Arc Raiders' Next Big Update Isn't Coming Until October, And That Might Be A Good Thing

"“It's a luxury problem, right? It's not something to complain about. In that sense, it was, of course, great, but also getting this amount of eyes on your game also puts a lot of attention on some of the problems that the game is having. [It] kind of got a little bit in our way, to be honest with you, because we were kind of focusing on what was next, and we had to spend quite a lot of time with some technical things that we had to deal with. And, I mean, that's the right call, obviously. That's not the point. I think we were a bit caught off guard.”"

"“When we shipped the game, we had this idea that we wanted to do monthly content updates, which is a pretty ambitious plan, to be honest with you. We're not the largest team in the world, so we really work hard to get something out. Then we ran out of some of the [early] initiatives that we did, and now we had to work on a month-to-month cadence, which means, practically speaking, there's not that much production time on the features for the things we're doing.”"

"“Putting out content updates every month, I think the ambition was great to keep people engaged and interested. I think, though--and the community and the players are telling us the same--that they feel like some of these updates aren't really hitting the mark in terms of what they want, in terms of impact. And we as a team feel that as well, but we're not really able to take our ideas all the way through what we want them to be and also [determine] how they”"

Arc Raiders is changing its update schedule so Embark Studios releases larger game updates about every six months. The first six months were highly successful, but the team was surprised by the level of attention and the early technical issues that required extra time. The original plan aimed for monthly content updates, but the studio ran out of early initiatives and had to move to a month-to-month cadence. Limited production time reduced the ability to fully develop features and deliver the intended impact. Player feedback indicates that some updates do not match what players want, and the team agrees that the updates are not landing as effectively as desired.

Read at GameSpot