Extraction Shooters Go Mainstream? Arc Raiders Says Yes

Arc Raiders. Phil, take us away.
I mean, look, I think everyone listening this podcast knows Arc Raiders has been an enormous success. And I think now it's time to think about how do we think about this success? So, already we have Video Game Insights reporting that they have made more than hund00 million in revenue. And Embark themselves, I think, has mentioned that they passed 4 million copies sold. I wouldn't be surprised if they'll do $200 million probably by the end of the year. I don't know, Eric, you feel free to tell me if I'm wrong. I think the question here is, you know, what does this mean in terms of live service? So already they have been growing their Steam PSU. And so right now we're looking at max daily concurrent players on Steam for Arc Raiders, Delta Force, Battlefield 6, Call of Duty, and I put in PUBG Battlegrounds. We don't talk enough about PUBG, which has had built just an absolutely incredible business on Steam.

It's kind of almost been, you know, not a part of the conversation, but certainly a part of the player base. And right now, Art Raiders is matching or exceeding Battlefield. And if you remember, Battlefield also launched their freeto-play skew, RedSack, which we were talking about, which basically came out and didn't do jack And Arc Raiders looks like it's about to overtake it and is just about there. Meanwhile, Delta Force steady as always. Call of Duty seems to have been taking a little bit of a hit, but let's see next month when they come out with their next version. You know, what does this mean? I don't know if this is like the first mainstream success for Extraction Shooters. I don't know if this is going to continue. I think one of the interesting comparison points is comparing Arc Raiders to Hell Divers 2. And it'll be interesting to see if they follow similar trajectories. So Hell Divers 2, very similar Steam story comes out, there's a I think a huge audience on Steam, which is price insensitive. They'll throw 40, 60 bucks on whatever is popular and blowing up. And then what happens is they end up leaving the title. They end up going to their next title. They're tourists almost. And so

the question is after the tourists leave, what's left? And I think what Arrowhead was able to do with Hell Divers is build actually incredibly sustainable business. And if you see the spikes here, this is when they do their seasonal launches. They've done an incredible job on narrative. They've done an incredible job on monization. We could talk about and I think this is a potential opportunity for our graders. We're going to check back in it week after week. It'll drop. There's no doubt about it. I think this is the peak. I don't expect any more growth after this. But I think the question is where is bottom for them? And then can they have these upticks that we see in Hell Divers 2 to ultimately build a stable business. I would also point to some potential monetization opportunities in extraction shooters. Let's see what they do. Their extraction mode, they are experimenting with more gameplay based items. Art Raiders does have MTX, but they are not doing gameplay affecting items. But DMZ started to play with this idea of insurance slots. they started to play with some different mechanics because again the genre isn't super established in the mainstream. So I think they have a lot of room to figure

out what those monetization norms are. But I think at the end of the day what I would pose to Mr. Crest, we were talking about Soderland. Sodland being the man who decided to launch Titanfall 2 in between Battlefield and Call of Duty. It looks like he pulled an inverse Titanfall 2 here. And what the hell does this first of all mean to Call of Duty? It feels like the air has just been sucked out of the room between Battlefield 6 and Arc Raiders. It's looking real grim. And also Nexxon and Embark. Like I guess when you see success like this, don't you pull everyone off of the finals and just like fly in resources to the Swedes to like get this thing in a better place. See if you can't pump a live service out of it.
We've been tracking this game for a while and the quality was super high compared to the finals, right? We
However, [laughter] that there's no live service model attached to this, right? Like it's
there is I think that's actually the innovation here and we talk about this on shooter monthly. Pass pointed this out is that you can almost attach this adjacent hyphen adventure extraction adventure where they have a lot of focus on what the seasonal missions are. And to be honest with you, I'd like to come back and play more. Unfortunately, my PC

and motherboard snapped on the way to Cypress, so I haven't had the chance to dive into it. Yeah, I just went out and dropped $2,000 on a new PC here nor there. But I think that there's heartbeats here. And to be honest with you, Ember ran a live service on the finals. They are running a live service on the finals. Actually, I think they prove they can do it. I think Hell Divers is a good benchmark for them. I think that's what I would look towards as a success is it can they create these reoccurring PSU curves when they launch new seasons. And again, remember there is MTX in our graders. It's cosmetic only right now, but there is MTX.
I know, but you would hope that they would be a little bit more aggressive given the $40 price point, right? I mean, that they lost left a lot of money on the table in theory.
They have a special edition.
Yeah. [laughter] I don't know. I the fact that they launched in between these two. We'll see if Call of Duty has any impact like and we'll talk about it later. I'm sure
it's this Friday.
I I would have waited, but that's just me, you know, like I probably would have waited till February or March next year, but you know, we'll see. The game is phenomenal. They're doing an exceptional

