Over a quarter-million players were above ground scavenging for loot or hanging out in Speranza at the same time together in Arc Raiders yesterday. That eye-popping number set a new Steam record for concurrent players in the extraction-shooter genre–with PvP features.
Spotted by Eurogamer, Arc Raiders peaked with 264,673 players on Valve’s platform for the game’s launch on October 30, per SteamDB. The strong start led to some server problems for the extraction shooter, though also proves Embark Studios might be right in not shying away from Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7.
However, there are a couple of caveats to consider. For starters, Arc Raiders broke the Steam record when including PvP extraction shooters, but it’s arguably not a requirement to fit in the genre. Without PvP, Helldivers 2 holds the top spot for the genre, according to SteamDB, and even saw a huge resurgence in player counts when the game came to Xbox Series X|S in August. Meanwhile, Escape From Duckov has peaked on Steam with a little over 300,000 concurrent players and outgunned Battlefield 6 briefly last week.
Speaking of which, Escape From Tarkov looms large in this discussion. The game that arguably put extraction shooters on the map will finally come to Steam on November 15 as part of the version 1.0 release. People who already own Escape From Tarkov will have to pay again to play on Steam, though.
Arc Raiders is also available on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S–in addition to PC. So keep in mind the concurrent-player numbers are obviously larger than just what’s seen on Steam. The game does have cross-play and cross-save, too. For more, check out how to get Arc Raiders hatch keys.
