Embark Studios' smash Arc Raiders continued to be white-hot this holiday season. It was the second-best-selling game on Steam over the holidays, and has sold more than 7 million copies on Steam alone. It has moved more than 12 million copies overall since its October 2025 launch. On December 26, it hit its highest-ever concurrent player count on the platform at 3.2 million.
Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter set on a post-apocalyptic Earth in which players battle robots (the titular Arcs) and other players for loot before hopefully getting out of there. You'll enter with nothing and if you can survive the initial stages, become a force to be reckoned with.
At workshops, you can craft weapons, gear, items, and consumables to give you a fighting chance. All over the map are blueprints, which increase the number of things you can craft.
These are just the basics, though. Once you land, there are any number of factors that can dictate your run. Perhaps the most important is how other players react to you. You can play nice, but there's no guarantee other players are going to. They may even befriend you for awhile until it becomes advantageous to stab you in the back.
As I've mentioned, there is a former pro gamer who has taken to hunting down underequipped and outgunned players for the content. Arc Raiders quickly became one of 2025's biggest games, and this shooter revolution looks like it will continue in 2026. We'll keep you posted on all the latest developments.