In the run-up to the release of ARC Raiders (2025) late last month, there were more than a few media outlets parroting the refrain that the extraction shooter sub-genre is somehow oversaturated; some even stating, “We don’t need more extraction shooters…If there's one genre that truly didn't need to become a trend, it's the extraction shooter." Others called the sub-genre “a crowded market,” even while reviewing the recent success of ARC Raiders (2025).

This criticism even dates back to the sub-genre’s early days. In 2022, PC Gamer questioned the since-cancelled extraction shooter Hyenas’ goal of “squeezing itself into an already oversaturated genre.” The sub-genre is effectively five years old at this point (if we mark Escape from Tarkov (2017) as the beginning), and there were eight (yes, eight!) games tagged as extraction shooters on Steam by the end of 2022.

To anyone who plays extraction shooters—which up until ARC Raiders’ release would mostly be those who played Escape from Tarkov and/or Hunt: Showdown 1896 (2018)—this oversaturation claim is incredibly perplexing and needs to be put to rest, if only due to the gross misuse of the term ‘oversaturated.’ 

Market saturation is an actual economic concept with an actual definition, which is seemingly not well understood. Overstauration of a market occurs when “no more of a product or service can be sold because there are no more possible customers.” Further, “Market saturation refers to the point at which a product or service has reached its maximum potential in a given market, resulting in little to no room for further growth or expansion.” 

At the time of writing, there are 19,355 games tagged as ‘shooters’ on Steam. Among the shooter sub-genres, extraction shooters are the smallest with a paltry 220; 5,029 are tagged as third-person shooters, 1,564 as ‘looter shooters,’ and 1,498 as ‘hero shooters.’ Extraction shooters are even outsized by the 1,062 games tagged as ‘boomer shooters.’ In all, extraction shooters only represent ~1% of shooters on Steam.

If the market for extraction shooters is oversaturated compared to the overall shooter market, then the ratio of extraction shooter players to available games should be smaller than what we see for the overall shooter market. 

To find this, we need to first estimate just how big the shooter market is. Estimating the shooter market is difficult since most of this data is private and must be inferred using a combination of available Steam data, industry reports, and what publishers let the public see.

To estimate the MAU for games we don’t actually have numbers for, we are going to use the monthly average concurrent player count multiplied by 25. This multiplier (let’s name it 25x) is extrapolated from available data on concurrent viewer averages and MAU on other shooters like Fortnite (2017), Apex Legends (2019), and more. 

Players’ behavior may vary from game to game depending on tastes and habits (e.g., it is possible extraction shooter players are more likely to be single-game players than battle royal fans who play every game in that sub-genre), but the 25x multiplier will more or less work for our purposes.

To define the overall shooter market, let’s keep it simple and only include gamers who have shown an interest in playing first-person shooters, like Call of Duty (2003), and third-person shooters, like Fortnite; we are also going to refer to these kinds of shooters as ‘traditional shooters’ to distinguish them from extraction shooters. 

We are going to ignore RPGs with FPS and third-person perspectives like Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and Control (2019), as well as the shooter market for mobile devices. The mobile shooter market, despite its massive size (e.g., PUBG Mobile (2018) ~120M MAU and Call of Duty: Mobile (2019) ~80M MAU), has too many unknowns (e.g., mobile player barriers to entry for conversion to the PC/console market) for a meaningful comparative analysis. 

Okay, so how big is the traditional shooter market compared to the extraction shooter sub-genre? Since there are literally thousands of traditional shooters on the market, an exhaustive count would be time-prohibitive, so we are just going to use the top 7 games in the genre. The estimated MAU for these games ranges from 197M to 284M, with an average of ~240M MAU.[1] 

For extraction shooters on Steam with over 1K concurrent players, the estimated MAU is ~3.9M MAU.[2] Adding 1.47M for Escape from Tarkov brings the total MAU for extraction shooters to ~5.4M.[3]

This means extraction shooters represent only ~2.2% of the overall shooter market (5.4/(5.4M + 240M) =2.2). If we used the most conservative estimates of the traditional shooter market, 197M as opposed to the 240M average, extraction shooters still only make up ~2.6% of the market.

In total, extraction shooters make up an extremely small part of the larger shooter genre; but could they still be described as oversaturated, according to the definition above? If the ratio of games on offer in the sub-genre is higher compared to the overall genre, then this is still possible. 

For every extraction shooter on Steam, there are roughly ~24K MAU per game (~5.4M MAU/220). In the overall shooter market, this ratio is ~12K MAU (~240M/19,398), which means there are almost double the games per player in the overall shooter market than there is in the extraction shooter sub-genre; meaning the extraction shooter sub-genre is less saturated than the overall shooter market.[4] 

The reasons for the oversaturated misconception could be due to many factors; it could be the failure of gaming journalists in seeing extraction shooters as the separate and growing sub-genre they are, instead choosing to reflexively lump any shooter into a traditional shooter market which is oversaturated; or a subconscious bias against extraction shooters due to their punishing difficulty, something which traditional shooter players have difficulty adjusting to.

Whatever the reason, as the sub-genre continues to grow, with upcoming titles like Hunger (2026), Marathon (2026), and more, this perception is likely to persist until extraction shooters see their own success independent of the traditional shooter market.

Notes:

[1] Call of Duty: Warzone (2020) 60-90M MAU, Fortnite (2017) 40-80 MAU, Counter-Strike 2 (2023) 24-30 MAU, Overwatch 2 (2022) 24M MAU, Valorant (2020) 19-28M MAU, APEX Legends (2019) 18-20M MAU, and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege (2015) 12M MAU.

[2] ARC Raiders (2025) 8M MAU, Delta Force (2024) 1.6M MAU, Escape from Duckov (2025) 800K MAU, Arena Breakout: Infinite (2025) 800K MAU, Hunt: Showdown 1896 (2018) 425K MAU, Off The Grid (2025) 170K MAU, Dark and Darker (2024) 120K, and Gray Zone Warfare (2024) 30K. 

[3] Estimating the MAU for Escape from Tarkov, the game which created the sub-genre, is difficult since Battle State Games does not release data on the game’s player base. Steam DB numbers for Escape from Tarkov are not helpful, since the game has only been out for mere hours, at the time of writing, and the majority of the player base is likely using Battlestate Games’ legacy proprietary launcher. For this analysis, we will use the IconEra estimate of ~1.47M MAU, since it is a consistently updated number based on data which is available and is further supported by community tracking. https://icon-era.com/blog/escape-from-tarkov-live-player-count-and-statistics.136/

[4] There are definitely more traditional shooter players than the numerator accounts for in this equation, which would make the traditional shooter market look less saturated. However, without the resources and connections of a dedicated research firm, accurate numbers are unavailable, which means painting with broad strokes is, unfortunately, necessary. Remember to always view any analysis based on incomplete data with the skepticism it deserves, especially this one.