ARC Raiders was ONCE AGAIN Steam’s top monthly seller
It’s our first monthly ranking of 2026! Expect data on ARC, friendslop, and 2026’s first early access hit. Plus, we cut through the Google Genie hype with a chainsaw.
ARC Raiders continues its Snap Hook ascent
It’s a new year, but ARC Raiders has held onto its dominant trajectory through January, shifting an additional 1.5 million copies on Steam alone.
This translates to nearly $50 million in revenue in one month, easily securing ARC Raider’s #1 January Steam position for revenue as well as pure volume.
The success extended to consoles, where another 1.7 million units were sold, pushing the title past two significant life-to-date milestones across platforms: 15M copies sold, generating gross revenue of $500M:
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For the third consecutive month, ARC Raiders has held its spot as the top-selling title across Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam.
In terms of launch-aligned player counts across all platforms, ARC is currently outpacing Battlefield 6 – and that’s including free-to-play users from the free REDSEC mode. While ARC Raiders benefits from a more accessible $40 price compared to Battlefield’s $70, its engagement metrics remain staggering.
ARC Raiders managed to hit 10M MAUs million in January, an 8% increase over December and the main part of the holiday break. With DAU records breaking weekend after weekend and a new map on the horizon, ARC’s momentum just keeps on going.
Wishlisters are also continuing to convert, too. Our platform now shows wishlist conversion for each month. For example, of the 1.8M people who wishlisted ARC Raiders on Steam in November 2025:
5.7% bought ARC Raiders on Steam after 7 days.
21.4% bought it after 30 days.
27.2% bought it as of yesterday.
Clearly, ARC’s ongoing hype, discounts, and quality are continuing to convert wishlisters.
Looking for wishlist conversion data on any game? Reach out here for a free trial of our platform.
Forever friendslops
Low-price ($8-$10), social-driven “friendslop” titles also returned to the ranking in January. We’ve covered them to death, but the established trifecta of 2025 low-fi co-op titles continued to crush it in January:
PEAK (#2) sold 1.3 million copies on Steam ($6.0 million).
R.E.P.O. (#3) moved 1.1 million units ($7.1 million). This push helped R.E.P.O. cross the 20 million copies sold milestone, a massive achievement for a small development team.
RV There Yet? (#5) added 752K copies to its total ($4.7 million).
These three titles also demonstrate that pure volume can rival AAA revenues. Since their respective launches in 2025, PEAK, R.E.P.O, and RV collectively generated nearly $300 million from 44 million copies sold.
As we recently covered in our client-only newsletter (reach out to get a free trial of our platform), this represents a shift in social game design where independent studios have focused on chaos and the experience of hanging out instead of traditional combat.
The emphasis on slapstick physics and high-stakes mistakes makes these games encourage players to capture and share the chaos on platforms like TikTok and Discord. This transforms a player base into a high-reach marketing department at low cost.
StarRupture is 2026’s first early-access success
StarRupture (#4 by copies sold on Steam) has emerged as a significant early-access success with 852K copies sold and $12M in revenue. As we covered in our newsletter a couple of weeks back, this momentum is the result of a calculated cross-promotion strategy by developer Creepy Jar.
By heavily discounting their previous survival hit, Green Hell, to just $2 throughout December and January, the team built up goodwill that fed into the early-access launch of their new IP.
While Satisfactory (played by over half of StarRupture players) established the blueprint for open-world automation, StarRupture differentiates itself by building on these concepts.
Periodic “star ruptures” scour the world with fire, evaporating bodies of water and reducing lush greenery to ash, forcing players to hole up in bases that literally glow red from the heat, creating moments of tension that set it apart from its more static (but still awesome) inspirations.
Like many of the other games in this list, this makes StarRupture clippable and chaotic. And like every other game in the list, StarRupture has a huge co-op element.
Games with co-op modes generated revenues of almost $810M on Steam last month, bouncing nicely off the $8.2B generated last year:
So no, the co-op trend isn’t going to die out any time soon, and there are opportunities galore (unlike the PvP space).
Speaking of trends and environmental cataclysm…
No, generative AI is NOT coming to eat the games industry
Wall Street has lost the plot again.
