroud' Grzesiek to illustrate his point.
"Game dev in a nutshell," says Grzesiek, joking about the esoteric difficulties of the medium in reaction to Embark talking about a "hail mary" plan to put something out. "Guess what? We failed," Braga says, in a talk attended by GamesRadar+. "We really did – twice. We failed that plan, and then we actually did a bigger change."
The pivot of Arc Raiders is well-documented, as it went from being a co-op shooter to more extraction-based, over the course of several years. This "reset," as Braga calls it, led Embark to releasing one of the biggest games of 2025, and the defining multiplayer experience of the year, despite competition from Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
While the sound bite is fitting, Grzesiek's somewhat synonymous with fighting drones in Embark's PvPvE maelstrom because he's been such a huge cheerleader of it. He actively campaigned for Arc Raiders to be more recognized at The Game Awards, despite the project already having a nomination for Best Multiplayer Game.
Getting the plaudits and recognition required taking a remarkable gamble, and Braga's clear about those circumstances. "It's something that worked for us, turning an almost canceled game into a success story," he says. "And that success story kind of ends like this, as the game is today, as you can experience."
Following on from The Finals, Arc Raiders is where Embark truly found something that fit the zeitgeist. Among all the elements that helped, having a prominent streamer doing your PR for you never hurts, and it's good Braga gave a nod to that.
