Nordic Game Flashback: ARC Raiders
The talks from NG26 are not a souvenir, they are still useful. The official Nordic Game YouTube channel now holds the recorded live streamed speaker program from Slagthuset this May: Design, audio, production, leadership, and the messy middle of shipping a game. Watch what you missed. Rewatch what you only half-heard between meetings. Send a session to someone who could not make Malmö.
If you only have time for one video this week, make it this one.
Watch: ARC Raiders – Data, Design, Direction
youtube.com/watch?v=NLOfp2G-vX0
Virgil Watkins (Design Director), Gerardo Basurto (Product Director) and Moa Naess (UX Researcher) from Embark Studios take the main theatre through the real road of ARC Raiders: early user research, Technical Test 1 and 2, the 30 October 2025 launch, and the live game that followed.
This is why it is worth the hour.
It is not a victory lap. ARC Raiders became Nordic Game of the Year 2026, and also took Best Technology and Best Audio. It passed 12 million players. The session is still about the work: How a team pairs player data and sentiment with design choices when the road will not sit still.
You hear three jobs in the same room. Design, product and UX research on one stage is rare. You get how those roles actually argued, decided and iterated, not just a slide that says “we collaborated.”
It is useful if you ship after launch. The talk does not stop at release day. If you run live ops, extraction, multiplayer or anything that has to keep earning its players, this is closer to your week than a launch trailer debrief.
Moa holds the thread. The conversation is steered by the person whose research kept feeding the loop. That is the part most post-mortems skip.
It is a Nordic story with global scale. Embark built this in our region and then took it worldwide. That is exactly the conversation Nordic Game exists to host.
Then keep going. On the same channel you will find Jesper Kyd opening the main stage, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Housemarque on SAROS, the Planet of Lana team, and a full spread of production and leadership sessions from NG26’s 179 speakers.
Subscribe here: youtube.com/@NordicGame
NG27 is next!
Nordic Game returns to Slagthuset, Malmö, 25-28 May 2027. We will start announcing new speakers soon — names you will want in the room, not only on a later upload. Bring the YouTube archive with you into the autumn. Then book the week in May, when the next talks happen in person.
See you in Malmö.
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