Arc Raiders is becoming the most successful extraction shooter on Steam with its server test. However, its biggest competitor will also be released there soon.
The third-person extraction shooter Arc Raiders will not be released on Steam until October 30, 2025. However, a free playtest is currently underway to test the servers. The rush for the preview event is so great that Arc Raiders has already left all comparable extraction shooters on Steam behind by an impressive margin.
However, its biggest and best-known competitor, Escape from Tarkov, is not yet available on the platform.
Impressive player numbers even before release
Looking at the figures on Steam DB, Arc Raiders is already recording an impressive peak player count of almost 200,000 simultaneous logins, well ahead of its release.
This is doubly astonishing because not only has Arc Raiders not been released yet, but it also leaves other games in the genre that have already been launched far behind.
For example, The Cycle: Frontier has a peak of around 41,000, and Gray Zone Warfare stands at 73,000. The recently released and highly acclaimed Escape from Duckov has settled at an impressive high of 147,000, but still lags behind Arc Raiders.
Escape from Tarkov coming soon to Steam
The developers behind Arc Raiders can probably already hope for a big sales success. Incidentally, the studio is no stranger to success: Embark Studios is also known for the free first-person shooter The Finals, which shines with fast-paced multiplayer battles and destructible environments. Here, too, the peak number of players on Steam is an impressive 243,000.
However, the future of Arc Raiders remains exciting. On November 15, Escape from Tarkov, arguably the most popular extraction shooter and, in a sense, the founder of the genre, will be released on Steam.
Theoretically, this could knock Arc Raiders off the Steam throne, although it doesn’t necessarily look like that will happen yet. At least, if the current wish list rankings are anything to go by: While Arc Raiders has settled comfortably in 4th place, its competitor Escape From Tarkov is currently lagging behind in 46th place. It remains to be seen whether it will climb higher as the launch date approaches.
In the future of Arc Raiders, the world has been taken over by robots, known as ARC machines. Humans have therefore gone underground, but a few brave raiders continue to venture out on raids, risking their own lives. As in other extraction shooters, there is plenty of looting and fighting – against AI opponents and real people, with whom you can also form alliances.
During these missions, you not only capture valuable resources, but you can also trade them later with merchants for new equipment and useful upgrades.
