As usual this time of the year, Google posted the list of the most searched for keywords in 2025, and Embark's ARC Raiders surprisingly topped the list in the gaming category.
The game beat Battlefield 6, Split Fiction, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Path of Exile 2, Grand Theft Auto VI, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, Minecraft, and Roblox. The other game in the Top 10 is Strands, the online word game created by The New York Times, though of course that's not really a videogame.
Grand Theft Auto VI only ranked seventh on this chart, which may shock some readers. That said, the game got delayed twice this year, first out of the original Fall 2025 window to May 26, 2026, and then again to November 19, 2026. Without a doubt, this caused the countless fans of Rockstar's massive franchise to try and take their minds off the game, given the long wait ahead of them.
However, the biggest surprise is seeing ARC Raiders take this particular crown, especially since it didn't receive much hype until the final Server Slam Test in late September. It would certainly have been very difficult to predict such an enormous success a year ago. Embark had only released the free-to-play arena shooter game The Finals to a fairly mixed reception. ARC Raiders was also reworked from the original cooperative-only plan to a PvPvE game.
Well, the final formula managed to win over the fans of the burgeoning extraction shooter genre. The game sold over four million units in around 12 days, becoming NEXON's most successful global launch to date. Last we heard from third-party analytics firm Alinea, ARC Raiders was Steam's best-selling game in November. Its total sales have already surpassed 7.7 million units across all platforms.
This relatively sudden explosion in popularity demonstrates that, despite the importance of marketing campaigns, nothing can beat word of mouth - especially in the Internet and social media era - when a good product materializes on the market. It's also why more developers are adopting shadowdropped games as a guerrilla strategy; Bethesda recently indicated that they'd like to do more drops after Oblivion Remastered.
ARC Raiders earned a 9/10 score here on Wccftech from Kai Tatsumoto:
ARC Raiders is a phenomenal entry in the growing loot-and-scoot genre, or extraction shooter if you want to be more technical about it. While the gunplay suffers in the early stages with inferior tier one weaponry, it shines through once you start developing squad tactics and learn the ins and outs of besting the array of lethal ARC threats throughout Toledo.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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