Between Marathon and ARC Raiders, It’s Clear Which One Took The Bigger Risk

The extraction shooter genre has grown so large—perhaps too large, depending on who you ask—that it now seems like the predominant template for live-service shooters. There are plenty of leaders in the genre space, though the most recent figurehead to emerge is ARC Raiders, a game that, despite some controversies, has managed to amass a hulking, dedicated playerbase since its October 2025 release. Like Escape from Tarkov, The Division, and The Hunt: Showdown before it, ARC Raiders is shaping up to be a touchstone against which all future extraction shooters are measured against.