The end of 2025 was absolutely stacked with brilliant games; we had Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades 2, Battlefield 6, and, of course, Arc Raiders. There were almost too many great games to play them all, a problem that all studios releasing games at the time undoubtedly had to grapple with.
Arc Raiders had the monumental task of competing with the likes of Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, two huge names in the genre that had swathes of fans waiting to pick up the latest game. But there was also another shark in the water.
"When we spoke about whether we should move the game, the first dialogue we had was obviously centred around GTA," Embark Studios CEO, Patrick Söderlund, says in an interview with GamesBeat. "We did not want to be close to them. I don't think anyone wanted to be close to them. And we were waiting for them to announce when they were releasing, and once that became clear, we then felt we could build a date. We had a pretty reasonable hunch that Battlefield was coming around the time frame, we knew that Call of Duty was going to ship roughly when it did because it always does."
Scheduling Arc Raiders to release between Battlefield 6 and Black Ops 7 wasn't a mistake or even a gamble: "It was absolutely something we did intentionally," Söderlund says. "As we started to see more of Battlefield 6, we thought that looked good; we didn't see much of Call of Duty. But at the end of the day, we felt that the game was ready to be launched."
Amongst the stacked gaming schedule, Arc Raiders managed to still break through, gaining over 100,000 players in just the first 30 minutes and going on to have some of the best player retention I've seen in quite some time.
"We had a long, long conversation about [changing the release date], and we came to the conclusion after going back and forth that we believed we had a game that was very strong," Söderlund says. "We also believed that we could get to a place where we could be competitive in a different way. We, of course, didn't think it was a Battlefield in that way, but that the game had enough uniqueness that it could stand on its own legs.
"We felt that the game was offering something very different from what those other games were, and we also had very strong KPIs from our last technical test, and we did a final test of the game just before launch, which we called Server Slam, gave us more data to feel comfortable with launching."
Arc Raiders' uniqueness sure did see it through. Yes, players had seen extraction shooters before, not least Escape from Tarkov, but Arc Raiders offered a different, more laid-back approach. Lobbies are friendlier, loot is more plentiful, and dying has far fewer consequences here than in other extraction shooters. There's clearly an audience for this softer approach, and now we know just how big it is.
