Between Marathon and ARC Raiders, It's Clear Which One Took The Bigger Risk

The extraction shooter genre has grown so large—perhaps too large, depending on who you ask—that it now seems like the predominant template for live-service shooters. There are plenty of leaders in the genre space, though the most recent figurehead to emerge is ARC Raiders, a game that, despite some controversies, has managed to amass a hulking, dedicated playerbase since its October 2025 release. Like Escape from Tarkov, The Division, and The Hunt: Showdown before it, ARC Raiders is shaping up to be a touchstone against which all future extraction shooters are measured against.

This is already happening, as the recently released Marathon has garnered no shortage of comparisons to ARC Raiders these past weeks, and most of them aren’t exactly favorable for the former. Even ahead of launch, expectations for Marathon were tempered to say the least, with early impressions noting that it was missing a strong “hook,” or reason to keep playing, round after round. Following Marathon’s server slam and eventual release, opinions on the game have settled into a more diverse range: a lot of players have effusively praised the game, but it’s not enjoying the phenomenal success of something like ARC Raiders. You could analyze the reasons behind this until the cows come home, but one central factor is risk-taking, which ARC Raiders exhibits to a far greater extent.

Marathon vs. ARC Raiders on Steam Player Count

Marathon is now here to bring ARC Raiders its first big competitor, and this is how each game’s Steam player count is shaping up.

Even if you don’t particularly like ARC Raiders, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t unique. Just looking at it within the context of other extraction shooters (or other multiplayer shooters in general, for that matter), its dense, unique science-fiction world, compelling ARC PvE enemies, and robust, elegant social systems are clearly enough to pique anyone’s interest.

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ARC Raiders has the same high-risk, high-reward tension as its contemporaries in the extraction genre, but the social systems are its true crown jewel. Everything in ARC Raiders subtly encourages you to cooperate with your fellow players rather than outright kill them, which flings the doors to emergent gameplay wide open. It’s rewarding to collaborate with other players (a process elevated by ARC’s great proximity chat), and that fundamental design choice is a massive risk in a genre defined by competition. By implementing pro-social gameplay successfully, ARC Raiders arguably redefines what extraction shooters can be.

Marathon Has a Lot Going for It, but It’s Not Groundbreaking

To call Marathon generic or uninspired is entirely unfair, although its ingenuity is expressed in its details rather than its fundamental construction. Marathon’s striking art style, for instance, enriches its strong and satisfying FPS gameplay, but this doesn’t make for a completely new kind of experience in the way that ARC Raiders’ multilayered, emergent social systems do. Similarly, Marathon’s great gunplay—which isn’t a surprise, considering that it’s a Bungie game—makes combat fun, intense, and tactical, but in the same way as Halo and Destiny. The impact of this is expressed in the Steam data for each game which, at the time of writing, can be summed up as follows:

ARC Raiders current players: 128,346
Marathon current players: 39,092

ARC Raiders 24-hour peak concurrent players: 147,231
Marathon 24-hour peak concurrent players: 53,569

ARC Raiders all-time peak concurrent players: 481,966
Marathon all-time peak concurrent players: 88,337

For the record, none of this is meant to necessarily declare ARC Raiders as objectively better than Marathon, only that it pushes more boundaries and succeeds by virtue of this. A good way to describe Marathon might be as an extremely solid execution of a tried-and-true premise. Within its individual mechanics, systems, and design choices, passion and creativity are evident, but the package as a whole lacks the X-factor of something like ARC Raiders, which could wind up harming it in the long run.