The success of ARC Raiders has seemingly made the parent company of Embark Studios, Nexon, quite happy. Studio CEO Patrick Söderlund has been appointed as an executive chairman at the parent company. This new role, according to PCGamer, will give Söderlund “broad authority over the company’s long-term strategy, creative direction, and how Nexon develops games globally.”
This means that, while Nexon CEO Junghun Lee will continue to lead the company when it comes to business matters, Söderlund will be given more power over the creative direction of the various game development studios under the company.
“Nexon has all the assets to unleash dramatic growth—incredibly talented people, iconic franchises, large and committed player communities, and best-in-class live service capabilities,” said Söderlund in a statement. “This is an enormous opportunity, but one that will require deep focus and discipline. Junghun and I are aligned on what needs to happen and I’m ready to get to work.”
“Patrick and I are fully aligned on transforming Nexon,” Lee said. “He’s built studios, attracted the industry’s best people to work with him, and shipped massive global hits. That’s exactly what Nexon needs right now.”
More details about Söderlund’s new position in Nexon’s overall hierarchy are slated to be revealed on March 31st, at the company’s Capital Markets Briefing. The briefing will also include Neople CEO Myeongjin Yun, along with other members of Nexon’s leadership. The company has teased that, among other things, it will also provide an update on its strategies surrounding the growth of its IP, like Dungeon & Fighter, as well as demo footage of new and upcoming games.
Söderlund is no stranger to executive positions at large companies. Aside from serving as CEO of Embark Studios itself, he also served as chief design officer and executive vice president of worldwide studios at Electronic Arts before he left the company in 2018.
Back in January, Söderlund had spoken about the challenges faced during the development of ARC Raiders, especially when it came to competing against industry giants like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Since Embark Studios was a young team, having only released one multiplayer game—THE FINALS—Söderlund noted that, rather than growing the studio with more developers, Embark Studios focused more on refining its development pipeline and building the tools it would require.
“To start a new studio from scratch and to compete with the likes of EA and Activision and others, if you follow traditional development methodologies, you’re going to have to have five, six, seven hundred people,” he said. “We didn’t want to be that, we couldn’t afford that many people, and we didn’t believe that was the way to get to the right type of innovation and quality.”
“So when we started Embark, we spent the first seven to 10 months conceptualising ARC Raiders and most of the time we spent on production methodologies and building tools and pipelines to change the way games were being developed. With the ambition of being substantially faster in developing games, so that we could compete with these big publishers but with a substantially smaller team.”
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
