One hundred and twenty developers. Then twenty-five. Then 131,000 players online at once.

ARC Raiders’ path from near-cancellation to one of the biggest extraction shooters on Steam is the kind of comeback story the industry rarely gets to tell — mostly because the games that need comebacks usually die in the process.

From DICE Veterans to Desperate Reset

Embark Studios was supposed to be the studio that got it right from the start. Founded in Stockholm in 2018 by Patrick Söderlund — former CEO of DICE and Chief Design Officer at EA, the man who helped build Battlefield into a franchise — alongside fellow DICE veterans including Magnus Nordin, Rob Runesson, and Johan Andersson, Embark had pedigree, funding from Nexon, and a first project announced in 2019 that would eventually become ARC Raiders.

That project nearly killed the studio. Production director Caio Braga has been blunt about what happened: the team was forcing design directions that weren’t working, and development spiraled. Nexon, the South Korean publisher backing Embark, could have pulled the plug. Instead, they greenlit a reset. The ARC Raiders team was gutted from roughly 120 developers to just 25. The rest were shifted to The Finals, Embark’s free-to-play shooter that launched in December 2023 and pulled 10 million players in its first two weeks.

“They had to have a lot of patience, and they had to make sure they trusted us,” Braga said of Nexon. “A lot of games would be canceled” under similar circumstances.

The skeleton crew looked at what they had and found, in Braga’s words, “foundations for a very interesting extraction game.” They rebuilt ARC Raiders as a PvPvE extraction shooter set on a mechanized, hostile Earth — and on October 30, 2025, they shipped it.

The Numbers That Matter

Five months post-launch, ARC Raiders is not just surviving. It’s thriving. The game currently sits at 131,433 concurrent players on Steam, holds the number seven spot on both the Top Sellers and Specials charts, and has moved 14 million copies worldwide as of February 2026. Reviews stand at Very Positive — 86% positive from over 224,000 Steam reviews. It won Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2025 and Online Game of the Year at the D.I.C.E. Awards.

For a $40 game (currently 20% off at $31.99) in a genre dominated by free-to-play competitors like Escape from Tarkov and The Finals — Embark’s own title — those are serious numbers.

That discount is worth a second look. Dropping price on a game that’s still climbing the charts isn’t a panic move; it’s a funnel play. Get players in cheap while word-of-mouth is hot, build the install base, and monetize later through cosmetics or seasonal content. Smart, if the retention holds.

The Chill Factor

What separates ARC Raiders from the extraction shooter pack isn’t just the PvE-forward design — it’s the community. Browse the Steam reviews and a pattern emerges fast: players describe the community as “friendly,” “chill,” and cooperative in a genre notorious for kill-on-sight paranoia. “Most ppl friendly and chill recommend the game,” reads one 100-hour positive review, and that vibe shows up across dozens of similar posts.

In a market where extraction shooters typically breed anxiety and salt, Embark has somehow cultivated a playerbase that revives strangers and shares loot. That’s not an accident — the PvPvE balance and cooperative objectives nudge players toward teamwork rather than betrayal. It’s a genuine differentiator.

The Endgame Question

But there’s a crack forming, and it’s one extraction shooters know well: what happens when the grind runs out?

Negative reviews increasingly cite thin endgame content, repetitive events, and the frustration of losing progress to ambushes. “The game pretty quickly stops being fun when you are forced to redo the same grind over and over,” wrote one 40-hour player. The Harvester events that anchor late-game play are drawing particular criticism.

Here’s the counterpoint: according to Steam achievement data, only about 5% of players have actually reached the endgame. The loudest complaints are coming from a tiny, highly engaged minority. That’s a familiar pattern — the players who burn through content fastest are always the first to demand more.

Embark’s 2026 roadmap suggests they know the clock is ticking. The “Escalation” phase running through April promises a new map, new ARC threat enemy types, a matchmaking tier for level 40-plus players, and expanded endgame progression. Whether that’s enough to keep the hardcore engaged while the other 95% catch up is the central tension of ARC Raiders’ next six months.

The Verdict, For Now

131,000 concurrent. Fourteen million sold. Awards on the shelf. A community that’s genuinely nice to each other. By every measurable standard, Embark Studios has a hit.

The studio that nearly lost everything on a broken build has delivered one of the most successful extraction shooters ever made. The endgame complaints are real, but they’re a good problem to have — it means people care enough to stick around and demand more.

Whether Embark can keep feeding that appetite will determine if ARC Raiders becomes a fixture or a peak. Right now, the trajectory says fixture.

Sources