After launching to over 12 million players, Arc Raiders has already made back more than six times its budget, but Embark Studios’ killer extraction shooter is still breaking records and topping charts.
While the game’s player base is largely situated on PC, Arc Raiders has also managed to top the sales charts for PlayStation 5, surprisingly beating both Grand theft Auto V and NBA 2K26 in the US market.
Shared by PlayStation in their official US and European PlayStation Store downloads charts for January 2026, the momentum of Embark Studios’ extraction shooter has miraculously continued past its launch month.
In the United States and Canada, Arc Raiders was the single most-downloaded title on PlayStation 5 with a heavily on-sale Grand Theft Auto V coming in second place. In third place, NBA 2K26 followed by Minecraft, Madden NFL 26, Black Ops 7 and EA Sports FC 26.
This is surprising as these more mainstream games are typically always the highest selling games of January as new console owners typically gravitate towards them after the Christmas period. However, Arc Raiders has somehow managed to top every mainstream title in the American and Canadian markets.
The story is slightly different in the EU, though, where Arc Raiders has scored second place, situated between EA Sports FC 26 and Grand Theft Auto V. Nevertheless, this is a huge win for a brand-new IP that even its publisher’s CEO didn’t expect to be such a juggernaut success.
This is just the start for Embark’s popular multiplayer game with the game’s 2026 partial roadmap already confirming new events for the title over the next few months. Additionally, design lead Virgil Watkins has confirmed that multiple new maps will be coming to the shooter across the year, as well as new enemies to fight.
Arc Raiders’ success is unprecedented, especially on console, due to the friction associated with the extraction shooter genre. While Embark’s take on the genre is more casual than most, it is very exciting to see a new game in a new IP in a fairly unexplored genre get so popular with players on all platforms.
