Arc Raiders Dev Says Drop Free-to-Play "Helped" Too Much

In a sea of free-to-play games like Marvel Rivals, Fortnite and Apex Legends, Arc Raiders, like Helldivers 2 before it, opted to charge players a modest upfront fee of $39.99, hoping to get people into its title without an upfront fee and get them to stick around enough to buy microtransactions.

Ark Raiders character next to The Game Awards statuette.

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We don't know if Ark Riders was eligible for a GOTY nomination until 2030

Arc Raiders was snubbed for GOTY, but multiplayer games have always been judged differently.

Don't get it twisted, though, there are still things available like Raider Tokens in Arc Raiders or Super Credits in Helldivers 2, but by not making the game free-to-play, in this case, Arc Raiders was able to avoid significant pain points that would have affected players' enjoyment of the extraction shooter.

Apparently, Ark Raiders fans had no problem coughing up $40 to play the game at launch.

In a new YouTube video, as first spotted by GamesRadar, design director Virgil Watkins explains how many compromises the team at Embark Studios had to make to make Arc Raiders free-to-play, and what it ultimately led the team to do.

“It's actually, in a lot of ways, made it a lot easier,” Watkins said of the approach to paying. “In free-to-play you have to, in some ways, make things a little stickier than otherwise, take a little more time, grind a little more, so players have more incentive to stay in those loops and keep playing their game.

“Ideally, (they're) encouraged to spend money on that game.”

Key elements of the game being impractical or on a timer will probably cause many people to give it up, all things considered.

For example, in a free-to-play world, crafting has a timer that players will likely have to wait before accessing the mechanic again. Elsewhere, the responsibility for players to collect doesn't “rationalize” or align effort (crafting) and outcome (your reward) as they should.

Those elements “made it difficult to respect the player's time,” Watkins added. “We almost put our hands on their foreheads, 'Ugh, slow down a little bit'.”

While removing the free-to-play element certainly got rid of some of the central challenges that the team had going up against, there's a new challenge to find ways to monetize the game that players aren't poaching after already forking over a decent bit of cash.

Like many of these developer documentary-style productions the full video is worth watching. Game design is a really fascinating field.