Arc Raiders was Steam's best-selling game the week of Christmas, and Battlefield 6 wasn't far behind

Arc Raiders skins: Key art showing three characters. The one on the left is wearing a blue pincho and holding a pistol ready at their hip. The middle figure is wearing a brown poncho and cowboy hat, facing the camera with a pistol across their chest. On the right is another character in a brown poncho and hat but facing away.

(Image credit: Embark)

In case you haven't heard, multiplayer shooters are undergoing a vibe shift—as PC Gamer's Morgan Park outlined in that article, 2025 met players with a number of games that forego brutal competition in favor of more approachable, chaotic, casual-friendly shooting. It seems like players are eager to embrace the new order, as two decidedly chill games dominated the sales charts around Christmas: Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6.

That stat comes courtesy of SteamDB, which gathered a list of the top ten best-selling games (excluding free-to-play games) from December 23 to today, December 30. There are plenty of familiar faces: the award-guzzling Clair Obscur, the absurdly excellent Baldur's Gate 3, and our favorite game of 2025, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. There's also some games that you just take for granted as always being best sellers: Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced and the latest EA Sports FC, for example.

But at the very top split only by the Steam Deck are Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, two shooters that offer relatively intense, competitive styles of shooter (extraction and modern military) without all the sweat. There's not so much as a competitive ranked mode of play in BF6, and Arc Raiders is a breakout hit in a genre once known primarily for being niche and hardcore. As Elie Gould put it in their review: "Finally, a less stressful extraction shooter."

You can find the expanded list of 100 games on SteamDB, which includes everything from indie co-op hit RV There Yet? to two different Assassin's Creed games one after another. The biggest surprise for me is that Ubisoft's Avatar game, Frontiers of Pandora, is at number 19 above Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring Nightreign. I guess that's the power of a film series that unfailingly generates hundreds of millions of dollars every time it surfaces.

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Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he's amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky '90s esoterica. Whether he's extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it's hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he's not at his keyboard, he's probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

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