- Arc Raiders crushed every CCU chart in sight, yet the Game Awards still pretended it did not exist.
- Critics continue to overlook multiplayer giants even when the player base dwarfs half the GOTY lineup.
- If CCU no longer matters, then the Game Awards should stop pretending that GOTY represents the games people actually play.
Arc Raiders’ launch this year is like a meteor on every platform, and that alone should have been enough to turn a few heads at the Game Awards 2025. Instead, the GOTY nominations rolled in, and Arc Raiders faced the snub of the decade. That sting has become familiar for fans of multiplayer titles because raw player numbers rarely sway critics who still treat CCU like a trivial footnote. It creates a strange divide. Millions of people vote with their time every day, yet critics pretend that this kind of impact has no place in the conversation for Game of the Year.
Arc Raiders deserved at least a place in that GOTY 2025 nominations lineup. Not the trophy itself, but the chair at the table at least. The game is rising every single day with a momentum that feels like the start of something important rather than a short surge. Ignoring that is a miss, and this one hurts more because the data paints a very loud picture.
How Arc Raiders Crushed CCU Charts While Other GOTY Nominees Barely Register
Arc Raiders did not simply perform well. It towered over the charts at a scale most nominated games never reached. While the SteamDB lines for other contenders look like quiet hills, Arc Raiders is a mountain range. The game sits comfortably above three hundred thousand players at any given moment. It spikes past four hundred thousand without breaking a sweat and keeps that pace daily, not only at launch. It behaves like a blockbuster that refuses to slow down.
Put that next to some of this year’s GOTY 2025 picks, and the gap becomes hard to ignore. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 never pushed past two hundred thousand peak players on Steam. While that does not define the game’s quality, it shows how small its total reach really is.
Other nominees like Death Stranding 2 and Donkey Kong Bananza are platform exclusives, which means large portions of global audiences cannot even play them yet. Of course, we already know that The Game Awards will plug its yearly Kojima and Nintendo games somehow. And if not, at least a PS5 exclusive.
Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 are the rare single-player examples from the past that defy this trend. Elden Ring reached 900K+ concurrent players at its peak, while Baldur’s Gate 3 reached 800K+. That should tell critics something.
Even in a solo format, scale matters. People playing your game in massive numbers means it’s connected. It meant something. That shows when people talk about a game after years, like it happened with Baldur’s Gate 3 or Elden Ring. Even after being a 2-year-old game, Baldur’s Gate 3 draws more players than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance II.
Arc Raiders reached that level without the advantages enjoyed by prestige single-player releases. It did not lean on a famous director (you know who). It did not launch behind a legacy franchise (again, you know which one). Arc Raiders did not benefit from a protected platform slot, and it clearly earned its growth through word of mouth and the strength of its systems.
Players kept showing up because the game offered something they could not get anywhere else. That is the sort of cultural footprint that award shows usually celebrate. Except this year, they did not.
If GOTY nominations are meant to reflect the year’s most important games, then ignoring the title with the strongest daily presence on all platforms feels backwards. Arc Raiders did everything you expect from a contender. It reached wide audiences and sustained those players. It built a community large enough to shape the genre. If CCU truly does not count for critics, then at some point, we need to ask what does. Just some scripts written in a boardroom meeting that was supposed to be an OTT series instead?
Game Awards Ignoring Multiplayer Games Is a Pattern Now
Here comes the frustrating part. The Game Awards panel does not treat multiplayer games the same as single-player titles. There is a long pattern here. If a game is built around PvP or PvPvE or even large-scale co-op, it starts at a disadvantage.
It does not matter if the player base is huge. It does not matter if the game shapes trends or pushes a genre forward. Critics keep leaning toward narrative-driven single-player work as if that is the only frame of reference for quality. And most of the time, the critics love their favorite Hollywood simulators every year, where gameplay is minimal, and everything relies on a strong script, like it is the Oscars.
And most of the time, the critics love their favorite Hollywood simulators every year, where gameplay is minimal, and everything relies on a strong script, like it is the Oscars.
You can see the bias every year. Multiplayer titles become side awards. They get labeled as niche even when they pack more players than the nominees combined. Arc Raiders walked right into that same trap. Critics see a third-person extraction shooter and assume they know everything about it. They reduce it to a category instead of judging the work in front of them.
Arc Raiders Reinvents Multiplayer in a New Fun Way
Yet Arc Raiders does something new with its genre. It nails a sense of cooperation between strangers that does not feel forced or artificial. It blends AI ARC threats with human threats in a way that flows rather than clashes. Arc Raiders breaks the usual extraction pattern where everything becomes a dull sprint to the exit. It rewards strategy instead of reflexes alone. These ideas matter. They move the medium forward.
A single-player game can deliver a strong moment with a cutscene or a setpiece. A multiplayer game has to earn it through systems and interactions. When Arc Raiders creates a cinematic escape or a desperate stand, it feels like the game world itself bends around the choices of multiple people. That is its own kind of storytelling, and it deserves respect.
When Arc Raiders creates a cinematic escape or a desperate stand, it feels like the game world itself bends around the choices of multiple people. That is its own kind of storytelling, and it deserves respect.
The CCU numbers show that people want this type of design. The critics ignoring it does not change the fact that Arc Raiders shifted multiplayer in 2025 in a meaningful direction. Calling it unworthy of a nomination while celebrating smaller titles with less influence is a strange contradiction.
Arc Raiders will not crumble because it missed a trophy. The player count is strong enough to carry it far beyond the award show bubble. Still, the snub reveals something about how critics see multiplayer games. They view them as lesser, even when the industry keeps proving otherwise.
At some point, that gap will need to close, because the future of games is not only in quiet single-player tales. It is also in worlds where chaos, strategy, AI, and human instinct crash together and create moments you talk about for weeks. Arc Raiders belongs in that future, and it should have belonged in the GOTY 2025 nominations, too.
What are your thoughts on Arc Raiders getting snubbed from Game of the Year nominations? Do you think The Game Awards should call GOTY the Singleplayer Game of the Year at this point? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
