‘The Finals’ Developer Embark Find The Key To Success In the Shooting Game Industry
by Julian Torres
'The Finals' (Image: Embark)
From day one, the Swedish game developer Embark has set out to make games ten times faster than its competitors.
The studio currently has around 300 people and has worked on four games since its inception in 2018. Its flagship game, The Finals, was released in 2023 to immediate success, garnering over 20 million downloads at launch. However, that hype and momentum began to die out after a month; factors like a lack of content, subpar UIs and menus, weak onboarding for new players, and poor explanations of game modes were cited as reasons.
To combat the sudden disengagement, Embark added a new game mode, yet it didn’t have the desired effect. The company kept going through a trial-and-error process to bring players back, and The Finals eventually saw improvements and profitability again.
Patrick Soderlund, Embark’s CEO, attributes the success to the fact that they started planning not months, but years, ahead. He reasons that it is about “just launching with more content and depth. He explained:
“It’s not necessarily about the number of maps, it’s about how you utilize the content. The first thing is the second-to-second gameplay, if you don’t nail that, there’s no game. Then it’s about what happens every minute. You need to nail that, too. Those things you can’t negotiate. Unless you have those figured out, no one is going to want to play.”
Embark also began leaning into AI and machine learning to transform pipelines and create custom tools to revolutionize how they develop games. This is part of the effort to create a unique, Embark-brand system for building and updating games, as it helps employees learn to use tools exclusive to the company. Their artists need to adopt the new standard model.
This new standard model has guided the people at Embark to identify the kinks in their games and promote their longevity much more quickly. Soderlund claims it has helped them make the minute-by-minute gameplay exciting, as well as the month-by-month experience. In his words, “you need to make sure you have things for the player to accomplish and a game they want to come back to. A game that punishes you enough, but not too much. That is rewarding, but not too rewarding. That feels fair, but sometimes unfair. That’s the balance.”
These early commitments have made this medium-sized studio as efficient as possible. Soderlund doesn’t want people to think, however, that Embark is sacrificing quality for speed. His system dedicates time and money to the things he deems essential, rather than to the more tedious, time-consuming tasks that technology can handle. He analyzes that a game like Arc Raiders, Embark’s newest game that released a few weeks ago, would have cost another developer “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars” more than it cost them to make.
Embark has much more to come. Though it has two more games in the works, it does not intend to expand much beyond its current size, prioritizing efficiency and precision in its business model over needless excess.
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