Embark Studios exec Aleksander Grøndal just admitted what every burnt-out dev already knew: transitioning to live service is "fucking hard," and Arc Raiders' post-launch sprint left the team super tired and constantly overshooting capacity. The extraction shooter hit 16+ million players, blew up to hundreds of thousands concurrent on Steam, and became one of Nexon's top earners, but the monthly update plan they locked in pre-launch turned into a death march of bug fixes, exploits, and content that players called mid. Grøndal, a 15-year EA vet who once burned out so hard on Battlefield he needed five months sick leave, said the team asked themselves "why are we doing this?" after realizing pre-launch workflows produced better stuff than the rushed post-launch cycle.

They ditched monthly drops back in May for biannual big updates, with the next one (Frozen Trails, the biggest map yet) dropping in October. Player counts tell the story: all-time Steam peak over 465k in January 2026, now hovering around 15-22k concurrent after the slowdown. Grøndal owns the overambition—"we were constantly overshooting our capacity"—and the team was unhappy running "really hard milestones" that weren't fun. He's not sugarcoating it: live service maintenance eats time, player demands are relentless, and a small studio (peaking at ~120 people) can't outpace the content treadmill giants without breaking people.

Now they're testing a PvE mode because a chunk of the playerbase just wants to avoid shooting each other, and they're quietly patching cheats while Denuvo anti-cheat rolls out. The interview reads like every other live service post-mortem, except this time the guy in charge is publicly saying they underestimated the grind and are choosing to slow down instead of losing the team. Good for them. The game still prints money, but the real win here is not turning the studio into another casualty of "ship it and sprint forever."

Grøndal's EA scars are showing, and it sounds like the right call this time.