Embark's next shooter is ditching free-to-play so devs can 'focus more on the fun' and not 'encouraging players to make purchases'

Arc Raiders is finally coming out of the shadows. First announced back in 2021 as a free-to-play co-op shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by dangerous robots, Arc Raiders is the second game from Embark Studios, the Nexon-backed house of ex-DICE devs that also makes The Finals. Arc Raiders was developed in parallel with The Finals, and was once meant to be Embark's debut game, but was delayed as priorities shifted to the free-to-play shooter. We didn't hear anything else about Arc Raiders for a long time, until Embark shared last year that the project had pivoted from a purely PvE co-op shooter to a PvPvE extraction shooter.

Today, Embark reintroduced Arc Raiders to the public at the Gamescom Opening Night Live show, and dropped another major update: Arc Raiders is no longer free-to-play, and will instead have a regular price tag.

In a press briefing held last week, executive producer Aleksander Grøndal discussed Embark's reasoning for the change:

"You may remember that we first intended for Arc Raiders to be a free-to-play game," Grøndal said. "After careful assessment, we decided the premium business model is a great fit for the experience that we're building."

When asked about why the premium model is perfect for Arc Raiders but not, say, The Finals or Nexon's latest hit The First Descendant, Grøndal's response was surprisingly candid.

"For free-to-play games, they need to strike a careful balance between providing engaging content and encouraging players to make purchases," he said. "For Arc Raiders, this shift will allow us to focus more on the engagement, fun, and impact on choices with regards to how the game evolves over time. So we can optimize differently in this game, and give out more rewards as the player progresses, as an example."

I mean, yes, agreed: Free-to-play is nice because it's free to play, but the true cost of entry is a little piece of our souls. To play a live service game in 2024 is to be ferociously hounded by battle pass upgrades, store updates, and general monetization spam at every turn. It's remarkable how much of a major multiplayer game's real estate is now dedicated to ads and shiny levers that make numbers go up and bank balance go down. It's hard to shake the feeling that you're not playing a game as much as you're visiting a digital store that just happens to have a game attached to it.

"Our decision with regards to Arc Raiders specifically doesn't reflect on what our other games are up to. We are trying to do what's best for the game and for the players," he continued. 

What Grøndal is saying in so many words is that Embark believes Arc Raiders is better when it doesn't have to focus on in-game monetization. That's a nice mindset, though I'll have to see it to believe it. He didn't say Arc Raiders wouldn't have microtransactions.

This makes Arc Raiders the latest member of a small club of multiplayer games betting on an upfront buy-in over the turbulent waters of free-to-play. Helldivers 2 charged $40 and became one of the biggest games in the world, and Sony's hero FPS Concord is releasing this week for $40 with zero microtransactions (and zero hype, it seems).

In a press release, Grøndal added: "This shift allows us to focus on what truly matters for this game — creating an engaging, balanced, and replayable action survival experience." Like Sony's batch of service games, Arc Raiders will be $40.

Gameplay reveal

The briefing also included our first decent look at Arc Raiders gameplay. You play as a raider—a resident of an underground city who regularly ventures to the surface to scavenge for supplies. The threats on the surface are twofold: there are AI bots wandering around attacking anything that moves, and other raiders (players) competing for all the loot.

Sounds like a generic extraction shooter setup—a genre that we're in no short supply of at the moment—but Arc Raiders' emphasis on PvE robot fights does stand out. Similar to Hunt: Showdown, I get the sense that the environment will be just as lethal as players, and that careful movement through bot-infested territory is crucial.

We also got a brief look at gunplay. Arc Raiders is a third-person shooter, but you can see a lot of The Finals in there: ballistics are loud and punchy, sound travels far, and grenades have a bouncy quality. What we didn't see was any fancy server-side destruction tech—that one might be a Finals exclusive.

A few other details to note:

• Embark isn't sure what the max lobby size will be yet
• New players can backfill into a session as others extract from the map
• Arc Raiders will have multiple big maps that share a larger region, similar to Escape From Tarkov
• There is some sort of underground base building or customization element to Arc Raiders

Arc Raiders isn't out until sometime in 2025, but Embark is running its first public playtest much sooner: October 24 to 27. You can sign up on the game's Steam page.