Arc Raiders' executive producer explains how he 'wasn't completely prepared for how hard' a live service game would be and warns against the dangers of burnout

I have a lot of fond memories about Arc Raiders' release. The world was beautiful, terrifying, and expansive. It provided some of the best community interactions I've had in a game to date, and it was just a refreshingly good time to share with friends. But that didn't last as long as I and many others would have hoped, with executive producer Aleksander Grøndal admitting that Embark overestimated its capacity for work.

"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 says in an interview with Game Developer. "When you build a game up until launch, you build and you test and you build and you test and you fix things and measure results. …