The success of ARC Raiders has been quite the sight to behold, with the title having sold more than 12 million copies and continuing to top engagement charts despite having come out all the way back in October. The CEO of developer Embark Studios parent company Nexon, Junghun Lee, confessed in a recent interview with Game File that this success has been quite surprising.
“I didn’t expect ARC Raiders to be this successful,” said Lee. “It’s had around double the amount of success that I had initially anticipated.” The surprise and success have been attributed by Lee to how uniquely ARC Raiders is able to combine gameplay elements from other extraction shooters while still maintaining respect for players’ time. He noted that the company couldn’t “say that the gameplay of ARC Raiders itself is totally new and is completely unprecedented.”
ARC Raiders being successful has led to Nexon also exploring more partnerships with western developers, said Lee. While it’s far from a done deal as of yet, he did refer to this as being “an exciting and amazing opportunity for us”.
“We are able to enjoy more awareness in the western community now,” said Lee. “And we also have a lot of different developers who are curious to know how Embark and Nexon work together. I think this is an exciting and amazing opportunity for us, and I do definitely have this willingness to work more with more western developers who are innovative.”
Nexon also has a host of other projects in development based on western IPs. A report from back in April 2025 has indicated that Blizzard has been looking to team up with Nexon to develop and release smartphone games based on Overwatch and StarCraft. Blizzard has primarily been accepting bids from Korean studios for use of the IPs, with the licensing deal noted as being a package deal that includes rights to publish and service the titles in Japan and Korea.
As for ARC Raiders, its general success has emboldened Embark Studios to get more ambitious with its future plans. Design lead Virgil Watkins had spoken in January about wanting to “escalate” the challenges offered by the extraction shooter’s PvE elements beyond just massive robots with six legs.
“I think we are pretty happy with what they are now, but I don’t think we can subsist forever on that,” he explained. “I think eventually, if we introduce yet another six-legged giant spidery robot, it’s kind of like, ‘Okay, we got it.’ So yeah, I think it’s looking toward where we take those types of experiences in the future to something else or something additional, seeing how we can escalate the experience for the player on the PvE side.” A major sticking point with these ambitions, however, is whether or not the ARC Raiders servers could handle these challenges.
ARC Raiders is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review of its launch version. Also check out details about its new three-strike ban system.
