ARC Raiders Dev Admits Team Is "Super Tired

Success is supposed to be the easy part. Get the players in, keep the servers up, and ship new stuff on a steady drip. For Embark Studios, though, the popularity of ARC Raiders seems to have created as many problems as it solved, and the person running the show is now saying so publicly.

In a recent interview, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal was unusually frank about the state of his team. They are, in his words, "super tired."

Too Fast, and Not Fun Enough

The core admission is simple. Embark has been pushing out content as quickly as it can, and it still hasn't been enough. Grøndal goes further than that, though. He suggests that some of what the studio shipped may not have been especially compelling in the first place.

"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," he says.

That's a striking thing for a live service lead to say out loud. Most studios will defend every update until the end. Grøndal instead describes a team that kept stretching beyond what it could realistically sustain, with too much focus on hitting ship dates. By his account, the results were predictable: unhappy staff, an uneven update schedule, and a player base that noticed and complained.

He hasn't completely written off the recent work. Grøndal says he's proud of what the team managed in the first four months of this year. But he also says the studio has to be honest about the cost of that push.

Back to What Worked

So what's the fix? According to Grøndal, the team eventually stopped and asked itself why it was working this way at all. The answer it landed on was that Embark did better work before launch, when the pressure of a constant release cycle wasn't dictating everything.

"Everything pointed towards the fact that we were doing it better before shipping, so we need to play to our strengths," he says, adding that the goal is output that is "better, more interesting, and higher-quality across the board."

In plain terms, Embark appears to be swapping raw speed for quality. That may mean fewer drops. It may also mean drops that actually land.

Burnout Is the Real Concern

Underneath all of this is the bigger issue of developer burnout. Grøndal says he has been through it himself during his time at Electronic Arts, and that preventing it at Embark is a priority for him.

"It's very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance," he says. His reasoning is practical as much as personal: the people at risk of burning out are the same ones who built ARC Raiders to begin with. Lose them, and you lose the thing that made the game work.

The War on Cheaters Continues

Separately, Grøndal has also posted a lengthy update on Twitter about cheating in the shooter. He claims anti-cheat detection is getting stronger "month by month," and confirms that anyone caught cheating will be permanently banned, with no exceptions.

The studio is also working on further hardware ban options aimed at repeat offenders, the sort of players who simply make a new account and carry on. On top of that, Grøndal addresses matchmaking abuse and says progress is being made against "queue teaming." That's when players coordinate outside the game to enter solo lobbies together and gang up on people who are genuinely playing alone. It's exactly the kind of thing that sours a game for solo players fast, so it's good to see it named directly.

Our Take

There's a lot to like about this level of honesty. Studios rarely admit that their content wasn't interesting enough, let alone that the pace of production was hurting their own people. We've seen similar candour lately elsewhere, with Elder Scrolls Online developers openly discussing a tough stretch, and it suggests the industry is slowly getting more comfortable talking about the human cost of live service.

For players, the trade-off is fairly clear. A slower cadence could test patience in the short term, especially in a genre where a quiet spell can quickly look like decline - and live service games don't always survive those spells, as Synduality: Echo of Ada going offline shows. It is worth watching whether Embark's next updates actually feel more substantial, and whether the community gives the studio the breathing room it's asking for. The anti-cheat promises deserve the same scrutiny: permabans and hardware bans sound tough, but the real test is whether solo lobbies feel fairer in the months ahead.