A new extraction shooter is dominating the new multi-player game category. After its release on Oct. 30 Arc Raiders has taken its studio, Embark, to a whole new level of recognition. According to polygon.com, this exciting video game has been nominated for one of six, best multi-player games of the year. 

This game has become a phenomenon on YouTube leaving some creators, like Caleb Thompson, explaining Arc Raiders is different from other extraction shooters.

“It is its own thing and is just a really good game.” 

It continues to break its own records by exceeding its max concurrent player count on Steam for the third time on Nov. 16, with 481,966 players, according to gamesradar.com. It has also remained in the top six most games played on Steam since its release. 

What makes a game like Arc Raiders so popular? This can be summed up into one word, community. 

Thompson is a 10 year YouTube content creator, who has been gaming for most of his life and has noticed how the player to player interactions have been a complete change compared to most multiplayer shooter games in this age. 

“Because it’s just a bunch of gamers looking to have fun. You get a lot of people just talking to each other and it’s bringing gamers together again and it’s nice to see. It’s just like the old days.” 

This game has not simply kept people playing because of gameplay, but it has brought a piece of gaming culture which has struggled with the hyper competitive formula being prominent for many years now. 

Christian Dean, a long time gamer and Arc Raiders enthusiast, attests to the games success and has logged over 30 hours since the games release. 

“There’s a lot about Arc Raiders I would love to say. The community is unreal compared to other extraction shooters.”

According to Thompson, the game also has some high-end difficulty features changing your experience every time. Many extractions hold to a set of perimeters like shoot on sight of other players, loot and get out; yet, Arc Raiders has unlocked a new form of playing forcing players to work together.

“The robots use machine learning. They watch and learn from the players actions to learn how to combat them better.” 

An ever changing challenge which learns as you play has kept gamers coming back and naturally helps with repetition fatigue. 

This game has not been on short notice as some have been waiting for years for it. Thompson says he does not appreciate the new style of releasing games as soon as you can.

“I like that they waited, because six years ago the first trailer came out for the game. I like that they waited and really made sure they finalized everything before releasing it.”

Some games have fallen victim to this like the release of Battlefield 2042 having a very negative release, on Nov 19, 2021. According to Enders on YouTube, the game had a 2.4/10 score from users of the game on Metacritic and also received overwhelming negativity on Steam due to “numerous bugs and a lack of content.” 

Arc Raiders has shown its care for its community with a roadmap of content released along with the game. The development team has worked to keep the playerbase happy with fresh content and tweaks keeping the game running as intended. 

“They say they want to keep the game going for ten years which you don’t see anymore. It’s usually a yearly cycle now with games.” 

Thompson has seen many games like Arc Raiders lose popularity after a large spike in attention, but hopes it will stay relevant.