Arc Raiders launched less than 24 hours ago, and it has already become a smash hit, beating out many of the top free-to-play games currently topping Steam charts, despite its $39.99 price tag on Steam . At the time of writing, around seven hours after Arc Raiders launched, the game had peaked at 264,673 players, putting it in fourth place in SteamDB's real-time concurrent player tracker and in the number-one spot in the trending games category. For comparison, The Finals, a free-to-play shooter from the same developer, Embark Studios, launched almost two years ago, and it similarly hit high player counts as early as day one, topping out at 242,619 concurrent players, according to SteamDB . Given that Arc Raiders launched on a Thursday and reached such heights already, it stands to reason that the weekend may see player counts rise even further.

Arc Raiders still has a way to go to catch up to some of its more popular peers in the shooter genre, though. Battlefield 6, which launched earlier this month, has recorded concurrent players counts as high as 747,440 players, while PUBG: Battlegrounds peaked at over 3 million players in January 2018. Arc Raiders's popularity comes with a rather impressive "Very Positive" (89% positive) rating on Steam, despite the developer's use of divisive generative AI tech in the game's development. As is the case with The Finals, Arc Raiders only offers a Windows installer package and uses Easy Anti-Cheat, but Embark Studios is not hostile towards Linux users, and many users on ProtonDB have reported that the game works on Linux with Valve's Proton compatibility layer, even without any tweaks, earning it a "Gold" rating on the database.