Extraction shooters are hotter than ever. What began as a niche subgenre with a single top dog (Escape from Tarkov) is thriving into an entire ecosystem that can seemingly sustain a bunch of similar games, including Arc Raiders, Marathon, and more. One Embark Studios developer reckons the once-niche is now booming because new entrants are designed to be "easier to step into."
In an interview with GamesRadar+ about the new slate of PvPvE extraction shooters, Arc Raiders' design director Virgil Watkins says multiplayer games "absolutely can be a difficult space to break into" because "the bar is extremely high" for live service titles. Players have already sunk sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours into a select few experiences, "so anything new really has to earn its place."
