Arc Raiders has sold more than 14 million copies, and its creators say a striking share of players are using the game as a place to cooperate instead of kill. Aleksander Grøndal, speaking about the late-last-year release set in a lethal imagining of humanity’s apocalyptic future, said the response “caught us a little bit by surprise.”
The numbers help explain why. Roughly one in five players have never knocked out another raider, and half have knocked out fewer than 10. That is unusual for an extraction shooter, a subgenre built around racing against the environment and other players to escape with loot. But in Arc Raiders, players are sometimes teaming up to take down robot monsters, or breaking into spontaneous rave parties and playing music through their microphones. Grøndal called it “a more peaceful version of the game than we anticipated,” and added, “Pleasantly surprised, just to be clear.”
Embark Studios says it always wanted cooperation to be possible, but Grøndal said many players latched onto that side of the game in a way the team did not fully expect. “We always wanted [that] to be the case, but it was a little bit surprising to see how many people latched on to that aspect of the game … It kind of blew the whole extraction shooter open, because it doesn’t always have to be about conflict with other players,” he said. The shift has drawn attention beyond gaming, with social scientists and criminologists taking note of behavior that blurs the line between competition and community.
That unusual mix is part of what has kept Arc Raiders in the conversation after launch, and it helps explain why a game built around survival is now being read as a test case for how strangers behave when they are not forced to fight. A YouTube video called The Humans of Arc Raiders, built around conversations with randomly encountered players, has only sharpened that picture. Related updates continue to roll in as well, including an Arc Raiders patch note that added an Acquire Resources button to speed crafting.