job of executing against it.
Think they have to be hitting their revenue targets. 200 million sounds about right.
I don't even know. Did we talk about GTA moving? I guess I can't remember. But with GTA moving crest to your point now that GTA is in November, you know, spring looks really good for this game to have launched in that timing. So
I was just thinking about the the revenue targets and like yes, the game is beautiful, looks really fun. I would love to play it, but I'm afraid I don't have the time right now. It just gets sucked in. I was just thinking about this from the Nexon perspective because Nexon is not a chump. Like it's a company that generates about $3 billion in revenue every year and I assume that they have invested how much in Embark? Like I think their initial investment was like 250 million and probably more and they're publishing this. So let's put it at like 350 maybe thus far. The company Embark has 250 employees according to LinkedIn plus of course an army of outsourcers that will probably triple this amount. What is the amount

of revenue that Arc Writers has to generate for it to be tangible for Nexon?
I would say that it's probably hitting expectations, if not exceeding expectations at this point, but certainly the finals was a huge disappointment, right, from the perspective of the company,
I would think. Right. I'm sure they're happy with it. They should be happy with it. It's just interesting because like when a game is good and it sells a lot and looks like a hit and then you look at the company that shipped it and it's actually not that tangible for them, then you have to kind of ask what the [clears throat] hell are the expectations. You essentially need to be launching like a PUBG or Apex every time for it to really matter to anything that you're doing and kind of opens up why EA is only launching franchises.
I do think the key to this success is long-term revenue. This has to be at least something like, you know, Hell Divers or kind of a live service revenue that is recurring, you know, that does like 300 to 400 to 500 million a year. Like I think that would be a view huge success for them even on a three billion

dollar run rate of their own revenue. But yeah, we'll see if they can pull that off. That's why I think the focus really should be on like ongoing monetization, which you know, we really don't know exactly what they're going to be doing on a regular basis, it seems. Let's just wrap up one other story about Arc Raiders while we have this up and it has to do with AI. So this is comes from game industry.biz. Eurogamer gave Arc Raiders two out of five stars with their review from Rick Lane criticizing the game's use of AI voice generation. Tim Sweeney responded with a series of tweets that said the reviewer's AI stance was political and quote political opinion should go into oped folks unquote. So as a reminder, you know, Arc Raider is a bark and it's not even a Tim Swinny game or a company and he's out there making comments. Arc Raiders, it has a
it pushed Unreal to the max easy.
That's true. It's Unreal. Okay. No, fair enough. Okay, fair enough. So, it has a Metacritic score of 84 on PC and it hit an all-time high concurrent players of

like almost 500,000 two days ago according to Steam DB. So, personally, I just I I'm an AI neutral person. Like, I really think AI has a lot of great things to offer and I think we should be using AI wherever we can to create better experiences, be more efficient, but make sure to do it in a way that upholds creative integrity because I work with a lot of creatives. I get it. That being said, don't review bomb some somebody because you don't agree with the philosophy of why someone is doing what they're doing. If the AI voices sucked, if it was a poor experience, yes, I understand that
it's not AI voices. I think this is really important. It's not AI voices. They went out, they signed voice actors, and what they did is they did use text to speech, which by the way, again, EA at Seed was doing this like 10 years ago. So, they pay those voice actors. And so rather than the voice actors having to say every single line item, for instance, you add a new item or you have a new ping, they take those voices and then what they do is they have that

voice with AI say what that thing is, but there were still actors that were hired as a part of this.
Okay.
I think this given their consent they given their consent to this too.
Yeah. And they're Yeah. And so this especially for me is should be okay if the especially if the voice actor is going in. They don't have to screen into the microphone 10 times. They can, you know, they if they're paid and compensated for the work and AI takes it to other places.
I think Rick Lane or whatever the his name is, this is a ridiculous review for him. You know, it's like I would totally agree if these AI voices impacted his experience or his gameplay or like, you know, that could be a legitimate gripe, you know, and you could mark that off on reviews, right? But like, but if you disagree philosophically or politically, you know, you got to get off get over yourself, right? You know, like like that's not your job. Your job is to be an objective reviewer. Like that's that is your role, right? And so
the game is universally loved. that has

like 85 Metacritic, which is an amazing score for a new game. And what's really crazy about it is this. If you actually read his review, it's really positive. It's a really like if you just take the score out of it, right? And people are making that big hubbub about score versus the actual written review. The written review is positive, but all he really cares about is this self-righteous view that AI and gaming is bad, right? Like, and so,
have you seen the title? It's Arc Raiders review. A smartly designed extraction shooter marred by one inexcusable decision. Underline grass the machine. Jesus, what a comment.
I think [laughter] Yeah, I think Rick Lane is just being very obtuse about this particular subject. That's what I think. I think and he's getting so much flak right now, right? Because he's like literally the only bad review. I mean, he's like a 40 Metacritic. There's a few 60s, but the majority are 80s and 90s, you know? And so like he just looks like an idiot, right? I mean, really, he just looks like a pompous ass right now.

I'll refer to the comments I made at the beginning of the cast that the only thing lower than video games journalism is sports journalism. [laughter]
It's just the way it's way it's been for for a decade.
Clip it. [laughter] There's some there's some good guys out there.
Awesome. All right, everyone. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next week.
Thank you.
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