Even before Cory Doctorow coined the word Enshittification, it was happening far and wide in gaming. From loot boxes addiction caused by terrible implementations of in-game microtransactions to terribly optimized games and overpriced games, to mass layoffs, games as well as the gaming industry at large have been going through this process for a while now.
The introduction of microtransactions fundamentally changed gaming economics. What began as optional cosmetic purchases evolved into predatory systems. Loot boxes (randomized virtual items purchased with real money) became particularly controversial due to their similarities to gambling.
Research found significant links between loot box spending and problem gambling behaviors. The UK Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee recommended in 2019 that loot boxes be regulated under gambling laws. Belgium and the Netherlands have already banned certain loot box implementations.
Take EA: in 2017, Star Wars Battlefront II became the poster child for predatory monetization, with its pay-to-win mechanics sparking such outrage that EA’s response became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history with over 667k downvotes.
Meanwhile, publishers increasingly pivoted to games as a service (GaaS) models, designed to extract continuous revenue rather than deliver complete experiences. We have also seen more games launching incomplete, with Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous 2020 launch serving as a cautionary tale of rushed development and broken promises.
But the most devastating aspect of gaming’s enshittification is its impact on workers. The 2022-2025 video game industry layoffs have been catastrophic. Major publishers like Microsoft, Sony, and EA have all made massive cuts—often while reporting record profits. Aftermath, a worker-owned gaming publication, has been essential in documenting these labor issues.
This exploitation of course also extends to customers/players. Mdern games increasingly ship with invasive tech like aggressive Denuvo anti-tamper technology and always-online requirements that can degrade performance and lock players out of games they’ve purchased. When Ubisoft shut down The Crew‘s servers in 2024, players lost access entirely, prompting a Stop Killing Games campaign and regulatory attention in the EU.
The Resistance
However, not all studios have embraced enshittification. Larian Studios‘ Baldur’s Gate 3 launched in 2023 as a complete, polished experience with no microtransactions, winning Game of the Year at The Game Awards. Listen to studio head Swen Vincke‘s roast of the gaming industry during Larian’s victory lap at the 2024 Game Awards:
The studio made their game because they wanted to make a game that they wanted to play themselves.
The didn’t make it to increase market shares. They didn’t make it to serve a brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets or fear being laid off if the didn’t meet those targets.
[…]
They didn’t treat their developers like numbers of a spreadsheet.
They didn’t treat their players as users to exploit, and they didn’t make decisions they knew were shortsighted in function of a bonus or politics.
Similarly, Helldivers 2 from Arrowhead Game Studios launched at a $40 price point with fair monetization and became a massive success, proving that player-friendly practices can still be profitable.
So for every dozen grindy Ubisoft open world games that don’t respect your time and for every hundred or so crappy dopamine-trap shitty mobile games that are a fast pass to brain rot, there sometimes comes an absolute gem that not only provides real value for money but also raises the bar for games overall.
Enter ARC Raiders
An excellent full ARC Raiders review from SkillUp that will hopefully convince you to give it a shot!
ARC Raiders is a PvPvE extraction shooter developed by Embark Studios that launched on October 30, 2025. It’s probably one of those generational games that I will be playing and talking about for decades to come. These games are few and far between. Like Eminem, I got a list, here’s the order of my list that it’s in:
That’s it. Those are my 4 generational games. Have I played other great games? Of course. Are there any others that I would consider generational? Personally, no. If you notice, all the games above are multiplayer games, and that makes sense. As a nerd growing up in the late 90s / early 2000s, being able to connect with other nerds and play video games was one of the highlights of my life. Whereas I cosplayed the rest of life like school and sports and socialising, playing StarCraft at a LAN party was one of the only times I really felt seen for who I was. Heck, my 21st birthday party was at a gaming cafe called MindHead (if you know, you know!).
I now have a fifth game to add to the four above. I’m not quite sure where it goes on the list, but I suspect it will go pretty high up, though maybe never dethroning Starcraft: Brood War, which to me is still the perfect game.
