Embark Studios: How a Stockholm Team Made The Finals and the Breakout ARC Raiders
Founded by a former DICE boss and owned by Korea's Nexon, Embark released two very different shooters in two years. One is a destructible TV game show; the other became 2025's biggest multiplayer surprise. Inside the studio, its two games and its plans for 2026.
In late 2018, Patrick Söderlund walked away from one of the biggest jobs in games. He had run DICE, the Swedish studio behind Battlefield, and then served as Chief Design Officer of Electronic Arts. Instead of staying, he gathered a handful of DICE veterans in Stockholm and started again with a new company called Embark Studios.
Seven years later, Embark has released two games, and both are unusual. THE FINALS is a free-to-play shooter set inside a virtual TV game show where nearly everything can be blown apart. ARC Raiders is a paid extraction shooter that sold more than 16 million copies, according to owner Nexon, and won Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2025. Here is how a mid-sized studio built two hits in a genre dominated by giants.
Who Embark is
Embark's founders included Söderlund and several former DICE colleagues: Magnus Nordin, Rob Runesson, Stefan Strandberg, Jenny Huldschiner and Johan Andersson. From the start the studio talked about procedural tools, machine learning and cloud computing as ways for a smaller team to build big worlds.
Money came from Korea. In late 2018, Nexon, the company behind MapleStory and Dungeon & Fighter, became majority owner with a 66.1% stake, and it completed a full acquisition in 2021 while letting the studio operate with a degree of independence. Embark had about 50 people in 2019 and roughly 350 by 2025.
THE FINALS: a shooter where the map is the weapon
THE FINALS arrived as a surprise. It launched during The Game Awards on December 7, 2023, on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, free to play. Players are contestants in a virtual combat game show set in 2100, complete with holographic crowds and two commentators, Scotty and June.
Its hook is destruction. Walls, floors and whole buildings can be brought down, which turns every fight into a puzzle: you can blow a hole in a ceiling to drop onto a vault, or collapse a floor under the enemy team. The game passed 10 million players in its first two weeks. Critics liked it, too: it scored 80 on Metacritic for PC, and Game Informer gave it 9/10.
It also attracted criticism. THE FINALS used AI text-to-speech for its character voices, and Embark responded that its voice work was a mix of professional actors and temporary voices from staff. The debate would follow the studio to its second game.
Since launch, THE FINALS has run on a seasonal cycle. World Tour, a weekly tournament mode, arrived in Season 3 in June 2024, a PS4 version followed in December 2024, and a Chinese version, localised with Tencent, launched on November 18, 2025. Season 12, Prime Time, launched on October 20, 2026, with an overhaul of the destruction system, new blast waves, reworked arenas and a complete lighting update. Söderlund said the season had the highest concurrent player count since Season 2, while admitting that "Season 11 was not as good as we wanted."
ARC Raiders: from co-op shooter to phenomenon
ARC Raiders was actually announced first, at The Game Awards 2021, as a free-to-play cooperative third-person shooter. In 2023 Embark changed course and rebuilt it as a PvPvE extraction shooter: you head to the surface in small groups, scavenge, fight the robotic ARC and other players, and try to get home with your loot. It also dropped free-to-play and became a paid game at $40.
Players live in Speranza, an underground city in the year 2180, and venture up to a ruined surface patrolled by machines. That mix of danger and community, where another player might help you or rob you, became the game's signature.
ARC Raiders launched on October 30, 2025 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. It sold more than 4 million copies by November 11, reached 14 million by February 2026, and passed 16 million by May 2026, according to Nexon. Across all platforms it reached more than 700,000 concurrent players in its first weeks.
The awards followed: Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2025, Online Game of the Year at the D.I.C.E. Awards, the BAFTA for Multiplayer, and the Steam Award for Most Innovative Gameplay. Critics gave it 86 on Metacritic for PC and 88 for Xbox.
2026: slower updates, bigger moments
ARC Raiders' first year was not all upward. Like most live games, it lost a large share of its Steam audience over the spring and summer, spending months between roughly 30,000 and 50,000 concurrent Steam players.
In May 2026, Embark changed strategy. Instead of monthly content drops, it would ship two major updates a year. The first, Frozen Trail, arrived in early October 2026, alongside a 50% discount and a free trial weekend from October 8 to 12. It worked: Steam concurrency climbed past 131,000 on launch day and then to nearly 186,000, the highest since March. Embark also tested an experimental PvE-only mode from October 13 to 20.
By the numbers
- 2018: the year Embark was founded in Stockholm
- 66.1%: Nexon's first stake in the studio
- 10 million+ THE FINALS players in its first two weeks
- 16 million+ ARC Raiders copies sold by May 2026
- 700,000+ ARC Raiders concurrent players across platforms at launch
- ~186,000 Steam players after Frozen Trail, the highest since March
- $40: ARC Raiders' launch price, after Embark dropped its original free-to-play plan
- 350: Embark's approximate headcount in 2025, small by AAA standards
WGC's take
Embark's story is a reminder that "AAA" is not only about head count. A studio of a few hundred people, backed by a publisher willing to wait, made two games that feel genuinely new. THE FINALS proved its destruction tech; ARC Raiders found the emotional hook that many extraction shooters miss, the stranger who might be a friend.
The two games also show two ways to run a live game. THE FINALS is free and lives on its seasons: each one has to bring players back, and Season 11's stumble showed how quickly that can go wrong. ARC Raiders is paid, which gave Embark a large upfront audience, but it still faces the same summer slump every live game meets. Embark's answer, fewer and bigger updates backed by discounts and free weekends, produced the game's best numbers in months in October. Other studios will be watching whether that rhythm holds when the second big update arrives.
For Nexon, the lesson is just as clear. A Korean company best known for free-to-play online games now owns the game that won Best Multiplayer at The Game Awards 2025, made by a studio it let work on its own schedule.
What to play next
If you have never tried Embark's work, THE FINALS is free and Season 12 is the best version yet. ARC Raiders is the bigger experience; watch for sales like October's 50% discount. Both games are on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, and THE FINALS also runs on PlayStation 4, so your friends can almost certainly join you. And for a contrast, read how Bungie's rival extraction shooter fared in our Marathon story.