It's widely believed that one of the big reasons Titanfall 2 tanked badly, despite being such a good game, is that EA decided to shove it out the door between the releases of the Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare behemoths. Despite being better than either of those games (an objective truth), there was simply no light for it, and it quickly withered and died. Nine years later, Arc Raiders is taking the same shot, between Battlefield 6 and Black Ops 7. Is that wise?
"Insanity," Embark Studios CEO Patrick Soderlund said in an interview with The Game Business Show, recorded a couple days prior to Arc Raiders' release. Soderlund knows a thing or two about that: He was executive vice president of EA Studios when Titanfall 2 launched. But in spite of his not-entirely-serious summary of the situation, he's confident in a better outcome for Arc Raiders.
"I know that people may look at that [launch date] and say, 'What the hell are they doing?'" Soderlund said. "We have spent a lot of time looking at this from multiple aspects and angles, and you know, for right or wrong we've decided that we believe the game can launch there. We look at this long term. This is the start of a long term journey. It needs to start somewhere."
Embark is a fairly large studio—Soderlund said in the interview that it has about 300 people now, which is quite a bit more than I would've guessed—but it's still nowhere near the scale of EA or Activision. The same can be said for Arc Raiders, which is one of the games we've looked forward to the most in 2025: It has the potential to be one of the biggest extraction shooters to come along in ages, but it's still no Battlefield or Call of Duty.
Even so, Arc Raiders is doing very well for itself, surpassing 264,000 concurrent players on Steam today, according to SteamDB, a number it will almost certainly exceed over the weekend. There are a lot of factors playing into those numbers, and the "very positive" Steam rating it currently holds: It's a really good game, for one thing—"An extraction shooter for the masses," PC Gamer's Elie Gould declared in their review-in-progress—and that $40 price tag, just over half the cost of Battlefield 6 and Black Ops 7, surely helps. It's still early days, but right now it looks like the launch-day squeeze that helped sink Titanfall 2 isn't going to be a big worry for Arc Raiders.
