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Former Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney reckons he knows why Arc Raiders developer Embark has been so successful compared to other veteran-led studios: because the people in charge actually care about something other than money. And Mahoney would know - under Nexon he bought Arc Raiders studio Embark thanks to the live-service game's promise.
Talking to The Game Business, Mahoney was asked what differentiates a certified live-service hit like Arc Raiders from a massive bomb like PlayStation's Concord. Both games were made by studios led by developers with experience on beloved IP - Arc Raiders developer Embark is made up of former Battlefield developers, while the now defunct Concord team was an all-star lineup of former Bungie, Respawn, and BioWare devs - and yet, one game has been an undeniable success and the other was one of the most high-profile failures of the last few years.
Mahoney, who was CEO and president of Embark's parent company Nexon from 2014 to 2024, obviously has a uniquely informed perspective on what makes Arc Raiders stand out in a cemetery of dead live-service shooters. The truth, according to him, is just to make things that you actually care about.
"The examples that you just gave were, 'we bought this company because five years ago they made some game, so therefore they're good.' It doesn’t work that way at all," Mahoney said.
"One of the reasons why game companies cannot be successfully rolled up, as Embracer found out to the horror of its investors, is that game companies are really just collections of people."
Currently at Hasbro, Mahoney is a certified veteran of the video game industry, having served as EA's head of corporate development from 2000 to 2009 before joining Nexon as CFO in 2010. Mahoney uses Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund, who he met during his EA days, as an example of a lead developer who followed his heart to great success with Arc Raiders, and before that, The Finals.
"We kept in touch and I knew that he really wanted to do something different, so his head was in the right place," Mahoney said. "I knew his team was sick of making Battlefield and wanted to do something different. They had something to prove.
"The industry sometimes gets that wrong," Mahoney added. "They get so excited about the banking deck. People start counting up the money. They talk about the integration of the phone and database systems and all that. And all this stuff that really matters, where the value is created, is just completely forgotten."
If I'm reading him right, Mahoney is simply saying games are more likely to succeed if they're made by people who aren't just trying to please investors or ride the coattails of more established IP - and companies buying up studios are more likely to recoup their investments if they give developers the freedom to explore ideas that genuinely interest them.
He called out Embracer specifically as a company that apparently didn't do that, and faced severe consequences. Unfortunately, it seems the brunt of those consequences have fallen on the thousands of individual developers who've lost their jobs since Embracer's restructuring plan in the wake of its failed $2 billion with the Saudi-backed Savvy Games Group. But that's another story.
