ARC Raiders Passes 17 Million Sales, but Nexon Says Things Have Cooled Off
Seventeen million Raiders topside, and the ARC still hasn't learned to knock.
ARC Raiders keeps adding to its numbers, just at a slower pace. In its third quarter earnings report on November 10, Nexon said Embark Studios' extraction shooter has now sold more than 17 million copies worldwide, according to Inven Global.
That is an enormous total for a brand new multiplayer game that launched just over a year ago. It's also only about one million more than the 16 million copies Nexon reported back in May, as Instant Gaming News pointed out, so the early sales rush has clearly slowed down.
What did Nexon say about ARC Raiders?
Nexon described the game's contribution to the quarter as steady. The October Frozen Trail update brought a big wave of returning players, but the number of people playing at the same time dropped quickly afterward. Management said that both player activity and sales have since settled back to normal levels.
Nexon's answer is a steady schedule of big content drops, with at least two major updates planned every year. Patrick Söderlund, who founded Embark Studios, said that "two high-quality, large-scale updates per year is the appropriate cadence" for keeping core players around.
How does ARC Raiders make money now?
ARC Raiders is a buy-to-play game, which means everyone who plays it has already paid for it. Söderlund noted that this means every active player in the game is already a paying customer.
From here, Nexon plans to focus on three goals. It wants to reach players who haven't bought the game yet, keep the current community playing, and encourage more in-game purchases along the way.
How did the rest of Nexon's quarter go?
Pretty well, overall. The company reported consolidated revenue of 1.1231 trillion won for the quarter, up 17% from last year. MapleStory carried a lot of that growth, with franchise revenue hitting an all-time quarterly record thanks to MapleStory Classic in China and Taiwan. Nexon is expecting a quieter holiday quarter, though, with fourth quarter revenue projected between 912.2 billion and 1.0067 trillion won, which would be lower than last year.
Earnings season has been busy across the industry, too. Take-Two just said GTA 6 presales are beating its own expectations, so the next few months could get crowded for every big game.
My read is that 17 million copies is a massive win for a brand new IP, and slower growth after a year is completely normal. The real test is whether those two big updates per year are good enough to keep Raiders coming back topside. (Somebody please tell the Rocketeers to take a day off.)
Are you still playing ARC Raiders? Tell us in the comments.
