PC player numbers for Arc Raiders are steadily climbing, but that doesn’t paint the full picture of the game’s potential popularity.
Embark Studio’s decision to launch new multiplayer shooter Arc Raiders shortly after Battlefield 6, which has garnered a lot of positive buzz during its pre-release and is now a proven hit, was a risky one.
Considering this also comes just a couple of days after the surprise launch of Battlefield Redsec, Battlefield 6’s free-to-play battle royale spin-off, we wouldn’t have blamed Embark for pushing its game back to give it some breathing space.
Yet, so far, Embark’s strategy seems to be paying off, at least on Steam, where Arc Raiders is managing to outsell Battlefield 6 and has cemented itself as the top selling game on the platform.
Part of that could be attributed to Arc Raiders’ price. Whereas Battlefield 6 is £59.99, Arc Raiders is notably cheaper at £30.99.
It’s still far too early, though, to deem Arc Raiders a runaway success. At the time of writing, Battlefield 6 still has a far larger player count, with SteamDB estimating just over 335,000 players.
Arc Raiders has currently peaked at just over 200,000, but the number has been steadily rising since launch earlier today.
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PC stats don’t tell us the whole story, though. There’s no way to tell how well Arc Raiders is performing on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S (which Battlefield 6 is also available for) and it won’t be for a while until Embark shares official sales figures.
There’s also the matter of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7, which is scheduled to launch in just a couple of weeks, on November 14. While Battlefield 6 is currently outperforming current Call Of Duty games on PC, with its popularity clearly spooking Activision, Call Of Duty has always fared better on consoles.
Even given how much the franchise has been criticised in recent years, it’s difficult to imagine Black Ops 7 not doing continuing to do well with the casual market – who will be largely unaware of Arc Raiders.
Arc Raiders’ two advantages are its more affordable price and it being an extraction shooter, thus differentiating it from from Battlefield and Call Of Duty. Extraction shooters have always been fairly niche, but given Arc Raiders’ popularity so far, perhaps it’ll help the genre gain more notoriety.
This can also be seen in Escape From Duckov, an Escape From Tarkov parody that launched on Steam two weeks ago and quickly became a hit. In fact, it’s currently the sixth most played Steam game, right under Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6.
However, Arc Raiders has not been without controversy. Just as with Embark’s last game, The Finals, Arc Raiders features AI generated voice work through text-to-speech, which is an obviously contentious aspect since there are well-founded fears of voice actors losing paid work if studios can just use AI instead. There was a whole actors’ strike about the matter last year.
Embark’s co-founder and chief creative officer Stefan Strandberg has defended the use of text-to-speech for voicework, saying that human actors were still used in the process.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Strandberg says, ‘I came out of recording just two days ago with two wonderful actors that you’ll have heard in the pre-order trailer. Those are real actors. There’s something special and dynamic about putting two people together that to me, being a sound designer originally, there’s nothing that can replace that in my opinion.’
So, how come the studio is using AI as well for its voice work? ‘[Text-to-speech] allows us to increase the scope of the game in some areas where we think it’s needed, or where there’s tedious repetition, in situations where the voice actors may not see it as valuable work,’ explains Strandberg, adding that it helps avoid unnecessarily ballooning the studio, especially in an age where teams are growing too large for their own good.
Even so, AI voicework seems an obvious slippery slope. If you already have an AI recreation of someone’s voice, why would you ever bring them in again when the AI can do the same job at no extra cost?
Strandberg also admits that other AI tools, such as machine learning, have been used for Arc Raiders’ development, though he insists that the technology will never outright replace anyone, while denying that generative AI was used to make any of the game’s content.
‘There’s no such thing as just auto-piloting development,’ says Strandberg. ‘That’s not a thing. So it’s guided by us, and we’re always on the lookout for how we can improve our own workflows. We started this studio with a massive set of procedural tools when it comes to world building, and we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today without those investments.’
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