Johnny Flores Jr. is a News Editor at TheGamer. He joined the team in 2024, and is focused on bringing the latest news to readers in a fun and easily digestible format. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Johnny owns a B.A. in Journalism and minor in Sports Media Studies. California born and raised, you can often find Johnny enjoying the sunshine and In-N-Out. When not gaming or writing news, Johnny can be found playing with his two male chihuahuas, Akira and August, whom he affectionately calls his sons.
Arc Raiders was snubbed for GOTY, but multiplayer games have always been judged differently
Don’t get it twisted, though, there still are things available to purchase like Raider Tokens in Arc Raiders or Super Credits in Helldivers 2, but by not making the game free-to-play, in this case, Arc Raiders was able to avoid significant pain points that would’ve impacted players’ enjoyment of the extraction shooter.
Clearly, Fans Of Arc Raiders Had No Problem Coughing Up $40 To Play The Game At Launch
As first spotted by GamesRadar, in a new YouTube video, design director Virgil Watkins outlined just how many compromises the team at Embark Studios would’ve had to make in order to make Arc Raiders free-to-play and how it hurt what the team was ultimately going for.
“It’s actually, in many ways, made it drastically easier,” Watkins said of going for a paid approach. “In free-to-play you need to, in some ways, make things a little stickier than they would be otherwise, take a little more time, a little more grind, just so players are more incentivized to stay in and stick into those loops and keep playing your game.
“Ideally, (they) are incentivized to spend money on that game.”
Having key elements of the game be unreasonable or on a timer would probably make a ton of people drop it, all things considered.
For instance, in a free-to-play world, crafting would have a timer on it that players would have to wait out before presumably accessing the mechanic again. Elsewhere, what players are tasked with collecting would not be as “rational,” or the effort (crafting) and the outcome (your reward) wouldn’t quite match up as they should.
Those elements “made it kind of hard to respect the player’s time,” Watkins added. “We almost had a hand on their forehead going, ‘Uh, slow down a little bit.'”
While removing the free-to-play element certainly got rid of a few central challenges that the team was going up against, there is a new challenge in finding ways to monetize the game that aren’t predatory after players have already forked over a decent bit of cash.
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The full video is really worth a watch, as are many of these developer documentary-style productions. Game design is truly a fascinating area.
It’s been two decades since Perfect Dark Zero launched alongside the Xbox 360.
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