Arc Raiders' success led to team burnout

Arc Raiders executive producer Alexander Gröndal has admitted that the shooter's shift to a service model cost Embark studio dearly: the team, in his words, is "very tired", and content plans had to be cut on the fly. The conversation took place at Gamescom, roughly four months after the Swedish studio confirmed it was abandoning monthly updates.

Gröndal says Embark was unable to reconcile the demands of more than 16 million players with the needs of its own team. "We were constantly exceeding our own capacity", he says. According to him, he had been warned about the difficulty of moving to a service model and was mentally prepared for it, but had no idea how hard it would be in practice.

Why the monthly update schedule didn't hold

Gröndal explains that before release the studio worked to a familiar pattern: build, test, fix, measure the result, repeat. After launch the audience's demands turned out to be so high that the studio could no longer move any faster. "The team is very tired. We're shipping content as fast as we can, but it isn't enough — and maybe it wasn't interesting enough", the producer admits, adding that he is proud of what was done in the first four months of the year but believes it's necessary to look honestly at the consequences.

On top of that came a line of expenditure that plans usually underestimate: supporting a game that has already shipped. Fixing bugs, fighting exploits and other constraints took up so much time that planning anything new became difficult. Embark had a plan for how to support Arc Raiders on a monthly basis and what engagement that would deliver, but the plans had to be redone and some of the content cut because the time buffer ran out.

The result hit from two sides. Internally the team was working to hard milestones that, in Gröndal's words, were neither fun nor interesting in terms of the tasks involved, and people were extremely unhappy. Externally players complained, and the consistency of update quality, as he admits, was not good enough.

What Embark changed in the process

Dropping the monthly schedule was presented by Embark Studios as a way to take the pressure off the team, but behind it lies a rebuild of the working process. The logic Gröndal describes is simple: the studio asked itself "why are we even doing this" and concluded that it had been doing better before release. So it needs to play to its strengths and return to a way of working that leaves room for iteration.

The experience the producer describes leads to conclusions that transfer to any live-service project:

• a team's post-release capacity is calculated with support factored in, not just the production of new content;
• a fixed update calendar turns into a commitment that is the first thing to start cutting into quality;
• time to iterate turns out to be the condition for an update being interesting at all;
• by the studio's own assessment, rarer but more polished updates are better both for player feedback and for the state of the team.

Gröndal expects that under the new approach the result will be more interesting and higher quality across the board, and that the studio will have the chance to see ideas through instead of "shipping, shipping, shipping".

The producer speaks about burnout from his own experience

Answering a question about how important it is to protect staff from burnout, Gröndal shared a personal story. Over 15 years at Electronic Arts he drove himself into a state that took five months of sick leave to come out of — right after the release of one of the Battlefield instalments: in his words, he kept pushing himself and ended up completely broken.

"We talk about burnout, and it's obviously bad, but being burnt out is disgusting. I wouldn't wish it on anyone", he says. At the same time the producer immediately turns the topic to production terms: a burnt-out employee is out of work for a long time, and the studio loses good people. The task, as he formulates it, is to build a framework that allows people to stay creative with a normal work-life balance; if you look at the product long-term, you need exactly the people who created Arc Raiders.

The service model increasingly runs up against people

Embark's admission looks like part of a broader shift: studios that launched live-service games on a wave of expectations of constant growth are increasingly revising their production pace in public. Against the backdrop of layoffs and closures in the industry in recent years, teams' margin of safety has become noticeably smaller, and crunch is probably ever less often seen as an acceptable price of success — not least because losing key people costs more than a missed update.

It is telling that it is a member of management speaking about the problem, and after a successful launch at that. Previously such conversations more often started in hindsight — after a project was cancelled or a wave of layoffs. If the trend continues, the way service games are presented will probably change too: the promise of a regular update calendar will become more cautious, and deadlines will be tied to a studio's real capacity. For artists, animators and technical specialists that would mean a less fragmented production cycle, albeit less predictability of content releases for players.

Will Embark hold on to Arc Raiders' audience after switching to rare but large updates?