Following Google Genie 3’s announcement, gaming stocks across the board dipped as investors panicked over a supposed “disruption” of the industry. Some investors reckon tools like Project Genie will let anyone generate a high-end video game with a text prompt. It’s a technical impossibility masquerading as a breakthrough.
It’s the same kind of DiSrUpTiOn we saw with web3, blockchain, the metaverse, cloud gaming, and esports. How are they doing again?
Anyway, the reaction to Genie is the clearest indicator yet for what most of us already know: generally speaking, the stock market fails to understand how games are made and what draws players to them.
While I’ve got to admit the tech is a cool research prototype, history shows that the only “Genie” here is the one that Google will eventually shove back into the bottle – or more accurately, the Google Graveyard.
We saw this with Stadia in 2019, a cloud gaming venture that Google unceremoniously axed despite technical promise.
Genie 3 follows the same pattern of a flashy PR cycle followed by a research prototype phase with no viable path to a profitable consumer product.
Back when Google announced Stadia in 2019, I made a bet with one of my old bosses that Stadia would be in the Google Graveyard by 2023. I won that bet, and I’d bet the same thing again here – Genie will be in the Graveyard by 2028.
Genie essentially guesses, frame-by-frame, what the next visual output should be based on your inputs.
This approach lacks the core foundations of game development:
Zero object permanence: Because the world is generated as a probabilistic video stream, items and environments often erratically appear and disappear.
No mechanical logic: There are no underlying physics, collision data, or scripted logic. You are simply exploring a real-time hallucination.
Performance bottlenecks: Running a janky virtual environment at a low frame rate (and where things disappear), should NOT elicit such a reaction in the stock market.
There’s no intentionality here. In a real game, if you press ‘A’ to jump (let’s not argue about facebutton placement…), the game checks your velocity, collision, and gravity.
From what I’ve experienced, there’s none of this in Genie – only a statistical guess that the next frame should look like a jump.
In other words, because the model is just predicting the next pixels, it has no concept of rules, which are fundamental to games. Hell, they define a game in many respects.
Scrolling through a video that reacts to your thumbstick is not playing a game. The model seems to be training on the visual output of games rather than the source code. That’s sort of like trying to build a working Ferrari by looking at photos of a Ferrari.
You might get the shape of the frame and colour right, and it might look very pretty and impressive, but there’s no engine under the hood. All style, no substance.
And then there’s the plagiarism problem. Google says the model is trained on “publicly available web data,” AKA unlabelled gameplay footage belonging to publishers.
Early user tests have already produced output that rips off Breath of the Wild and Super Mario 64, complete with paragliders and clearly plagiarised environmental assets. Nintendo’s lawyers are ruthless, and they’re not going to like this. I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall of that meeting.
Nintendo has a history of litigating against even fan-made projects using their assets and IP (like AM2R, Pokemon Prism, and Lost in Hyrule). A multi-billion-dollar corporation like Google using its IP to train a commercial AI is a completely different kettle of Magikarp.
Simply put: investors, there’s plenty of things to worry about when it comes to investing in AAA games, but Google Genie – and its ilk – isn’t one of them.
Yes, generative AI can help with ideation and in minor tasks like quest text or environment clutter, but let’s not mistake a bit of efficiency for production evolution.
Even within the executive suites of the world’s largest publishers, the consensus is fractured. Some companies are sprinting into the fog with over 100 active AI projects, while more measured companies are remaining more guarded.
The reality is that generative AI carries every hallmark of a classic venture capital bubble. We’re witnessing billions of dollars in speculative investment chasing a ROI that simply hasn’t materialised.
It’s a “what if” technology being weaponised by growth-challenged tech giants who are desperate to manufacture a new narrative for their shareholders, regardless of whether the tech actually works at scale.
Beyond the logistical failures, we have to confront the profound ethical decay at the heart of the model, a fundamental devaluation of the medium.
If games prioritise high-speed, automated output over human intentionality, it risks trading away its creativity, its jobs, and its soul for a library of infinite, tasteless content.
If everything is procedurally generated by a machine that doesn’t understand fun, then nothing is actually worth playing.
Let’s all relax a bit on this bubble, is it?
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