Arc Raiders studio admits burnout crisis after live service launch success

Embark Studios has confronted a uncomfortable truth about live service success: the faster a game grows, the harder it becomes to sustain the pace required to keep millions of players engaged without destroying the team behind it.

Arc Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal spoke candidly to Game Developer at Gamescom about the studio's struggle to balance the needs of over 16 million players with the wellbeing of its workforce. "The team is super tired," Grøndal admitted. "We're putting out content as fast as we can but it's not enough, and perhaps it wasn't necessarily interesting enough as well."

The crunch came to a head four months into the year when Embark confirmed it would abandon its monthly update cadence. The decision reflected a harsh reality: the studio had fundamentally underestimated the hidden costs of maintaining a live service game at scale.

"When you build a game up until launch, you build and you test and you build and you test and you fix things and measure results," Grøndal explained, highlighting the disconnect between traditional development and live service demands. "Now the demands of the players are really high and we feel like we really can't go much faster."

Embark had planned its post-launch support month by month, projecting engagement and content output. Reality proved far more complicated. "We didn't have the time. You also have a lot of the cost of just maintaining the game, implementing bug fixes, exploits, and other constraints. We were constantly overshooting our capacity and so it was hard to plan when there's so much to do. There's a lot of maintenance and cleanup that takes up so much of your time," Grøndal said.

The studio responded by fundamentally rethinking its workflows. Rather than chase an impossible content calendar, Embark chose to prioritize quality and sustainability. "Everything pointed towards the fact that we were doing it better before shipping, so we need to play to our strengths," Grøndal noted. "What we produce will be better, more interesting, and higher-quality across the board. It also gives us time to work things out instead of just shipping, shipping, shipping. We can actually iterate."

Grøndal drew on personal experience when discussing the importance of protecting employees from burnout. During his 15 year tenure at Electronic Arts, he experienced severe burnout following the launch of a Battlefield title. "I kept pushing so hard that I had to take a break for five months and go on sick leave because I was completely broken," he recounted. "Being burned out feels super shitty to be honest. It's terrible. I don't recommend it to anyone. Also, it means we lose good people who might be out for a very long time."

Protecting the team became central to Embark's strategy going forward. "It's very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance. If we think long-term about this product, not just in small increments but big-picture stuff, we need all of these great people. Those are the people who built Arc Raiders in the first place," Grøndal said.