Ahead of Arc Raiders' Frozen Trail update, a veritable relaunch following several quiet months, developer Embark Studios anticipated a decline in concurrent and daily players and chose to go all-in anyway, even if it meant weathering a few months of Steam CCU discourse.
Speaking with GamesRadar+, Arc Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal examines the conversations around the game's player count, which has unsurprisingly declined after a huge launch. This year, Arc Raiders joined the ever-growing list of games regularly put under the microscope of Steam Charts, which, he says, certainly doesn't feel great even when your game is a proven success.
"Of course, as developers we look at all our numbers and discuss what we want to do, what are the things we can look into, what are some of the challenges we're facing," Grøndal says. "We're constantly doing that. At the same time, when we did the change of the update cadence, we also accepted the fact that we would have less players over a period of time, with the hope that we could reengage those players with more interesting pieces of content like Frozen Trail. So we were kind of aware of it.
"But, of course, it's not something that you look at and go, 'Oh, that feels great.' That's not what I'm saying. But at the same time, you have to stick to your guns a bit when you make a decision. This is what we're going to do, and you have to believe that's the right approach. And, of course, we hope that works out."
With this new update schedule, Embark wants to release a Frozen Trail-sized batch of content roughly every six months. He says the dev team was aware of the "unsustainable" pursuit of infinite, regular content updates. They were too busy working to get any work done.
"We used to work in a way that we had a big test every six months, and we decided what to fix, and we implemented that, and we reevaluated that six months later," Grøndal says. "The team really wanted us to go back to that. They felt like they did a better job. They could spend more time working on improving rather than just completing. So the team is a lot better in terms of what they feel they have achieved, but also overall health is better, so they were pretty happy about that."
Grøndal considers Arc Raiders' position in the live service sea, filled with leviathans that almost nobody can fight. "We always try to think about doing things from the Embark perspective," he says. "I mean, we can't necessarily compete with the amount of stuff that some of the large games out there can [do]. We're just not that large."
But infinite content isn't the point, either. "Rather, what got us here in the first place was the trust in our own instincts and trust in trying to make decisions that make the most sense for the game and for the developers and for our business," he adds. "We got to Arc Raiders in the first place doing that, so we should continue doing what we're good at, and kind of accepting that that will come with some drawbacks. Of course, that's not a perfect solution. I'm not suggesting that. But we have to play to our strengths."
While Frozen Trail does in many ways feel like shipping the game again, Embark now has more experience with maintaining a live game. By better accounting for those demands in its plans, and giving larger updates more room to cook, the studio hopes to keep the servers tidy while still growing the game in meaningful ways.
"There are issues that come up with just being online, and that kind of ate a lot of our capacity," Grøndal notes. "And it needed to. It's not bad. It's more about, the little capacity we had left was supposed to provide meaningful updates, and that wasn't really what we felt we were able to achieve then. So I think we needed more time to just take care of the integrity of the game, and at the same time give ourselves some space to produce the type of content that we really felt like we wanted to produce. And hopefully the players will see that effort in the updates."
