ARC Raiders has crushed its own player peak for the third weekend in a row, climbing almost to the very top of Steam’s most-played games by concurrent players. The new record is another testament of the game’s quality and proof that the extraction shooter genre was just waiting for its king.
With 480,682 players at the time of writing (thanks SteamDB), ARC Raiders has become the third-most-played game on Steam per concurrent players, behind only Valve’s own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. It managed to beat out Battlefield 6, PUBG, and Call of Duty, among others, in what’s one of the most impressive shows of power in live-service gaming history.
It’s the only non-MOBA, non-FPS game in a long time that’s consistently grown its player count week after week, and is showing no sign of stopping. In fact, every time I refresh the SteamDB page the player count grows, and it’s likely to keep expanding as time goes on and new patches, maps, and content are rolled out.
Embark Studios has truly made one of the best games of all time, following up its free-to-play success, The Finals, by transporting us into an extraction shooter environment where anyone can be your friend or enemy. That is, except for the ARCs, powerful robotic “creatures” ruled by a sentient AI from orbit on an Earth that’s been long abandoned by its previous inhabitants.
The Raiders, a group of survivors living underground in Speranza, are all that’s left to try and take Earth back from the robots.
The story and world lend themselves perfectly for a high-stakes survival extraction shooter experience, which is coupled with a stellar movement and combat system that’s heavily inspired by The Finals, but now more refined and responsive than ever.
It’s an incredible game, and one that deserves all the attention and praise that it’s getting, which is, by all counts, quite massive.
