ARC Raiders and the Power of AI — Nexon Calls Arc Raiders a "Trojan Horse" for Promoting AI Tools

ARC Raiders and the Power of AI — Nexon Calls Arc Raiders a "Trojan Horse" for Advancing AI Tools

At a recent financial presentation, Nexon’s leadership put ARC Raiders front and center. The Embark shooter moved fast: >14 million copies in the first 15 weeks, with about 85% of revenue coming from the US and Europe — Nexon’s clearest push into Western markets to date.

Nexon President Junghoon Lee labeled the title a "Trojan horse", arguing it changed how the studio approaches builds and pipelines. The claimed engine behind that change is the Mono Lake AI initiative. Embark’s founder, Patrick Söderlund, noted that both ARC Raiders and The Finals were produced by much smaller teams and at a fraction of the usual AAA spend — a result, he says, of offloading routine chores to AI.

Management’s line is worth quoting: AI isn’t meant to replace creators but to unshackle them from "writing code" so they can spend more time "creating." The plan now is to copy this setup across other Nexon divisions, treating ARC Raiders as a practical roadmap rather than a theory.

There’s also a frankness here that’s mildly surprising. Despite earlier trouble with AI-generated voiceovers (some lines later re-recorded with live actors), Nexon openly notes the role of neural nets in content generation. The Steam page mentions procedural tools assisting production while the final calls remain with humans (hum.).