Still, ARC Raiders has definitely made the list, the first new addition since Dota 2 in 2011. And it’s the first game in a decade where I’ve made friends with strangers online; something I thought I’d grown out of.
ARC Raiders as it is implemented now not only resists enshittification, but it also actively unshittifies the gaming space by making a series of deliberate design choices that put players first while still selling many copies.
Transparent and Fair Monetization
Yes, the game has a cosmetic shop and battle pass. But Embark has shown a willingness to actually listen to players:
- When players complained about skin prices, Embark dropped prices and offered refunds to early purchasers. When was the last time you saw a game studio do that?
- Everything in the shop is strictly cosmetic—skins, charms, emotes. No pay-to-win nonsense, no “secure containers” that give paying players an advantage.
The most critical move Embark Studios made was abandoning the Free-to-Play model in 2024, opting instead for a $40 price point, the same strategy that worked so well for Helldivers 2.
In free-to-play (F2P) games, developers need to design sticky mechanics to force daily logins and incentivize spending. By charging upfront, Embark removed the need for these manipulative loops.
Respecting Player Time
Given that enshittification often treats a player’s time as a resource to be harvested, ARC Raiders pushes back through specific mechanical choices:
- No crafting timers: If you have the materials, the item is created instantly. Embark almost added timers when the game was F2P, but the model “made it hard to respect the player’s time.”
- Rational resource requirements: Because the studio isn’t selling resource packs, they keep upgrade costs grounded and realistic rather than inflating them to push purchases.
- Aggression-based matchmaking: To prevent casual PvE players from being used as content for hardcore PvP players, Embark implemented matchmaking that tracks player behavior. Peaceful players are more likely to be matched together.
Dancing with other peace-loving PvE randos at the Blue Gate village Lucky Raider Hatch while someone plays the recorder.
As of January 2026, ARC Raiders has reportedly sold over 12 million copies. Turns out respecting your players can be good business! As of this writing, it is the 3rd most played game on Steam at the moment (behind only CS 2 and Dota 2) with ~330k peak daily players:
Technical Quality Resulting in Absolute Cinema
ARC Raiders is a video game that often plays like a movie. Not only is it a rare amazingly-optimized Unreal Engine 5 game with breathtaking visuals and industry-leading sound design, but it is a game designed from the ground up to be cinematic.
Whether you’re looting freely in the mountain passes of The Blue Gate without a care in the world or creeping carefully to a contested extract on Stella Montis, you can be thrust into pure cinema at any moment. Anything from a Leaper to another human player could put you in a situation where you have to pull off something unbelievable to just stay alive.
A Leaper, the stuff of nightmares.
Finally, all of Embarks’s unshittificaiton, and especially their focus on respecting player time has led to a game that even older gamers like myself appreciate and choose to spend their often limited time in.
The eponymous AI enemies in ARC Raiders are both incredibly smart and insanely strong. If you aggro one, it will follow you to the ends of the earth and killing even the tiniest one feels like a huge accomplishment, especially at early levels. This means that if you want to do PvE things, you kinda have to work with other players and there is thus a strong social pressure within the game from fellow players to not kill and loot each other.
Me at every Stella Montis extract point.
The aggression-based matchmaking also means that if you are a more casual PvE player like me, you get matched with similar-minded players. This has resulted in me meeting delightful people in-game and making my first online friends since the early 2000s.
Busking on a Buried City night raid with my new bros ItchySpider and crowtalk.
This has been a throwback to my very earliest memories of online gaming. Playing DotA on Hamachi was a formative experience for me and I made friends online back then that I still keep in touch with today. Thanks to Embark’s careful game design, ARC Raiders is not only a game I want to play, but a community I want to be a part of. I hope that after reading this post, you might want to join us as well.
Obligatory night raid extraction selfie.
See you topside, raider! DON’T SHOOT!
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