Arc Raiders is So Fun it’s Bad

Arc Raiders — Embark Studios https://www.embark-studios.com

Arc Raiders is a PVPVE extraction shooter, the second game from Embark Studios, and by far its most successful, continuing to hit concurrent player peaks well after release. Having logged just over 300 hours since its release at the end of October 2025, I can say it’s one of the most enjoyable multiplayer projects I’ve played in some time, but a vocal segment of the playerbase has one really odd complaint: there’s not enough to do. I don’t think this is a grounded critique, but more a symptom of the online content environment, and the quality of the game itself.

Being an extraction shooter, Arc Raiders comes with really high drama potential: the stakes of losing being the loss of the entire kit you brought in with you means that every dicey situation has weight, and every escape is a celebration. The movement, looting, and combat systems also come together with the unique PVE Arc enemies to create this set of restrictions, risks and possibilities that give players space to create uniquely cinematic moments. In one raid I found myself and my friend with three minutes to cross 400 meters of arc infested map. In those three minutes, my friend died, I revived him, dodged several rockets, used up all of my adrenaline shots, and used my grappling hook to hop over a huge wall and call for extraction at the last second.

Narrative experiences like this lend themselves well to livestreaming, and Arc dominated the space for a good month after release; but while the game is really fun to play and watch, the incentive structures of livestreaming sites lead to that really strange complaint. Just a few weeks after release, a fairly large streamer going by Shroud, who had been a huge advocate for the game, and had been one of the first to start producing true endgame clips, essentially said that he might have to quit the game soon, as there wasn’t anything left to do. At the time people rightly pointed out that he had essentially blitzed all of the content in a much quicker timeframe than an average player might. But soon this complaint started to spread, the sentiment that the game would die if X Y or Z wasn’t added soon wasn’t overwhelming, but it wasn’t quiet, and the more I heard this, the more I realized there was something interesting behind it.

Arc Raiders — Embark Studios https://www.embark-studios.com/

Arc is a ‘live service’ style game, where you’re meant to be able to leave and come back to it over time and gradually see new things popping up for you to do, and it’s usually understood that these kinds of games (especially ones with smaller teams like Arc) need time to come out with new stuff. So what’s the deal with the “no content” complaint? There were (at launch) four large, incredibly detailed maps, a bunch of progression tiers, over 60 quests (quests are fairly light work in this game but still), and shortly after release we got a new stuff to do, events, a map, new modifiers. People definitely shouldn’t be talking about how there’s “nothing to do,” a mere two to three months post-launch.

Thankfully, this sentiment isn’t all that popular, but there are several things happening to make this feeling louder than it should be. The big driver, and I think the funniest part of this, is that the game is just too fun. It hit the right niche at the right time, with the right level of craftsmanship, and a lot of people racked up a lot of hours really fast, clearing progression way faster than projected. This is almost exactly what happened to me, and I had such a blast with it that I was happy to sign up for the voluntary wipe just to do it again. The game is so intensely fun, the gameplay so full of cinema and drama, and the systems so satisfying to learn and improve at that people with the time to do so just absolutely sent it.

The second part of the problem, and why this complaint is so visible, is streamers. At launch, if you weren’t playing, you were watching, and the person you were watching was financially incentivised to broadcast constantly. You’re playing, watching, trying stuff you see on streams or in clips, it’s everywhere. Eventually though, the streamers reach the endgame, the quests are done, their stash is flush, and there’s not really much to do for progression anymore. The whirlwind of genuine fondness for the game, and the monetary incentive of streamers to maintain their market-share of viewership in the most popular gaming category accelerated the content burn rate. And the audiences, constantly playing or thinking about playing, eventually found themselves burning out as well. The game is so good, and grabbed everyone so well, that the people with the time to indulge as aggressively as they wished, finished six months of content (for a working person) in less than two.

Here’s the thing though, Arc’s fantastic design means it has really broad appeal. Keeping up a content cycle that walks rather than runs allows for timely and substantive updates and fixes. Casual players get to enjoy content at a reasonable pace, and hardcore players get to return to sizable, meaningful additions. Coupled with how fun and engaging the community events around new content tend to be, Arc is in a really good place; and by the time the next major update drops, players who hopped off to find something else to do will be thrilled to have a new reason to come back.