How Arc Raiders and Marathon are making extraction shooters the next big thing

GameCentral examines the current state of the extraction shooter genre and what sort of impact Arc Raiders’ success could have on it.

The games industry loves to chase trends. That’s always been the case, but it’s never been more obvious than since so many of them started pumping out live service games, with Sony and Ubisoft in particular trying (and failing) to release a mega multiplayer hit.

Any time a new video game manages to prove even marginally successful, you can count on other publishers eventually releasing their own alternative, just as Fortnite helped spark a surplus of battle royale games.

As such, the recent success of Arc Raiders has made it, and extraction shooters in general, the hot new genre to copy, but whether Arc Raiders will become a trendsetter or a one hit wonder remains to be seen.

What is an extraction shooter?

Since there aren’t that many of them, and they’ve only recently come into the spotlight, there’s no strict definition of what an extraction shooter is, but put simply it’s a game where you have to escape a map rather than shoot anything, or anyone, in particular.

Typically, the games are shooters (often first person) with PvPvE gameplay, which means player versus player versus environment. Or to put it in actual English, you have to combat, or avoid, both human-controlled opponents and computer-controlled enemies.

There’s typically resources and/or loot involved too, which you can take back to your extraction point with you. If you’re playing in a team, and depending on the game, this can sometimes be used to determine who won a match. Although often merely escaping is the only achievement you need.

When did the extraction shooter genre start?

Despite feeling like a new concept, extraction shooters are much older than you might think. One of the most famous examples, Escape From Tarkov, has been around since early 2017 but it was by no means the first.

It is the one that helped to popularise the genre, though, resulting in similar military themed extraction shooters, like 2024’s Gray Zone Warfare and 2025’s Delta Force.

Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be a common consensus on what the first extraction shooter actually was. There’s arguments in favour of Ubisoft’s The Division from 2016 (which has an extraction shooter style post-game in its Dark Zone mode), elements of 2012’s famous DayZ, and even 2008 zombie shooter Left 4 Dead.

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None of these games explicitly advertise themselves as extraction shooters, but then this list of extraction games available on Steam includes many other titles that don’t either.

We wouldn’t call Helldivers 2 a dedicated extraction shooter, but it does involve reaching an extraction point once you clear a mission in order to reap any rewards, which is apparently enough for it to count.

Similarly, Dark & Darker is billed as a fantasy dungeon crawler, but despite the lack of guns, it too is counted as an extraction shooter since you form a squad with other players to gather loot, and you don’t get to keep it unless you successfully escape from the dungeon.

What are the best extraction shooters?

Although there have been a lot of extraction shooters over the years very few examples have come from any of the big name publishers, with most being indie titles.

There was Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Extraction from 2022, but that wasn’t much more than a professionally made mod and didn’t have much impact.

Instead, publishers have tended to include extraction modes in already existing games. EA had something like that in Battlefield 2042, with its Hazard Zone mode, and its current Battlefield Redsec battle royale spin-off has extraction missions as part of its Gauntlet mode.

Activision, meanwhile, added its own extraction shooter mode, titled DMZ, to 2022’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It was only ever labelled as a beta and effectively abandoned just a year later, but DMZ’s influence can be felt in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7’s PvE Endgame mode (one of the few enjoyable things about the game). Plus, insider TheGhostOfHope previously claimed DMZ will be brought back for this year’s instalment.

2019’s Borderlands 3 received a battle royale mode as DLC, where you need to use a loot extractor to keep any loot you obtain, while 2024’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 has a squad-based Operations mode that requires you to reach an escape ship upon completing missions.

How popular can extraction shooters get?

It seems many publishers feel there’s merit to the extraction shooter genre, but not necessarily enough to warrant full games.

The only noteworthy exceptions are Arc Raiders (developer and publisher Embark Studios is a subsidiary of South Korean company Nexon), Arena Breakout (which comes from Chinese conglomerate Tencent), and Bungie’s upcoming Marathon reboot.

Sony and Bungie obviously settled on turning Marathon (an otherwise single-player series of shooters) into a multiplayer extraction shooter long before Arc Raiders dropped, but after years of only half-attempts, perhaps the tides have shifted and made publishers less hesitant to commit to the genre.

A success like Arc Raiders is undeniably going to have turned heads. As a reminder, it has sold at least 14 million copies since its October launch (proof that such games don’t need to be free-to-play) and has remained consistently popular, currently sitting among the top 10 most played games on Steam at sixth place.

Most importantly, Nexon is happy with Arc Raiders’ performance, bragging that it has maintained six million active players weekly across all platforms. What’s more, Embark’s CEO Patrick Söderlund was recently given the new role of executive chairman so he can help spearhead Nexon’s entire games business.

