We had an inkling that Arc Raiders was going to be good when it released, following a massively successful beta, but I don't think anyone could've predicted it'd achieve this kind of success.
Following on from over 700,000 concurrents in just one weekend, a streamer civil war, and recently winning best multiplayer game at The Game Awards 2025, it's had one hell of a run. And you want to know some even better news? The devs have no plans to pack it up.
"I think we've said a few times that we had this 10-year plan," Robert Sammelin, art director at Embark, tells PCG'sTim Clark and Evan Lahti at The Game Awards. "Our ambition is to keep this game alive for the longest time. It is a live game. It's something that we want to keep alive for the longest time possible, as long as players engage with it and have fun and see that it is evolving in a good way.
"I think games like this will evolve depending on community behaviours, feedback, and how we pick out the things we see people engage really well with. But also throw things into the mix that sort of afford new challenges and opportunities within the game. I think there's a wide range of routes that we can take with this, and time will tell how we sort of dig into it. But we for sure have a pretty long-standing plan of where we want to take it."
Within a few months of launch, Arc Raiders has managed to do the impossible: make me love extraction shooters. If that doesn't utterly stun you, the devs also introduced a successful community event leading to a new map, introduced multiple new map conditions, and cut prices in its shop after players complained it was too expensive. It's been a busy few months, so I can't wait to see what else is in store for us raiders in 2026.
I do have a couple of ideas as to what I'd want to see in Arc Raiders over the next year or so, but at the top of this wishlist is more arcs, and as it so happens, this may actually be on Embark's to-do list.
"We started with a fairly slim roster of arcs, and that's, of course, something that we're expanding over time again," Sammelin says. "Different avenues open up for different types of behaviours with the arcs as well."
All of this isn't to say that Arc Raiders is infallible; this extraction game has had its fair share of foibles. I'm talking about using AI for voice acting, and recently, a killer gear-grind. But it's been largely successful since launch, and maintained consistent player numbers, which is in part thanks to the devs looking at other games and realising what not to do.
"Looking at other games, I think there are loads of lessons to be had and to analyse what could go wrong," Sammelin explains. "For sure, there are loads of pitfalls that you can sort of at least prevent, and do some clever designs beforehand to sort of mitigate this.
"One lesson is, of course, having a robust anti-cheat from the start and making sure that it is a lot of sort of good housekeeping being done on a regular cadence with having a sort of a live product in place, that's kind of crucial." See kids, doing your homework does pay off.
But the prep work is over; now Embark needs to focus not on what makes a successful launch but on what will make for a successful long-term live service game. If Arc Raiders manages to get through 2026 with the same kind of success and attention to detail it's had so far, then I'll consider myself very lucky, and if not, well then to hell with it, I'll likely still play it anyway.
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