A new extraction shooter launched cross-platform on October 30th and it’s a blow-up hit. Check it out!
ARC Raiders had its cross-platform launch on October 30th, and two days later the game has already met and exceeded 295 thousand concurrent players on Steam—a number we’ve had to update several times during the writing of this article. When we started the newsroom this morning, it was just 250K, and when I started the final writeup, it had already reached 277K. Regardless, the game seems easily bound for 300K at this rate, having already become the #1 top selling game on Steam and reaching a #4 on its Most Played list, just behind Battlefield 6 with its impressive ~ 477K players number. But ARC Raiders is no Battlefield, so what’s the cause of all the hype?
There are a few factors at play here, but the most important draws primarily boil down to the game being gorgeous, running fairly well across platforms despite running on the oft-maligned Unreal Engine 5, and being hailed as a very well-made third-person extraction shooter. « If you build it, they will come », and ARC Raiders seems to be a great example of that, providing both a great multiplayer extraction shooter experience and a worthwhile single-player story for those who don’t wish to engage with multiplayer.
