Over four million Arc Raiders are plucking all of my prickly pears, making it Nexon's biggest global launch to date

Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios and parent company Nexon have announced that the new extraction shooter has soared past the four million sales mark. The news comes just days after Arc Raiders toppled the Steam concurrent player record set by last year's breakout hit, Helldivers 2.

Arc Raiders has certainly struck a chord with players, myself included. Granted, I was initially cynical that Embark's take on the extraction shooter would achieve the same levels of success as the likes of Helldivers 2 or Battlefield 6. After all, the genre can be incredibly unforgiving, and has traditionally pandered to the hardcore shooter enthusiasts, rather than a mass audience. Free PC games like The Cycle Frontier offered approachable alternatives, but never truly captured the mass market quite like this, despite Arc Raiders carrying a $40 entry fee.

Between Embark's seal of quality shooter design, its glitzy cassette futuristic aesthetic, and Scrappy the chicken, there's a lot to love about Arc Raiders. Embark's confusing use of text-to-speech generative AI in its dialog remains an ugly smear on the studio, but this hasn't deterred players from flocking to Arc Raiders in their droves.

On Sunday, November 9, Arc Raiders recorded its highest concurrent Steam peak yet, topping out at a whopping 462,488 players and narrowly beating out the 458,709-player peak Helldivers 2 achieved when it launched at the beginning of February last year. It's not quite Battlefield 6 levels of hype, but it's an incredible feat nonetheless for a game within a typically niche subgenre. Even top streamers like Michael 'Shroud' Grzesiek are pushing hard for it to enter the Game of the Year conversation; Expedition 33 is still my clear winner, though.

In a Nexon press release, company CEO Lee Junghun says (translated from Japanese to English via Google): "We would like to extend our heartfelt congratulations and gratitude to Embark Studios for the most successful global launch in Nexon history. We are deeply impressed by the enthusiasm that the player community is putting into this game, and we are working hard to further enhance the excitement with a new content plan for maps, ARC machines, weapons, quests, and more that we plan to implement starting this month."

Arc Raiders' blistering success comes at a golden moment for extraction shooters. Between the arrival of Escape From Tarkov 1.0, as well as the upcoming Exoborne and, if Bungie can right the ship, Marathon, there's plenty to be excited about if you're into them. For now, Speranza calls, and I know I'll continue spending most of my gaming hours for the foreseeable scooping up consumables for my resource-spewing bird.