Original story: Arc Raiders is out, the day is today, you can finally go topside to strip evil AI Arc robots for parts and get more trinkets for Scrappy. I'll be playing (once I get this darn news story out of the way), and it looks like loads of other people are too.
Launching at 5:30am EDT / 2:30am PDT / 9:30 am GMT, there are already 103,975 players currently in the game, an all-time high and an incredibly impressive achievement. Especially when you take into account the US probably isn't awake yet, or if they are, Godspeed, that would probably kill me.
Alongside the impressive concurrents, Arc Raiders has also managed to climb to the top of Steam's best sellers list today, outshining games like Battlefield 6, The Outer Worlds 2, and Dispatch. It's all great news, especially for those of us who are banking on robbing a ton of people for loot once the game starts.
But this success hasn't come out of nowhere. A couple of weekends ago, Arc Raiders became the 89th most-popular game by concurrents, over a beta weekend where all the progress wouldn't carry over to the actual game. People were just playing for the love of the game and not to chase pixel perks.
The beta weekend brought in over 185,000, so I'd expect to see launch day bringing in more than this. As of writing, the number of concurrents has risen again to over 150,000 and counting, so it sure does look like that's an achievable goal.
I've really liked my time with Arc Raiders so far, surprisingly so. As someone who doesn't love Escape from Tarkov, is certainly refreshing to have an extraction shooter that just doesn't feel too hardcore, although those robo spiders are a pain for sure.
