Almost a month after Marathon's release, how has it affected ARC Raiders?

On March 5 — the same day Bungie's Marathon launched—ARC Raiders peaked at roughly 193,000 concurrent Steam players. That's actually about 10,000 less than the day before, a drop that sent speculation flying across gaming forums. By early April, that peak had settled closer to 144,000, and the story online had already created ardent defenders and attackers: Marathon had come, and ARC Raiders felt it.

But the data tell a more complicated story, and the real question worth asking is not whether Marathon stole players from ARC Raiders. It's about ARC Raiders could ever maintain those heights in the first place, and if two very different games can – or need – coexist in the same genre. As extraction shooters continue to make their way into mainstream gaming, the genre's biggest challenge may be competition for identity rather than competition between titles.

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Marathon vs. ARC Raiders on Steam Player Count

Marathon is now here to give ARC Raiders its first major competitor, and this is how each game's Steam player count is shaped.

ARC Raiders has a player drop that precedes Marathon

Before you draw a straight line from Marathons launch to ARC Raiders' declining numbers, it's worth zooming in on the SteamDB data. Average concurrent players were already trending down well before March 5; the slide had been consistent since January, then ARC Raiders averaged over 240,000 players. By March, that average had dropped to about 112,000.

It's also worth noting that Steam only tells part of the story, as the game sold over 12 million copies, and expectations built from those numbers were always going to be hard to sustain. In addition, ARC Raiders has a meaningful console player base, and the SteamDB concurrency data, which peaked near 480,000 concurrent players, can't capture that. What the Steam numbers suggest, however, is ARC Raiders behaves as most major live service games do, with a strong, volatile launch window, followed by waves of highs and lows that speak to the normalization of player numbers.

Extraction Shooters Churn and Burn players

Specifically, extraction shooters are notorious for their higher churn rate for a myriad of reasons, from the genre's difficulty curve to a generally higher skill ceiling. Players hit a wall, reach the playoffs, or simply burn out on the loop, and these dropouts often occur in waves, with peaks and troughs that make the decline look more dramatic than it is. ARC Raiders simply inherited this problem on the largest scale the genre has ever seen.

Marathon's player base is smaller, but significant

Marathon launched to strong numbers, a peaked at around 88,000 concurrent players on Steam, with reported hundreds of thousands of daily players across platforms in its launch window. But it's not very close in comparison. For a more hardcore extraction game, those are genuinely good numbers, and they confirm that Bungie still knows how to launch a game. But placed next to it ARC Raidersthe ceiling, the scale difference is hard to ignore.

That just speaks to these games' differences, then ARC Raiders is built for broad PVE accessibility, with cooperative flexibility and a tone that invites players who may not have touched Escape from Tarkov. Marathon is a little more PvP-forward, mechanically tighter, and leans heavily toward competitive rather than team-to-team cooperative play. That distinction matters when assigning blame for someone's declining player numbers, and Marathons comparatively smaller footprint makes it difficult to argue that it accounts for a gap of 50,000 players that was already forming.

The Flashpoint update shows that ARC Raiders is not standing still

None of this is to say ARC Raiders is rolling along in earnest, as Embark has continued to iterate heavily on the game, most recently with the Flashpoint update, which introduced new weapons, new enemies, and meaningful improvements to matchmaking. That said, the developers are still grappling with one of the central tensions of the genre: balancing the expectations of PvE-focused players with the demands of their PvP audience. The game's own player base has conflicting visions of what the game should be long-term, and in some ways that's the real competition ARC Raiders faces, beyond Marathonbeyond whatever is the next extraction shooter on the horizon. Marathon facing a version of the same challenge, just from a different angle; both games are still figuring out what they want to be at scale.

The genre is expanding faster than it is consolidating

Ultimately, taking a step back brings a bigger picture into focus: Extraction shooters are no longer niche, and ARC Raiders helped drag the genre into mainstream visibility. Marathon has a smaller impact, but it clearly signals that AAA studios see continued commercial potential in the genre. People online might think otherwise, but neither game meets the death knell of a genre under pressure; rather, it is the growing pains of a genre that is actively diversifying.

The old one Tarkov-centric model of a brutal, unforgiving game loop to rule them all is giving way to something more varied. ARC Raiders sits at the broader, more accessible end of the spectrum, while Marathon creating a high-stakes PvP niche between the two other titles. Rather than a zero-sum battle for the same player, the genre adapts to a growing pie, with different records having distinct flavors.

The impact of genre growth is felt more psychologically than statistically

Back to the March 5 numbers: 193,000 players, down roughly 10,000 from the day before. Although most accept Marathon-dominant interpretation of the data, the pre-launch trend, the scale consistency undermines the causal argument and ARC Raiders still getting major updates that suggest Embark is in for the long haul. All that Marathon has changed is the conversation around the genre.

The proof is clear enough to see, as for months, ARC Raiders occupied a unique position as an accessible and highly produced extraction game for players who were not ready for Tarkovs punishment. Marathons arrival means there's now another serious answer to the “which extraction shooter should I play?” That change changed the perception of these games more than it has changed the numbers.

Support the genre's growing freedom of choice

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The best part is that this diversification can ultimately help both games. The extraction shooter genre spent years being defined by one title. The more legitimate records that Marathon or ARC Raiders that exists, the more legitimate the extraction shooter genre becomes. And in a genre still finding its footing, more places for players to go will be what helps it grow in the long run.