What makes a AAA studio? Is it the size of the team? The scope? The budget?
Sweden’s Embark Studios – founded in 2018 by CEO Patrick Söderlund and some fellow former staff from Battlefield developer DICE – is not a big company, at least compared to other companies in the space. Even now, coming up to seven-and-a-half-years into its life, the firm only boasts around 360 members of staff working across multiple projects.
The development budget of Arc Raiders, Embark’s second title, hasn’t been officially disclosed – Wedbush’s Michael Pachter has stated it’s in the region of $75 million, including marketing – but it’s safe to say that it pales in comparison to similar titles. The game has sold over 14 million copies since its October 2025 release.
For Söderlund – who was recently appointed to the executive chairman position at parent company Nexon – being AAA isn’t about the size of the studio; it’s about “what you put out.”
“It has nothing to do with how many you are,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “That’s not the point. Our ambition is to be able to produce quality and depth in our products that’s similar to what other teams and studios can do, but obviously with a lot fewer people.”
As for how you do that, a lot of it, according to Söderlund, has been about challenging the conventional wisdom of making a blockbuster game.
“We’ve been a part of it since early on, when seven or ten people could make a game,” Söderlund says. “We were part of this spiralling exercise of people, cost and time. Now, with the available tools, pipelines, and technology, as well as a different way of building and structuring ourselves, we hypothesised that we could do this faster and better than in our previous lives. We quickly realised we could; we can do a lot better. We can compete in the AAA space, and we can do that with maybe a quarter of the budget.”
Efficiencies
An example of challenging conventional wisdom is building a landscape. The old wisdom is that – to build something of appropriate detail, both in texture and fidelity – you need to have a team doing concept art, which is then turned into a 3D mesh, which is later used to model the landscape. This needs to be populated with grass, trees, rocks, buildings, and things of this nature.
“We realised that tasks like texturing, lighting, and placement of objects were difficult, so we tried to see how much of this boring work could be removed,” Söderlund explains.
“We asked what other means of technology are available to us. Could we use the topography from Google Maps? We use photogrammetry, taking photos of objects to texture assets. Can we do a realistic landscape using procedural generation and pipelines? Very little of it is AI. A lot of it is reconfiguring what I believe are old ways of working – old toolsets, old pipelines, old engines, and saying there must be a better way of doing this.”
One technology that Embark has utilised is AI. Both of its games, The Finals and Arc Raiders, have attracted controversy for the developer’s use of this tech to generate voice lines. One concern that has been raised is that the studio has been using generative AI to replace real voice actors, or even that this is a way to get out of paying real performers. Söderlund insists that this is not the case.
“We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices”
“We pay our actors for all time spent with us in the booth and continue to bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game,” the CEO explains. “For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren’t as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio.”
Despite the focus on the studio’s use of AI in this regard, Söderlund says that “a lot” of its games’ voice lines are recorded from performers, and says that there are fewer AI voice lines in Arc Raiders now than when it was released.
“We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices,” he says. “There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is. We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines without recording them, and then we know what to record. It’s also a way for us to work, not replace actors. We don’t necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.”
Niche targeting
When it comes to Embark’s portfolio, there’s free-to-play team shooter The Finals – well-trodden ground for the games industry – and Arc Raiders, an extraction shooter. This genre has historically been niche, with games like Escape from Tarkov boasting both huge levels of depth and a massive learning curve. After Embark pivoted Arc Raiders from a co-op third-person shooter to an extraction shooter, the studio appears to have taken a page from Blizzard of old by taking a niche, inaccessible genre and making it mass-market.
“We believed that there’s something really exciting about the extraction shooter, but we also felt like there could be a broader term than just shooter – it could be more like an extraction adventure,” Söderlund explains. “We believed that we could make it far more accessible. We started playing a ton of extraction games while building Arc Raiders, especially after we pivoted. I got stuck in a lot of these games. I actually genuinely like them. But having a player spend the first two hours of a game experience in the menu isn’t a mass-market approach.
