ARC Raiders is without a doubt the biggest, surprise multiplayer story of the year, but as it turns out, that may include at least the last two years.
A week after launch, ARC Raiders managed to hit a new peak of 462,488 concurrent players on Steam, which not only broke its own record, but it also managed to pass up Helldivers 2’s all-time peak concurrent playercount on Steam, 458,709 players. That was the biggest, surprise multiplayer hit of 2024, and one of Sony’s only multiplayer success stories in recent years. But ARC Raiders may actually be more impressive.
ARC Raiders is developed and published independently by Embark Studios without a huge entity like Sony behind it. It’s also a wholly new IP where Helldivers 2 is well, you see the “2” there. ARC Raiders is not the biggest new multiplayer hit of 2025, but again, context. That would be Marvel Rivals, but it is made by mega-giant NetEase and uses one of the most famous IPs on planet earth.
If we want a glimpse into ARC Raider’s future, Helldivers 2 currently has a peak playercount of 32,138 nightly. No comment on whether that’s bad or good, it’s just what it is after that big launch two years ago. If we’re talking about an Embark property itself, The Finals, which also launched two years ago with a peak of 242,000, now has 14,000 nightly peaks. So do with that information what you will.
Both ARC and Helldivers are variants of the extraction genre, ARC being a more traditional PvPvE type, Helldivers 2 being purely squad-based PvE. Usually, when you start seeing breakout hits in a specific genre, the herd will start to follow. Surprisingly enough, Bungie now seems ahead of the game, with its Marathon extraction shooter having been in development for years. It was originally supposed to release before ARC Raiders in September, but after a poor reveal, a worse alpha and a plagiarism scandal, it has been delayed until 2026 and locked into closed, NDA-ed alphas. But despite the restriction, I’m hearing there have been a lot of improvements, so we’ll have to see. Matching ARC or Helldivers, however, is unlikely. But who knows.
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There’s simply no way this could have gone better for ARC. At least in the short term, it has a number of additions coming to the game. What its plans are for larger content updates in the future aren’t yet clear, but with this kind of playerbase, they’ll need to do a lot to move into “persistent hit” territory like the well-established Tarkov. Though that’s another level of success entirely.
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