Late last month, mega publisher EA fired 300 workers, including around 100 at developer Respawn. The studio, founded by ex-Call of Duty developers, is responsible for Apex Legends and the Star Wars Jedi games, and was reportedly working on a third game in its beloved Titanfall series before its staff roster was cut. Now cancelled, the rumours suggest that this Titanfall project was an extraction shooter – a difficult-by-design PvPvE genre that currently only enjoys niche popularity. But an extraction shooter set in the world of Titanfall and Apex Legends could have been the genre’s ticket to the big leagues. So if not EA, who will take the “Tarkov-like” beyond its enthusiastic niche and into the mainstream? The answer may be just months away.
"As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we’ve made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth," an EA spokesperson said of the layoffs that cut away at Respawn. It’s a sentiment EA employees have heard before. This move follows a rash of downsizing in other segments of EA’s portfolio, including at developers Codemasters and BioWare, and a more general 670 company-wide employees back in March of last year. This trend has many decrying the state of the games industry as unsustainable and calling for unionization.
But what of that rumored Titanfall extraction shooter? Naturally, its apparent cancellation has many fans disappointed; the existence (and lack of public appearance) of a new Titanfall game has become something of an in-joke in recent years. Further, rumors of a new extraction shooter from a triple-A studio has shone a spotlight on a style of game that has struggled to garner a significant audience thus far. And whether or not the cancelled Respawn title was indeed an extraction shooter, more people are discussing the potential of a genre that is in its infancy.
“This is an enthusiast genre which has, thus far, not significantly broken out to the mass market player,” Mat Piscatella, Video Games Industry Advisor at Circana, tells IGN.
Last month, developer Bungie finally revealed gameplay footage for Marathon, the upcoming extraction shooter that some predict will launch the genre into the mainstream. It's a game that's already found itself in hot water, accused of plagarising art assets. But while there are ethical questions around Marathon's production, the response to the game itself after press went hands-on with it seems largely positive. Perhaps this is to be expected from the studio with a reputation for stellar first-person shooter experiences like Halo and Destiny. But, come September, Marathon will be launching into a very different market, and the extraction shooter is a relatively untested genre. Will pedigree and tight FPS design be enough to carry the game to success? Analysts say: perhaps.
“If I were to bet on any developer being able to bring this genre to the mass market it would be Bungie,” Piscatella says.
For those unfamiliar, extraction shooters tend to be made up of a combination of player-versus-player and player-versus-environment gameplay loops. Small squads of players are dropped into a world, where they fight AI enemies and sometimes other player-controlled squads, to complete goals and gather resources, then escape the map. The genre was popularized by Escape From Tarkov, an incredibly unforgiving take on the formula characterized by its high-risk, high-reward firefights, which garnered a respectable audience during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
Since then, a number of other developers have tried their hand at the genre with varying degrees of success. One of the most prominent is last year’s Helldivers 2, developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Sony. It leans heavily on a campy schtick, community engagement, and in-game events, which has made it a standout among extraction shooters. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it’s a co-op only affair, with none of the tense PvP encounters that make games like Escape from Tarkov so challenging. According to Piscatella’s data, Helldivers 2 was the eighth most-played game on Steam in April, and ranked 34 on PlayStation.
“Helldivers 2 is the outlier success among this group,” Piscatella explains. “In April, approximately 9% of US active Steam users played Helldivers 2, while around 3% of PS5 players engaged with the game at least once. No other [extraction shooter] reached more than 2.3% of active players on any platform on which that particular game was played.”
It’s immediately obvious that these stats are small when compared to more popular genres like battle royale or multiplayer FPS games. As hugely popular as Helldivers 2 seems to dedicated PlayStation owners, the mainstream is Fortnite, Call of Duty, and EA’s FC – games that garner much, much larger audiences. But Piscatella is quick to point out that the extraction shooter is a burgeoning genre with a great deal of potential, and it faces the same challenges as any other genre does in its early days.
“Small or developing genres often only get big after one game makes it so,” he says. “The dance/music genre was a pretty small niche until Guitar Hero showed up. Console FPS games didn't usually sell all that well at all until Halo. MMOs comprised a relatively small portion of the market until World of Warcraft became the biggest thing in the world. Maybe Marathon does that for extraction shooters. Maybe it doesn't. Nothing is guaranteed for any new game in today's market.”
Other popular games in the extraction shooter genre include Deep Rock Galactic, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and Delta Force. The latter is a free-to-play title launched late last year and has been enjoying a steady rise in popularity in recent months: as of this writing, it ranks 15th in daily players on Steam, with somewhere around 135,000 players at peak. This is a respectable number, but nowhere near the numbers consistently put up by the battle royale genre and its titans. And let’s face it: executives have exhibited a certain amount of tunnel vision chasing the high monetization bars set by the Fortnites, Warzones, and PUBGs of the world.
There’s an argument that this sort of fixation has led to a certain amount of creative stagnation in the development space, and studio heads are less willing to take a chance on an unproven genre such as extraction shooters (it’s perhaps telling that Call of Duty’s attempt at it was an under-supported, now abandoned mode added to Warzone, rather than its own flagship release). In that way, Marathon represents the first significant triple-A effort to bring the genre to the masses. And it’s going to need all the help it can get along the way.
“Bungie being the developer certainly does not guarantee Marathon success,” Piscatella says. “In order for [it] to break through it would certainly help if the game could win over dedicated fans of the genre so they could advocate for the game among family and friends.”
Beyond word of mouth, Bungie will need to ensure smooth onboarding for prospective players. In particular, converting core players familiar with first-person shooters will likely figure into Bungie’s rollout strategy, but long-term retention will all boil down to the gameplay.
“It would…be helpful if Marathon were to have a ramping path for people that are more familiar with the big FPS titles like Call of Duty to help initiate trial and conversion,” Piscatella explains. “It would also have to nail the whole ‘easy to pick up, difficult to master’ trick that many mass market hits are able to pull off.”
The reality is that these are all the same problems faced by any new title, and the one true decider of success or failure is the market, which, as Piscatella points out, is extremely unwelcoming.
“It is a very fickle market at the moment. People have their favorite long-running games that are constantly being updated, are familiar, have significant social and monetary hooks, and many of these titles are free-to-play or easily accessible without an upfront purchase price. So, the challenges facing Bungie and Marathon are not dissimilar to those facing any new game.”
Fickle market notwithstanding, the biggest challenge facing Marathon is the untested nature of the extraction shooter genre as a whole. Escape From Tarkov has enjoyed its accolades, but that game benefitted from an audience inflated by pandemic lockdowns, as well as a gameplay loop that appealed to the core gamer segment. Subsequent titles have only seen middling performances (with Helldivers 2 being the outlier), so it’s easy to understand why studios have been reticent to devote significant resources to such a project, especially when the battle royale genre has proven its dominance.
In that way, Marathon should prove to be a useful litmus test for the rest of the industry. It’s surprising to see a studio like Bungie going all-in on an extraction shooter in this environment, and if it receives a strong reception you can expect other developers and publishers to take its lead. Of course there are dozens of factors to account for – things like monetization and market trends – and nobody can predict how things will unfold. But Bungie certainly has the clout and design chops to make something special. And it’s going to take something special to take the extraction shooter genre from niche to mainstream. You can be sure that, come September, the industry will be eagerly watching the launch of Marathon.