“At the same time, they had something that was pretty cool. Many of these games have a super loyal, long-standing user base. We liked the high-stakes gameplay of going out, looking for something, finding it, and deciding whether to bank or not bank what you’ve found. We believed there might be an opportunity to make this a little more mass-market. We believed that the genre was going to grow and that we could probably help it grow if we did a good job.”
Arc Raiders is not alone in the increasingly popular extraction genre. Recently, Bungie released its own take on this game type in Marathon, a release that Söderlund argues is probably a “bit more hardcore” than Embark’s title, but says that there is a lot to like about the Destiny maker’s approach.
“I feel like the game is more PvP [player vs player] prone,” the exec says. “PvE [player vs environment] doesn’t feel like the focus of that game. But there are a lot of things in there that I actually like that they’ve done well. I like that what I do in the game is linked to my progression. There are many things in there that I actually think they’ve done a good job with.
“I know their technical test last year was heavily criticised. Whether that was accurate or fair, I can’t tell you. But what I can tell you is that, even though the feedback may be a little mixed, it looks like the team has done a really good job of turning what was a big problem around in a very short period of time. That’s unusual. So credit to that team and to the work that they have done with the game. I hope that they do well.”
Battlefield layoffs
Earlier this month, EA made layoffs within the four studios that worked on Battlefield 6, DICE, Criterion, Motive, and Ripple Effect. This is despite the fact that the game sold incredibly well, shifting seven million units in its first three days on sale and going on to be the best-selling game of the year in the US in 2025.
Söderlund’s heritage obviously includes a stint helming Battlefield franchise developer DICE, before going on to hold a series of high-level positions at EA. The industry veteran says these job cuts are “obviously not good” for either the developers or the publisher, but there are business realities to consider.
“I don’t think this is an EA-specific problem. It’s a problem across our industry”
“I feel for them. They did a really good job with Battlefield 6,” he says. “Of course, I also see that they have had a lot of teams and a lot of people on that project, and I think that they need to right-size in order to run an efficient business. Sometimes you need to make tough decisions to do well by the people who are still there. It’s tough. We’ve seen a ton of layoffs in the past years. That is something that we have been trying to avoid, and we’ve been monitoring very closely. I think that speaks to what we’re trying to do. We become a little less sensitive to those types of swings as we try to do a lot more with fewer people. I don’t know exactly what triggered the layoffs or who was affected, unfortunately, so I can’t really have an opinion, but I don’t think this is an EA-specific problem. It’s a problem across our industry.”
By this, Söderlund means the steady increase in scope, team sizes and budgets that have somewhat defined the AAA side of the industry for some time now. The fact that four big studios were involved in making Battlefield 6 helps illustrate the resources that can go into making a modern blockbuster.
“I know a lot of people at EA. These are very smart individuals. They are absolutely investing time, resources, and energy to optimise their development pipelines, but it also takes time,” Söderlund says. “People need to understand that a game like Battlefield is sitting on old legacy systems that you can’t just replace in 24 hours. At the same time as you’re modernising a large company, you have to play with what you have. It’s going to take time for these companies to become more efficient and to learn these things. They don’t love the idea of escalating development costs and tougher markets and laying people off.”
The future
The first seven-and-a-bit years have gone pretty well for Embark so far. But what is the studio’s five-year plan?
“I hope in the next five years that we can continue to have both The Finals and Arc Raiders in one shape or form in the market with a solid, highly engaged player base and that we have two more games in the market so that we have four in total,” Söderlund says. “That would be my hope and ambition.”
Four games? The exec says that there are new projects in development at Embark, but while the team is “excited about them” he emphasises that “they’re still early”, and thus he can’t say much.
“We need proper time before we can talk about them,” he says.
“I don’t see a need for us to be 600-to-800 people”
Despite Söderlund’s ambition to double the number of games that Embark is operating over the next five years, he doesn’t feel that growing its headcount drastically is a requirement.
“I don’t see a need for us to be 600-to-800 people. I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he says. “We’re trying to remind ourselves about the reason why we started the studio and not get carried away and spiral out of control. We’ll probably keep adding some people, because we need to, but in general, try to remain relatively sensible in terms of how many people we have.”
He concludes: “You won’t see us grow to thousands of people. That’s not going to happen.”
