In his talk at this year's GDC, Arc Raiders production director Caio Braga said Embark's breakout extraction shooter hit emerged from a development cycle involving multiple massive directional pivots—points where many other game productions would have been cancelled.
In a post-talk interview with PC Gamer, Braga said the high profile live service launch failures that followed Embark's big hit leaves him wishing other projects were given the space to reinvent themselves that Arc Raiders enjoyed.
"I try to hope that they were given the same chance we had, because it's so hard to put a game out that having the trust and the time to improve those metrics is something that not all studios end up having," Braga said. "They get cancelled; they're forced to launch something that is not yet good. I feel for it, to be honest."
Part of the difficulty of the games industry, Braga said, is that studios are expected to treat the hit game launches of other studios as a roadmap that can be followed for their own success. Embark's development process on Arc Raiders, for example—one where the 100-strong staff all had considerable autonomy in pursuing their own vision for the game—wouldn't be feasible at many other studios.
"This participation that we have is something that not every company can do, especially size-wise. It's very inefficient to have 2,000 people, if all of them want to participate," Braga said. "We are 100, right? And even then, sometimes we have some troubles with that."
Essentially, Braga said, game development isn't an exact formula. It's one that works best when a studio can adjust or repurpose it to meet its circumstances—a creative freedom that Embark was allowed, but that many other studios aren't. Instead, what we usually see is a Highguard scenario: An unproven game is presented to the world with the expectation that it'll be an immediate phenomenon and axed before it can find its footing.
"Looking at a production as a little formula that you can follow—it usually does not work," Braga said.
