Shooters continue to be some of the most popular titles on live streaming, from old guards like Call of Duty to breakout successes like Helldivers 2. Within such a popular genre, subgenres are able to command sustainable audiences of their own, like Looter Shooters including Borderlands and Destiny. The current trendy subgenre of Shooters is Extraction Shooters: Games that task players with venturing out, getting loot, and bringing it back to your base safely, all while paying keen attention to audio design and environmental cues to avoid danger.
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Escape from Tarkov kicked off this subgenre which is now swamped with all kinds of variants including PvP, PvE, and PvPvE gameplay. Publishers are trying to find new niches in this space, with demos and alpha tests for new Extraction Shooters dominating online discourse. To see how these publishers are using live streaming to gauge player interest in their games, we’ve decided to take a look at two of the most talked-about Extraction Shooter titles in 2025: Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders and Bungie’s Marathon.
ARC Raiders Captivates Streamers with its Second Tech Test
We’ll start with ARC Raiders, a PvPvE game that just wrapped up its second tech test at the beginning of May. This beta was a massive success among live-streaming audiences, pulling in 8.8M hours watched from the 30th of April to the 5th of May. To put that in perspective, full (successful) game releases bring in similar viewership in their first weeks, like Clair Obscur which had 13.6M hours watched. More impressively, ARC Raiders generated this demand despite a relatively low airtime of just 63K hours. This means viewers flocked to a small body of popular streamers to get their eyes on the game – 75% of such viewership being on Twitch.
So why were people so curious to check out ARC Raiders? As mentioned, Extraction Shooters are incredibly popular right now, garnering the kind of interest that every new Battle Royale release used to see back in the late 2010’s. Additionally, ARC Raiders features some of the smoothest gameplay of currently available Extraction Shooters: The game’s environments encourage parkour movement to navigate the terrain and access loot. Combining this fluid movement with captivating visuals and well-designed AI enemy forces (in the form of the crab-like ARC robots) creates a spectacle where streamer gameplay looks both skilled and, at times, even beautiful.
Looking at the top streamers gives us a bit of insight on that high airtime/hours watched ratio we mentioned earlier. 2 of the top 3 streamers of ARC Raiders’ second tech test were shroud and LIRIK with 1.1M and 331K hours watched, respectively – both of whom were handing out free beta keys to lucky viewers that tuned in to their streams. Embark Studios’ partnership with them seems to have paid dividends: These two streamers alone contributed around 16% of all viewership for ARC Raiders’ second tech test. In fact, most of the viewership for ARC Raiders came from English-speaking streamers, with the notable exceptions being alanzoka (208K) and sasatikk (185K).
Extraction Shooters Are Becoming a Crowded, Competitive Subgenre
The success of ARC Raiders’ tech test is much-needed, as it plans to launch into a highly competitive subgenre. Looking at the top Extraction Shooters on the market by their highest ever monthly hours watched, there are 5 titles with greater than 10M hours watched. Far out in front is the original extraction shooter Escape from Tarkov which seems almost unbeatable at this point with 121M monthly hours watched at its peak. Some other notable recent titles here are Arena Breakout: Infinite(16.5M) and Hunt: Showdown 1896 (9.1M). Against these low-ranked titles, ARC Raiders has real potential as it generated 8.8M hours watched over just 5 days – that’d already place it 7th on this ranking. Note that we haven’t included games with ancillary Extraction Shooter modes, like Call of Duty Warzone’s DMZ mode.
I want to call out one particular oddity in the Extraction Shooter subgenre, however. Dark and Darker (25.1M) sticks out like a sore thumb in the above ranking: After all, it isn’t a shooter at all, mainly featuring melee weapons (outside of crossbows and spells). The Dungeons & Dragons-inspired fantasy aesthetic is also very different from anything else in the subgenre, setting it apart. But, crucially, the core gameplay loop is exactly like an Extraction Shooter – this just shows how much room for innovation there is left in this subgenre by remixing it with different genres and aesthetics.
Marathon’s Reception Foreshadows Its Place in the Extraction Shooter Space
In fact, using a different aesthetic is one of the biggest strengths of the other upcoming Extraction Shooter we’re looking at in this article: Marathon. Marathon’s alpha generated 3.1M hours watched even at such an early stage of development, with users drawn in by both the publisher’s reputation (Bungie) and the game’s unique art style (which was highly praised upon its first reveal). However, the response to Marathon’s gameplay was lukewarm at best. While it’s still early days, opinions in these early moments can form the seeds of future support for these titles… or snowball into negativity.
To get a better gauge of how online audiences have received Marathon, we’ve dived into Twitch chat data for the title’s Gameplay Showcase stream which took place on the 12th of April 2025 (and brought in ~3M hours watched). Across the 561K messages sent during the stream, 5.8% of them directly referenced Marathon. Of those messages, audience chat sentiment was almost evenly split, with 14.4% positive chat messages vs. 15.4% negative chat messages. While this outcome isn’t ideal, it’s early days: Bungie can take action to strengthen the positives and minimize the negatives. These tended to include…
Positives:
Presentation (Art Style & Music)
Intriguing Genre Blending (Apex Legends meets Escape from Tarkov)
Curiosity for Bungie’s Take on Extraction Shooters
Negatives:
Poor History of Online Support
Comparisons to Past Titles by Detractors
Lax Chat Moderation
Of course, both the closed alpha’s viewership and the gameplay’s initial reception seem to have been overshadowed by the storm of controversy surrounding Marathon’s development over the past couple of weeks. A scandal involving ill-obtained art assets and reports of low employee morale seem to have dampened anticipation for the game’s release. But this mood may be temporary: Bungie’s core fanbase remains generally loyal, and the studio’s other titles like Destiny 2 have also faced criticism but always end up receiving a surge of support on live streaming. Activating these core audiences with an influencer marketingcampaign could be the way to go, putting Marathon’s gameplay first and improving the title’s reputation.
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Seeing the pre-release performance of two vastly different Extraction Shooter titles reveals surprisingly few commonalities. Both games attracted a crowd of curious onlookers who are fans of the subgenre… but that’s about it. While one might have expected Marathon to see far higher viewership due to the studio’s reputation, viewers seemed to take an equal interest in both games. This may come down to viewers following the advice of streamers to find ARC Raiders, plus a kind of “support the underdog” mentality that has viewers ready to openly criticize any missteps by Bungie. Bungie should key into the influencer discourse around upcoming Extraction Shooters if it hopes to compete with the slew of other titles releasing in the coming years.
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