Embark Studios decided to save its extraction shooter Arc Raiders from the Sisyphean toil of free-to-play gaming, and no one is happier about it than its own developers.
In fact, design director Virgil Watkins makes Arc Raiders' transition from free-to-play to its current $40-up-front situation sound like a heavenly blessing. He discusses Embark's choice to ultimately abandon free-to-play in an ongoing YouTube series about how Arc Raiders was made, saying that "it's actually, in many ways, made it drastically easier."
"In free-to-play, you need to, in some ways, make things a little stickier than they would be otherwise," Watkins explains. Every action has friction, "just so players are more incentivized to [...] keep playing your game – and, ideally, are incentivized to then spend money on that game."
"It made it kind of hard to respect the player's time," he reflects. "We almost had a hand on their forehead going, 'Uh, slow down a little bit.'" Apparently, in the free-to-play version of Arc Raiders, even something as practical as crafting would punish you; there were crafting timers.
So, "As soon as that decision came down [to drop free-to-play]," Watkins says, "it made us able to make things take the amount of time that felt appropriate in a lot of ways. So crafting no longer has timers on it that you have to wait out, or the amounts of things we're asking you to collect are a little more rational, or effort and outcome match each other a little more precisely, and things like that. So it's helped a lot.
"On the other side – launching at a price point, you know, we still need ways to monetize that doesn't feel predatory. So that's also been an interesting challenge."
