Embark Studios decided to save its extraction shooter Arc Raiders from the Sisyphean toil of free-to-play gaming, and no one is happier about it than its own developers. "In free-to-play, you need to, in some ways, make things a little stickier than they would be otherwise," Watkins explains. Every action has friction, "just so players are more incentivized to [...] keep playing your game – and, ideally, are incentivized to then spend money on that game." Arc Raiders catches heat over expensive cosmetic bundles and lack of earnable premium currency: "Helldivers 2 should be the gold-standard for paid-game content" Arc Raiders was going to be a cross "between Shadow of the Colossus, Left 4 Dead, and PUBG" according to dev, who says Embark initially had no idea "what kind of game loop we were supposed to have" The 5th most-wishlisted game on Steam, ex-Battlefield devs' extraction shooter Arc Raiders, was delayed 3 years because they realized it sucked: "This game is not fun" "It made it kind of hard to respect the player's time," he reflects. "We almost had a hand on their forehead going, 'Uh, slow down a little bit.'" Apparently, in the free-to-play version of Arc Raiders, even something as practical as crafting would punish you; there were crafting timers. So, "As soon as that decision came down [to drop free-to-play]," Watkins says, "it made us able to make things take the amount of time that felt appropriate in a lot of ways. So crafting no longer has timers on it that you have to wait out, or the amounts of things we're asking you to collect are a little more rational, or effort and outcome match each other a little more precisely, and things like that. So it's helped a lot. "On the other side – launching at a price point, you know, we still need ways to monetize that doesn't feel predatory. So that's also been an interesting challenge." Police confirm Arc Raiders fan got a visit from officers in real life after a concerned motel guest heard him plead for a revive: "I got shot, please get me up!"