The team explored several different approaches to monetizing the project.
Arc Raiders is now a premium title, though it was originally planned as a free-to-play project. The developers say that moving away from the F2P model significantly simplified the development process.
Design director Virgil Watkin explained:
In free-to-play titles you often need to make it slightly harder for players to break out of gameplay loops—introducing more obstacles, time sinks and grind so they stay engaged and keep returning to those cycles. Ideally, that also encourages players to spend money in the game.
The Arc Raiders team even considered adding timers to crafting — players would need to wait a short while for an item to be ‘produced’ before they could claim it.
After switching to a premium model that idea was dropped, and the amount of resources required was adjusted to be more reasonable:
For a game like Arc Raiders it was difficult to respect players’ time in areas like crafting or session length — we were effectively forcing players to “slow down.” That didn’t sit well, so once we changed direction we adjusted processes to take only as long as felt appropriate in each case.
Dropping the F2P approach helped the team settle on the final game design. They then began exploring alternative monetization routes (the game already includes a store selling character skins and a companion rooster):
That change was very helpful, but when we release a paid game we still need monetization that doesn’t feel exploitative. Finding solutions that felt fair proved to be an engaging challenge.
Source: iXBT.games