Arc Raiders Release Date Between Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 May Have Some People Wondering ‘What the Hell Are They’re Doing?’ but Dev Insists ‘We Believe the Game Can Launch There’

The developer of Arc Raiders isn’t worried about coming out between Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, insisting: “we believe the game can launch there.”

Arc Raiders ended its recent ‘Server Slam’ playtest with big player numbers on Steam, suggesting a strong launch ahead of its October 30 release date. It hit a peak concurrent player count of 189,668, making it one of the most-played games on Valve’s platform the weekend it ran and the biggest extraction shooter ever on Steam. That said, with the full release slated for tomorrow, which happens to be between the launch dates of two of the world’s biggest FPS franchises, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Soderlund admitted some people may wonder “what the hell are they doing?”

“I know. The insanity,” Soderlund told The Game Business. “People may look at that [Arc Raiders’ release date] and say, ‘What the hell are they doing?’ We have spent a lot of time looking at this from multiple angles and you know, for right or wrong, we believe that the game can launch there. This is the start of a long journey. It needs to start somewhere.”