November's best-selling Steam games
ARC Raiders leads the pack for November revenues and copies. We analyse what makes ARC so great, look at the other top Steam games, and answer the question, ‘’WTF happened with CoD this year?''
To the surprise of absolutely no one, ARC Raiders sold 3.5 million copies on Steam last month, easily making it November’s top Steam game by copies sold.
ARC was also the #1 Steam game by revenues, outperforming the likes of Counter-Strike 2, Battlefield 6, and PUBG. To date, ARC Raiders has shifted 7.7M copies across all platforms – that’s revenue of over $250M.
On its current trajectory, ARC Raiders will reach 8M sold by the end of the week and 10M by the end of the year. It’s already shifted another 250K copies so far this week.
ARC retains players while attracting new ones, but why’s everybody ARC-obsessed?
ARC’s player drop-off has also been minimal. It averaged about 1.5M Steam DAUs over the weekend, down only slightly from its peak of 1.6M on Nov 16.
We’ve covered ARC to death recently, so I won’t retread familiar territory and retell the game’s development arc (ayy) too much. We covered the launch here, if you want more info on ARC’s development, launch, and marketing.
But after playing roughly 50 hours of the game myself, watching interviews with the CEO, and chatting with a couple of team members, there’s plenty more to say.
Here are a few takeaways from my time with ARC:
Ditching free-to-play was smart: Learning from The Finals, Embark said they recognised that the free-to-play structure inherently requires “sticky” – dare I say, predatory – mechanics, leading to unnecessary grind and timers on crafting and progression. Switching to a paid model allowed the team to respect player time better. It’s really noticeable. The player effort and reward make sense, especially compared to the grind in most F2P games.
Approachable yet versatile: Embark knew some gamers were turned off by the sweatiness of extraction shooters, so it made ARC more approachable. One example is what Embark calls mitigating the “poverty loop”. In other extraction shooters, losing all your gear can be a one-way ticket to churning, but ARC offers ‘’free loadouts’’ that give players a decent arsenal to raid with (even if they’ve had all their gear nicked). The core systems also support varied gameplay, allowing a single player to be stealthy or aggressive depending on their play style or session goal.
Nudging players towards co-operation: Various quests and challenges in ARC are far easier with other players, and ARC makes this known. The design organically encourages players to form temporary alliances, adding a unique, dynamic layer of cooperation to the core loop. ARC has an impressive range of non-verbal communication (ping and emote systems), encouraging comms even if a player doesn’t have a mic. I’ve noticed far more people on mic than any other game I’ve played in recent memory, though. ARC is one of the friendliest online games I’ve ever played, which we cover here.
World-class audio design: Led by former DICE audio team members, ARC’s sound design is some of the best I’ve seen and really elevates the entire product. The realistic weapon, enemy, and environment sounds are unique and critical gameplay. It’s not just listening out for player footsteps, too. Audio is a core part of ARC’s gameplay and is arguably just as important as its visuals.
Physics-driven and organic combat: ARC’s designers have faith in the players to figure out the combat more diegetically – that’s game dev speak for a feature that’s more organic in the game, rather than external to the gameplay. For example, instead of relying on UI elements like glowing weak points and health bars, audio and visual cues (heavy smoke for low-health enemies).
Alright, let’s get back to the ranking.
Indies accounted for the rest of the Steam November ranking
RV There Yet? shifted another 1.1M copies last month via its chaotic co-op gameplay. Driving a rickety RV through dangerous backcountry using basic survival tools guarantees hilarious and unexpected situations.
RV was instant streamer bait for high-profile creators. This, mixed with its $7.99 price, created a nice conversion funnel, quickly turning viewers into players. The dad-core humour is fantastic, too (and I’m not even a dad).
Last week, we wrote that RV was nearing 4M overall. Three days later, developer Nuggets announced on YouTube that they’d sold 4,067,315 copies:
On that day, our estimate was 4,085,215. That’s a margin of error of 0.4%. Learn how our estimates stack up against other recent publisher announcements here. We’ve gotta pat ourselves on the back sometimes, y’know?
In the top 5, indies also took the other three remaining spots:
PEAK sold 1.4M copies in November, bringing the viral co-op climbing game’s total to 14.8M copies sold. Expect that 15M PEAK announcement very soon. Its spike last month was due to a price drop (from $7.99 to $4.95) between Nov 5 and 19, timed with a content update (like prior discounts). There’s an audience of players that eats these games up – and it’s global. These lean, quick-to-develop, budget-friendly co-op games are killing it right now, and it’s a trend we’ll see continue into 2026. Expect bigger studios to … climb on the bandwagon.
Dispatch dispatched another 1.1M on Steam last month. It’s revived the interactive narrative genre with panache. Dispatch successfully mixes character-driven choices with a fun, strategic dispatch management minigame, providing engaging gameplay between the fantastic writing, animation, and comedy. It’s a superhero story without the bleak, rote end-of-days dystopia stuff we see elsewhere. And the strategic weekly episodic release schedule sustained player buzz and kept the Dispatch at the front of gamers’ minds (and near the top of the Steam charts).
Escape from Duckov also sold 1.1M copies. While Duckov’s genuinely engaging gameplay has contributed to its global appeal, it owes much of its success to its origins and popularity in China. It was published by the major Chinese media and streaming platform Bilibili – essentially the YouTube of China. Duckov already has a low price in the US ($18), but the regional pricing means that it costs the equivalent of $8 in China. The result is easy to see, with China accounting for over 65% (2M) of Duckov’s copies sold.
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Incredibly, Duckov is selling faster and generating more revenue than the Steam release of Escape from Tarkov, the game it’s parodying. After 17 days on the market, the Steam version of Tarkov has sold just 400K copies on Steam, amounting to gross revenue of $14M.
In that same amount of time, Duckov sold almost 3M copies (7x more) and generated revenues of $38M (2.7x more).
However, it’s worth noting:
Tarkov is an old title available for years on its own dedicated launcher, so its Steam release is not a true debut. Millions of core fans who would buy it already own it, leaving only a smaller segment of new adopters.
The extraction genre is now far more competitive, thanks to titles like Delta Force (free to play) and ARC Raiders ($40 versus Tarkov’s $50).
Either way, Tarkov on Steam has almost certainly not hit Battlestate Games’ expectations.
Speaking of not hitting expectations…
What happened with CoD this year?
Eurogamer recently interviewed us about Call of Duty having an off year. A few snippets:
‘’Call of Duty is underperforming this year due to a combination of community burnout, questionable creative and business decisions by Activision/Microsoft, and strong competition. Xbox dropped the ball on the wrong year, as this year saw some of the most exciting shooter releases in years.’’
“Player reception was [also] largely negative, with a mostly negative Steam user score and review bombing galore. Long-standing player frustrations, like the perceived impact of skill-based matchmaking -and the focus on heavy microtransactions (skins and bundles) over core gameplay quality, continue to drive players away from the franchise.’’
“Microsoft’s decision to put Black Ops 7 on Game Pass on day one has cannibalised traditional full-price game sales on Xbox and PC, with last year’s game losing a reported $300 million in potential sales due to the service. Our estimates have signalled time and time again that Game Pass cannibalises game revenues - and Call of Duty is no different.’’
Read the full interview, which also contains some quotes from the ever-awesome Chris Dring from The Games Business, right here.
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Hi Rhys, how is BF 6 doing now? Is it still selling strong? Just curious as its been a while since their launch.