The extraction shooter finally opens a PvE door

The extraction shooter was built on a simple promise: go in with little, come out with plenty, and lose the lot if another player finds you before the exit. That contract held as long as PvP tension alone kept players coming back. In October, ARC Raiders is testing a mode where players cannot hurt each other at all. In December, Marathon makes its own version permanent. Two studios, two dates, one shared conclusion about what the genre was asking too much of.

At a glance

What the extraction shooter has been losing

On Steam, the numbers carry most of the story. ARC Raiders launched on 30 October 2025 and passed fourteen million copies by February. Its monthly average slid from 264,430 concurrent players in November 2025 to 23,217 in August, against an all-time peak of 465,097. Marathon, out on 5 March, averaged 2,827 players in August after peaking at 77,358. Both games found an audience at launch and watched it thin out within months.

That erosion comes down to the opening contract rather than the content shipped. An extraction shooter asks players to accept losing their gear every run, against opponents who are often better equipped and better organised. That demand filters people out by design, and it filters harder as a game ages and the remaining crowd specialises. Embark measured it among its own players: in the survey the studio published, 37% describe themselves as friendly co-op types, 27% land in between and 34% want pure PvP.

Two answers to the same question

At Embark, the answer stays cautious. The post signed by executive producer Aleks sets a test from 13 to 20 October, with zero player-to-player damage, sessions mixing solos, duos and trios, and loot values brought down. Night Raids, the Hidden Bunker, the Locked Gate and the Frigate sit outside it. The studio warns that the attempt may fail and that it stands as what it is, a seven-day test with no commitment attached. It adds a line that covers the whole genre: the data is saying something that can no longer be ignored. That line has a figure behind it: Insider Gaming reports that 51% of surveyed players are interested in a dedicated PvE option, and Embark puts the share of its co-op crowd asking for fewer hostile encounters above 70%, a wish shared by 40% of the pure PvP side too. The studio built the switch to stay light: a PvE session is there to decompress, and flipping back to the classic formula leaves no trace on a player’s PvPvE matchmaking rating, no penalty, no risk to standing. Even the ARCs, the machine-controlled enemies, keep one rule intact: they target a downed player who is still moving, never one who stays still. We covered that test in our piece on the ARC Raiders PvP toggle.

Bungie, by contrast, has committed far more plainly, and this time for good. The Symbiosis update, due on 8 December, installs Marathon’s first permanent PvE mode, with a reworked Perimeter and a new Runner shell. Studio head Poria Torkan and product lead Josh Deane had acknowledged days earlier that the game had not reached as many players as hoped and needed to evolve. The update lands three months behind its original schedule: promised for September, Bungie chose to take extra time polishing it rather than force it onto a fixed seasonal deadline, a cadence the studio is dropping altogether from here on. Symbiosis also brings a new social space with a firing range, an experimental team deathmatch mode and the first of several fixes to a new-player experience the studio admits was rough. Where Embark opens a one-week window, Bungie writes PvE into the structure of its game. The full roadmap sits in our article on Symbiosis.

Tarkov had already lived this shift, with no test and no announcement

Escape from Tarkov never needed a timed trial to go through what ARC Raiders is about to test. The studio opened its PvE mode in April 2024, first locked behind a $250 special edition before it went on sale separately for $20 once players pushed back, and has since let the numbers speak on their own. Nikita Buyanov, the head of Battlestate Games, revealed that the number of players who have finished the game in PvE now beats PvP: 17,779 PvE endings against 15,743 PvP ones, figures relayed by Insider Gaming. The current split runs 55% on the PvP Season mode against 38% on the PvE platform, but that gap narrows as a season goes on: 15 to 20% of players pick PvE at the start of a wipe, a share that climbs towards 50% once PvP fatigue sets in. PvE mostly takes over once PvP wears players down, without ever wiping it out. That is the exact curve Embark and Bungie are watching right now, still without figures of their own.

Bungie is defending PvP while opening a PvE door of its own

That open door still splits opinion among the people building it. Bungie signalled this direction as early as May, when it first floated broadening the game’s appeal through PvE content well before Symbiosis had a firm date. Yet Joe Ziegler, Marathon’s game director, defended PvP’s place at the centre of the genre in an interview from around that same stretch. “The journey of Frodo and the Fellowship would have been way less interesting and suspenseful if all they encountered was dangerous wildlife on the way to Mount Doom and didn’t have other enemies out there unpredictably trying to steal the ring or end their journey,” he said, as reported by GamesRadar. The comparison targets fully PvE extraction shooters, a different format from the side mode Bungie is itself about to ship next to its main game. The line is thin, but it holds: Symbiosis bolts on a PvE wing, it does not touch the PvP core Ziegler is defending. ARC Raiders carries a separate piece of its own decline: Gurugamer’s tally puts the update pace at just two major content drops a year since May, well below the rhythm that carried the launch. The PvE mode is landing inside a mix of several causes, and it only fixes one of them.

Three other games walked this road first

Hunt: Showdown got there earliest, adding solo Trials as far back as September 2020. Dark and Darker took nearly two years to follow: developer Ironmace only shipped Adventure Mode at Season 6, on a game that had stayed strictly PvP since its August 2023 early access launch, not without regular grumbling from players wanting another way to play it. The mode keeps every core mechanic, traps, monsters, loot and extraction included, and shares progress with the PvP side. Arena Breakout Infinite went furthest: a poll run on 8 May by developer MoreFun returned 84.8% in favour of a permanent PvE mode with tougher enemies, and the “White Nights” season, out on 30 June, shipped the finished mode under the name Hostile Sector. Three different answers to the same pressure: add an option years later, test it and pull it back, or make it permanent off the back of a vote within weeks.

Which leaves a question the genre keeps avoiding. Does an extraction shooter without the threat of another player at the exit remain an extraction shooter, or does it turn into co-op looting where the loot simply falls more slowly? Caio Braga, production director at Embark, told GDC that the studio had considered pulling ARC Raiders back towards PvE before release, after watching its testers dislike the PvP. The extraction shooter spent five years selling the fear of losing everything, and it is finding out that the fear turns away more people than it keeps. The answers land in October and December, on two games with little left to lose.