ARC Raiders' success has led the Embark Studios team to burnout

ARC Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal has spoken at length about how brutal live service development can be. The constant need to ship new content can quickly lead to creative and physical burnout.

Speaking to Game Developer, Grøndal admitted that Embark Studios has struggled to balance the demands of more than 16 million players with what its own team can realistically handle.

According to him, the staff are "super tired" after sprinting out of the blocks. The comments came roughly four months after the Swedish studio announced it was ditching monthly updates to ease the pressure on the team.

Transitioning to live service is going to be fucking hard. Everyone said that to me. I've even said that to other people. I was mentally prepared for it to be hard—but I wasn't completely prepared for how hard it was.

Development before launch worked differently, he explained.

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. So the way that we've been building video games was based on that idea—but now the demands of the players are really high we feel like we really can't go much faster.

The team is super tired. 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. I'm proud of what we achieved during the first four months of this year, but at the same time, I think we have to be honest at looking at some of the impacts of that.

Even the best-laid plans can quickly fall apart when a studio takes on a large-scale live service game, the producer noted. Embark had a vision for how to support ARC Raiders month to month and how much engagement the updates would drive. In practice, those plans had to be reworked and some content cut because the studio ran out of time.

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 maintenance and cleanup [that takes up so much of your time].

To get back on track, Embark had to completely rethink its workflows and recapture the pre-launch magic. The developers eventually asked themselves why they were working this way in the first place.

Ultimately, we asked 'why are we doing this?' Everything pointed towards the fact that we were doing it better before shipping, so we need to play to our strengths [...] and 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.

Asked how important it is to protect employees from burnout, Grøndal answered with a candid personal story from his 15 years at Electronic Arts. After shipping a Battlefield game, he kept working himself to the bone and ended up on sick leave for five months.

It's super important [to protect people]. I can tell you a personal story. I was burned out. We'd just shipped a Battlefield game [when I was at EA] and 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.

We talk about burnout and it's obviously bad, but 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 [of work] for a very long time.

Grøndal said it is crucial for the studio to build a framework that allows creativity while keeping a good work-life balance. Embark managed to pull that off, and it should help the team keep building on the success of ARC Raiders.

The extraction shooter is getting a big update next week.