Arc Raiders opened the floodgates for extraction shooters in 2025 |
Let's get one thing straight: Arc Raiders was not the first extraction shooter. Escape From Tarkov is often credited with the founding of the genre, and while that may be true in a standalone sense, the mechanics that define it have been around for a while. The Division mixed PvP and PvE elements with its Dark Zone area in 2014, as did, funnily enough, Old School Runescape's Wilderness way back in the early 2000s. Sure, you didn't have to extract anything per se, but you did have to get the heck outta there without dying, lest you lose all of your gear.
Other extraction shooters have been released since Tarkov — Hunt: Showdown, The Cycle: Frontier, and even the DMZ mode in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to name a few — but Arc Raiders is the first in the genre to truly bring it to the masses. The big 2025 shooter competition was supposed to be between Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, and while you could argue the former won the battle, Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders came out of nowhere to win the war. The game still pulls in more than 300,000 concurrent players daily on Steam alone, as of this writing. You better bet game publishers will take note in the years ahead.
In fact, the upcoming release calendar is poised to become crowded with extraction shooters, meaning Embark may have lucked out immensely with its timing.........