12.4 Million Copies Sold in Two Months: Nexon’s ‘ARC Raiders’ Becomes a Global Sensation

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[Financial News] ARC Raiders, a new game created by Nexon’s Sweden-based subsidiary Embark Studios, is taking the global market by storm. Roughly two months after launch, the game has sold more than 12.4 million copies worldwide, demonstrating that Nexon’s strategy of expanding its global Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio by putting its European development studio front and center is translating into real commercial success.■ 12.4 million copies in two months: an unprecedented achievementAccording to Nexon, ARC Raiders has delivered strong results across all platforms since its global release on October 30 last year, including PC, PlayStation 5 (PS5), and Xbox Series X|S. The game surpassed 10 million copies sold in less than two months, and as of early this month, cumulative sales have exceeded 12.4 million copies. Peak concurrent users reached 960,000, setting a new internal record for the company. This level of performance is unprecedented for a game released by a Korean publisher.
From the moment it launched, ARC Raiders quickly made its presence felt in the global market. It remained in the top tier of Steam’s global “Top Sellers” chart for 10 consecutive weeks, laying the groundwork for long-term success, and it also claimed the No. 1 spot in Steam sales rankings across Asian markets including Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. A key characteristic of its performance is that users have been flowing in evenly from major regions worldwide, not just from North America and Europe.
ARC Raiders has also earned recognition for its gameplay by being featured at various global gaming awards. At The Game Awards (TGA), one of the world’s most prestigious gaming ceremonies, it won in the “Best Multiplayer Game” category. At the 2025 edition of The Steam Awards, which are determined by user votes on Steam, it was named the winner in the “Most Innovative Gameplay” category. On global review aggregation site OpenCritic, it received a 92% critic recommendation score and a 100% user recommendation score, earning the platform’s highest “Mighty” badge.
The popularity of ARC Raiders is spreading in every direction. In a recent episode of the long-running American animated series South Park, ARC Raiders made a surprise appearance that drew attention. In the episode, a character is shown sitting on a couch playing ARC Raiders on a console, with actual gameplay footage inserted on screen, accompanied by the line “Playing ARC Raiders.”
Industry observers point to the choice of genre and the game’s level of polish as key drivers of ARC Raiders’ success. The competitive-cooperative hybrid (PvPvE) extraction shooter genre is already known to have proven demand in the global market. Embark Studios lowered the barrier to entry by combining relatively intuitive controls with accessible map design, while also building a stable live-service framework from the outset that assumes repeated play sessions. Its worldbuilding, set in a post-post-apocalypse after the end of a cataclysmic event, and the imposing presence of its powerful enemy, the Ark, are also seen as differentiating factors. Analysts note that the gameplay structure, in which competition and cooperation coexist, has worked to the game’s advantage in terms of streaming and community-driven growth.■ Nexon’s next-generation blockbuster IP?The success of ARC Raiders is also being cited as a meaningful case study within Nexon’s global development strategy. Since making its initial investment in Embark Studios in 2018, Nexon has maintained a development philosophy that prioritizes quality over short-term results. Even after fully acquiring Embark Studios as a wholly owned subsidiary, Nexon has continued to guarantee the studio’s independence and creative freedom, while combining that with Nexon’s extensive experience in global publishing and live-service operations.
Nexon believes that the strong performance of ARC Raiders since launch demonstrates its potential to become the company’s next-generation blockbuster IP. The game’s success shows that Nexon’s strategy of horizontally expanding its IP across multiple platforms and user bases worldwide is yielding tangible results.
At the same time, ARC Raiders has also found itself at the center of controversy over the use of artificial intelligence in game production. After ARC Raiders was nominated for the British Academy Games Awards (BAFTA Games Awards), it emerged that text-to-speech (TTS) technology had been used in parts of the voice production process, sparking debate. As the use of Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) becomes more widespread, this issue has intersected with the labor conditions of the European game industry, which has undergone large-scale restructuring, reigniting concerns that AI could replace human jobs. In response, Embark Studios explained that traditional voice recording with actors remains the foundation of the game’s audio, and that AI-based tools were used only for some additional lines with the actors’ consent. The studio stressed that these tools were employed as a supplementary means to reduce the burden of repetitive recording, and that there is no intention to use Generative AI to replace human creativity.
yjjoe@fnnews.com Yoonju Cho Reporter