The meteoric rise and sustained success of Embark Studio's new third-person extraction shooter, ARC Raiders, will be one for the history books of the video game industry if things keep going the way they are currently going. A new report from Alinea Analytics claims that for the third consecutive month, ARC Raiders was the number one selling title across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox.
That month was, of course, January 2026, during which Alinea Analytics says ARC Raiders sold an additional 1.5 million copies just on Steam. On PlayStation and Xbox, it combined for an additional 1.7 million copies sold, bringing the game's total lifetime sales to an estimated 15 million copies sold across all platforms, generating an estimated $500 million in revenue, according to Alinea Analytics.
The game even hit a new record for monthly active users (MAU), reaching 10 million MAUs in January, an increase of 8% compared to December, which itself saw a record-high daily active users (DAU) count of 3.2 million players across all platforms.
When ARC Raiders arrived at the end of October 2025, it sold 2.5 million copies in its debut week. Less than a week later, it had sold over 4 million copies and even hit concurrent player counts of over 700K players on Steam. A few weeks later, it had eclipsed 7.7 million copies sold, and despite it only being out for the last two months of the year, Google's yearly review declared it to be the most-searched video game of 2025.
All of this happened amidst Embark Studios being under fire for its use of GenAI, as Embark is not afraid to say with its chest that it will continue to use GenAI tech as it sees fit, and dealing with heavy competition in the shooter genre from other standout hits from 2025, namely, Battlefield 6.
Of course, the question now is whether ARC Raiders will be able to seriously maintain this level of success and player engagement. As 2026 continues to roll on, the bigger releases set for the year, both ones we know about and ones we don't yet know about, could be what eventually causes players to move away from the game.
That said, it doesn't look like its community is going anywhere, considering the fact that since it launched on Steam, it has only fallen below 100K concurrent players once at the time of this writing.
For more on ARC Raiders, you can check out all of our coverage of the game at our hub page here. For help with your own raiding, check out our guides in our walkthrough and guides hub here.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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