Currently, Arc Raiders is a premium game, but a different business model was previously considered — the project was supposed to be free-to-play. The developers said that abandoning the F2P format significantly simplified development.
Design Director Virgil Watkins said:
In free to play games, you need to make it a little harder for players to get out of gameplay loops — add more obstacles, time, and grind so they stay in the game, continue to go through these cycles, and play longer. Ideally, this should also motivate and inspire players to spend money in the game.
The Arc Raiders team considered adding timers for crafting — before receiving the created item, you would have to wait some time while it is "produced."
However, with the transition to the premium format, this was abandoned, and the amount of resources required became "more rational":
In the case of a game of this type [like Arc Raiders], it was quite difficult to respect the player's time in some aspects, such as crafting or the duration of game sessions. We were almost forcing players to "slow down." It didn't feel very good, so once the decision was made to change the approach, we were able to make the processes take as long as seemed appropriate in many ways.
Abandoning the F2P model of Arc Raiders helped the developers decide on the final design of the game. They began to look for other ways to monetize (the game already has a store with skins for the hero and a rooster assistant):
It helped us a lot, but when we launch a game with a price tag, we still need ways to monetize that don't seem predatory. That turned out to be an interesting challenge too.