In a surprising twist for the extraction shooter genre, players of Arc Raiders have largely abandoned the expected shoot-on-sight mentality. The game, developed by Embark Studios in Sweden, sold more than 14 million copies after its late 2024 release. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans scavenge while avoiding deadly AI robots called Arcs, the game was designed with both cooperation and competition in mind.

Developers anticipated cutthroat gameplay similar to other extraction shooters like Fortnite and Counter-Strike, where eliminating other players is the primary objective. Instead, roughly 30% of players focus on cooperative play, while another 30% engage in player-versus-player combat, with the remaining 40% mixing both approaches. The game's proximity chat feature, used by more than 95% of players, enables spontaneous conversations and alliances.

Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal expressed pleasant surprise at how many players choose peaceful interactions over violence. Players regularly team up to defeat massive mechanical enemies like the Matriarch, with rival squads quickly cooperating when facing common threats. The phenomenon has caught the attention of social scientists and criminologists studying human behavior in virtual environments. As Grøndal noted, the development team now faces the challenge of increasing difficulty to match this unexpectedly cooperative player base.