Embark Studios executive producer Aleksander Grøndal has admitted the studio "constantly" overshot its capacity while servicing over 16 million Arc Raiders players, confirming that content planned for the extraction shooter had to be cut because the team ran out of time.

Speaking to Game Developer at Gamescom earlier this year, Grøndal gave a candid account of how the demands of live service development collided with the realities of studio bandwidth. His comments came roughly four months after the Swedish studio confirmed it would drop monthly updates for Arc Raiders specifically to relieve 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," Grøndal said.

He traced the problem to a mismatch between pre-launch development habits and post-launch cadence. When a studio builds toward launch, it cycles through building, testing, fixing and measuring. Live service inverts that model: player expectations are immediate and unrelenting.

"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," he said.

Plans collapsed against maintenance load

Grøndal explained Embark entered the post-launch period with a month-to-month support plan and engagement targets attached to each update. In practice, maintenance work consumed the roadmap. Bug fixes, exploit patches and other constraints ate the capacity reserved for new content.

"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," he said.

The human cost forced a structural response. "The team were super unhappy. To be fair, they were running really hard milestones and that wasn't fun and challenging, so we had to do something. The players were also complaining and I don't think the consistency was high enough," he added.

The studio's answer was to rebuild its workflows around what worked before launch. "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."

A personal account from 15 years at EA

Asked about protecting staff from burnout, Grøndal shared his own experience from his 15-year tenure at Electronic Arts. After shipping a Battlefield title, he pushed himself until he required five months of sick leave.

"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," he said.

He framed retention as a business imperative, not just a welfare issue. "It's very important for us to create a framework that allows us to be creative while having a good work-life balance. If we think long-term about this product—not just in small increments but big-picture stuff—we need all of these great people. Those are the people who built Arc Raiders in the first place."

For studios weighing their own live service transitions, the Arc Raiders case offers a concrete caution: a 16-million-player hit can strain a team's output faster than it strains its revenue. Watch how Embark's slower, higher-iteration update cadence performs over the coming quarters, both in player retention and in what it signals about sustainable live service staffing across the industry.