ARPDAU Scale Determines Arc Raiders' Future
Arc Raiders' free fall is concerning, some of which is just the rotating class of Steam bulwark tourists churning.
If ~1m DAU is in equilibrium, at perhaps rosy 0.10c ARPDAU, the game clears $36m in MTX gross revenue. If the team size really sits at around 120, at an $80k annual salary, with 2x total employee costs, cost sits at around ~$19m annually before marketing.
Roughly, the game might be breaking even on MTX, and that's not good enough. Box sales will dry up, and it's unclear if 1m DAU is actually sustainable; "adventure-extraction" is in its infancy!
For onlookers, it's important to remember that 1m DAU at their given headcount is remarkable; AAA studios run 1,000+ employees deep. While Embark's use of AI is a lot of smoke and mirrors, it's still a reminder that breaking onto the top Steam list as a mid-sized studio is still entirely possible.
The challenge, as I wrote in Marvel Rivals, is still something shooters need to master: getting out of sub-20-cent ARPDAU equilibria. While Marathon has effectively killed Bungie, there was still a future in that game, like there is in ARC Raiders, with innovative Genre-level monetization (see: Call of Duty DMZ insurance). No one seems to be interested, however, so installs and box price pressure crowd everything else.
Everyone loves to jump to power progression, and although that's incompatible with Western monetization norms on PC and console, there are plenty of ways to stretch cosmetic ARPDAU (see: my GDC vault talk, Economics of a Billion-Dollar Cosmetic Economy).
But without genre-norm shackles, designers missed a huge opportunity to innovate in an economy where resources are quickly gained and lost. Monetization at its finest is systems design, and with extraction being so system-design-heavy, expanding monetization opportunities is an opportunity to expand out-of-round meta.
While resets are core to the genre, designers haven't quite figured out the right live ops cycles and content types. This is the next step in the extraction: not only to stabilize, but to grow.