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Embark Studios decided to save its extraction shooter Arc Raiders from the Sisyphean toil of free-to-play gaming, and no one is happier about it than its own developers.
In fact, design director Virgil Watkins makes Arc Raiders’ transition from free-to-play to its current $40-up-front situation sound like a heavenly blessing. He discusses Embark’s choice to ultimately abandon free-to-play in an ongoing YouTube series about how Arc Raiders was made, saying that “it’s actually, in many ways, made it drastically easier.”
“In free-to-play, you need to, in some ways, make things a little stickier than they would be otherwise,” Watkins explains. Every action has friction, “just so players are more incentivized to […] keep playing your game – and, ideally, are incentivized to then spend money on that game.”
“On the other side – launching at a price point, you know, we still need ways to monetize that doesn’t feel predatory. So that’s also been an interesting challenge.”
