Embark Studios currently has a pretty good track record with the games it's released so far. Launching The Finals in 2023 and then Arc Raiders last year, the devs have done impeccable work and delivered some truly memorable games. It seems like a lot, especially for a smaller and relatively new studio, but in truth competing in the big leagues is something the devs had been preparing for for quite some time.
"To start a new studio from scratch and to compete with the likes of EA and Activision and others, if you follow traditional development methodologies, you're going to have to have five, six, seven hundred people," Embark Studios CEO, Patrick Söderlund, says in an interview with GamesBeat. "We didn't want to be that, we couldn't afford that many people, and we didn't believe that was the way to get to the right type of innovation and quality.
"So when we started Embark, we spent the first seven to 10 months conceptualising Arc Raiders and most of the time we spent on production methodologies and building tools and pipelines to change the way games were being developed. With the ambition of being substantially faster in developing games, so that we could compete with these big publishers but with a substantially smaller team."
Söderlund doesn't go into any detail about what specific changes were enacted to make process more efficient but he has in the past discussed how Embark has used AI to make work easier, and has even mentioned before that without said tool the devs wouldn't have been able to complete work on The Finals, so it likely played a large role here.
"You guys were super intentional in that if we have too big a team, it gets very hard to run, we can do a lot with software," former Nexon CEO Owen Mahoney continues. "And you were also very clear that you wanted to build something different." And that they did.
Arc Raiders success is in no small part thanks to just how unique a game it is. Sure, it's still an extraction shooter at heart but the emergent storytelling present in this game, alongside the wacky social interactions, and distinction between PvP and PvE lobbies has attracted a massive audience who can't really get this experience anywhere else. It seems like Embark has achieved what it set out to do: competing side by side with the big publishers. But even so, Söderlund says that this isn't where Embark will stop: "It hasn't been easy, and we're not done with it yet."
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