‘Patrick and I are fully aligned on transforming Nexon,’ said Nexon CEO and president Junghun Lee, ‘He’s built studios, attracted the industry’s best people to work with him, and shipped massive global hits. That’s exactly what Nexon needs right now.’

Arc Raiders’ success could also be to the benefit of Marathon since it has helped introduce the extraction shooter genre to a wider audience. Few have seemed confident in Marathon’s chances, given Sony’s track record with live service games, the troubles within Bungie, and Marathon being a niche IP, but it looks like it might start off strong after all.

Not only was its free open beta popular, but the game shot up Steam’s best sellers chart in the US to the number three spot, ahead of its full launch this week (Thursday, March 5), overtaking Arc Raiders and only losing to Valve’s dominant multiplayer shooter Counter-Strike 2 and the recently released Resident Evil Requiem.

If Marathon manages to at least rival Arc Raiders in popularity, that’s not only a win for Sony but a sign to the rest of the industry that a lot of people enjoy extraction shooters. And if they remain popular over a long period of time, publishers will be encouraged to not just make extraction-lite modes in their shooters, but whole games.

The 9 best extraction shooters you can play right now

Arc Raiders

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC

The obvious first choice, Arc Raiders’ current popularity means there’s no shortage of people to play with, but you are free to scavenge the ruined future Earth and fight giant robots solo.

The PvP can be annoying if you’re not looking to fight other players but developer Embark has made efforts to downplay that aspect, with no plans for competitive leaderboards and the like. The AI generated voicework may be a dealbreaker for some though.

Escape From Tarkov

PC

Although it’s technically been around for almost a decade, Escape From Tarkov has spent most of that time in beta and only saw a full launch last November, when it became more widely available via Steam.

Aside from the core multiplayer, it has a story campaign, but its more realistic military sim style approach to combat means the whole game is considered brutally difficult by even ardent fans and thus hard to get into for newcomers.

Arena: Breakout Infinite

PC, iOS, and Android

Another one for the military sim sickos, Arena: Breakout Infinite’s high learning curve makes it a hard sell, but it’s one of the more technically impressive examples of the genre, boasting strong visuals and good performance.

It was previously decried for being pay-to-win, since you could obtain better weapons with a premium currency you could buy for real money, but that currency has since been removed.

Delta Force

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, iOS, and Android

Like Marathon, Delta Force was a series of single-player shooters that vanished for years until suddenly coming back as a multiplayer game. It only launched last year and is a solid, if uninspired shooter, but it must be doing something right to be the seventh most played Steam game at the moment. Being free-to-play probably helps.

Hunt: Showdown 1896

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC

A personal favourite of ours, even if we haven’t played it much lately. This one’s unique not only for its supernatural setting, but for its premise of gathering clues to locate and hunt one of six ferocious bosses.

Even if you fail to hunt the boss, you can kill the player who did and steal their bounty, making for a more novel and oftentimes unpredictable experience compared to other extraction shooters.

Helldivers 2

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC

Helldivers 2 is the one live service game success Sony has and it didn’t even make it, only publish it. While it’s long past its honeymoon period, Helldivers 2’s consistent content updates have kept things fresh and interesting, and the extremely chaotic nature of its harder missions, combined with friendly fire, lend themselves well to unintentional comedy.

It’s also an extremely rare instance of a Sony published game being ported to Xbox, with strong word of mouth leading to it selling new copies faster than it did on PlayStation 5.

The Division 2

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC

It may not necessarily be billed as an extraction shooter, but The Division 2 is one of the best examples thanks to its very well thought out Dark Zone mode and endgame content.

You do need to beat the main campaign to access it, but it’s arguably the best part of the whole game and worth reaching. It’s seen years of updates since launchand will likely be keeping fans occupied until The Division 3 eventually comes out.

Escape From Duckov and Zero Sievert

PC

While the extraction shooter genre is tailor made for multiplayer games, there have been some attempts at catering to those who like the formula but don’t want to deal with other players.

Escape From Duckov, despite its status as an Escape From Tarkov parody, is one such example, being a top-down shooter where you play as a cartoon duck trying to build a spaceship and escape a hostile planet.

Alternatively, there’s Zero Sievert, which offers pixel art graphics and some roguelike DNA in its randomly generated maps. Its numerous weapons and items help keep each playthrough fresh, although it may be too challenging for some.

Marathon

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC

Technically this isn’t out until March 5 but the beta (or *Server Slam* as developer Bungie call it) has made a strong first impression, with Marathon fans on Reddit praising the gunplay and visuals.

The one downside is that the game won’t be free-to-play and is being sold for £34.99, but it’s already charting well on Steam, purely on pre-orders, so it looks like Sony doesn’t need to worry about another Concord level disaster.

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