Since its launch in late 2025, Arc Raiders has been a commanding presence in the extraction shooter genre, at one point peaking at over 480,000 concurrent players. Embark has earned its player count partially by listening to its community's needs and by issuing frequent updates—until a recent change to the development cycle that will see less frequent updates.

In a recent interview with Game Developer, Arc Raiders executive producer Aleksander Grøndal expanded on the studio's justification for the change. "The team is super tired. We're putting out content as fast as we can, but it's not enough, and perhaps it wasn't necessarily interesting enough as well." Grøndal explains that going from pre-release development to maintaining a live-service game was harder than expected.

"Transitioning to live service is going to be fucking hard. Everyone said that. I was mentally prepared—but I wasn't completely prepared for how hard it was." The upkeep was so taxing that content had to be cut to maintain the schedule before the change in May that saw the studio shift to major updates twice a year with smaller patches in between.

Embark ended up with a development team that was unhappy and overworked, and a community becoming more disgruntled with the quality of updates. Even Grøndal admits he was burned out.