ARC Raiders is currently a huge hit on Steam: strong ratings, hundreds of thousands of players. The breakthrough is not coincidental and parts of the success secret have previously been delivered by two games from Germany – with more or less success.
Already on the release day, ARC Raiders attracted over 200,000 players on Steam and was directly in the top 5 of the most played games. The player numbers grew even further: over 354,000 players were playing simultaneously on Sunday and even after the weekend there were still over 322,000 together (according to SteamDB).
With 88% positive ratings from 1,600 reviews, the game is rated “very positive”. The success even overloads the servers: there are wait times, but at least you will be compensated for it.
On Reddit and in the Steam forums, praise for the game is piling up – however, discussions also keep arising about where the hype actually comes from. After all, ARC Raiders, as an extraction shooter, is an odd hit in a genre that is otherwise little heard of.
And indeed, the very things that make ARC Raiders so good have previously existed in extraction shooters. Only ARC Raiders has perfected them.
A game that knows exactly what it wants to be – and what it doesn’t
The YouTuber and Twitch streamer JesseKazam analyzes the success of ARC Raiders in his video. He emphasizes not only that the game is finished but especially that it follows a vision.
Other games of the genre have often simply tried to copy Escape from Tarkov. Studios see the success of the shooter and want a piece of the pie without really recognizing what has contributed to greatness. The result is half-baked experiments like Call of Duty DMZ or Battlefield Hazard Zone.
ARC Raiders, on the other hand, has tried to create its own vision of an extraction shooter:
Everyone seems to think that to make [an extraction shooter] work, it has to be like Tarkov. We didn’t really have a game that understood the core of the extraction shooter genre. One that took the time to analyze why this genre is so fun and addictive, and then makes something completely new with the thought of catering to those core principles – until now.
JesseKazam on YouTube, around minute 4:15
Not quite the first extraction shooter with its own vision
However, there was already a game from Germany that approached the genre in exactly this way: Hunt: Showdown. Instead of making a realistic shooter in a modern setting with human opponents (like all the others), it’s about fighting against voodoo monsters somewhere in the swamp of Louisiana in the 19th century.
The German studio Crytek from Frankfurt uses many elements of the genre and has implemented them with its own ideas:
- Instead of collecting heaps of loot, there are bounties on monsters that can be collected and rewarded with money.
- Upon death, not only purchased weapons but also the character is lost – the bounty hunters are basically part of the loadout.
- Every fight against PvE opponents is a danger because the sound carries so far that half the map can be alerted by a single shot or flying ravens.
However, Hunt: Showdown has distinguished itself so strongly with its ideas that some fans already see it as an exception in the genre, less as a “part” of it.
Nevertheless, the vision shows success: the game still regularly attracts tens of thousands of players solely on Steam and runs on PS4, PS5, Xbox, and through GeForce Now – and this has been the case since 2018. By the end of 2024, the game had a record of 60,000 players concurrently on Steam alone.
