In the last ten years, the concept of the extraction shooter has skyrocketed in popularity. It has become a staple of the industry, and many developers have had a stab at it. We’ve seen extraction shooters set in post-apocalyptic wastelands, war-torn suburbs, and even the depths of space.
The genre hasn’t impressed everyone, though. It’s a challenging, unwelcoming concept that puts some players off investing entirely, and others feel it has been overdone in recent years. One former director of Bungie who worked on Marathon for years recently explained how the genre’s name is ‘so dumb’ and ‘terrible’.
What’s Wrong With ‘Extraction Shooter’?
In a recent podcast appearance, Chris Sides, who was the Director of Product Management at Bungie between 2020 and 2024, working specifically on Marathon, an extraction shooter, admitted that he hates the genre’s name.
The genre name is so bad. I hate the genre name of extraction shooter. When I was working on Marathon, I was working with marketing, dying to be like, ‘Can we please create a different genre name,’ because extraction shooter is so dumb. It’s the only genre where its name is a mechanic.
(Thanks to TGP for the quote)
Sides was quick to bring up other games that have similar mechanics that are not dubbed extraction shooters, such as Helldivers 2. He stresses it’s about the formula of an extraction shooter and how you can’t shoehorn games that are drastically different into the same categorization model.
For instance, he says it’s unfair to compare ARC Raiders and Escape from Tarkov, and he’s kind of right. They’re chalk and cheese when it comes to what they do and how they play, and the only thing that unites them is the extraction mechanic.
It’s just… it’s a problem. I cannot stand the name of it. So I think that when you say the extraction genre, it should hit your spot. I think it’s really the fact that the genre doesn’t even know what it is. You, as a player, how do you know what you’re going to get? And I think that’s one of the real issues with the genre itself.
Here’s the full episode of the Shooter Monthly podcast that features Sides:
Further on in the podcast episode, Sides admitted that Bungie was studying ARC Raiders as it evolved under the Embark Studios banner, and he said that it has ‘gotten so much better’ since they were using it as an inspiration of sorts for Marathon.
ARC Raiders can be considered a social extraction shooter, leaning on mechanics like proximity chat, persistent squads, emote wheels, and contextual pings to keep players working together. That’s similar to how Marathon operates, and the team at Bungie even dubbed it a ‘social extraction shooter‘ several months ago.
Do you think there’s something inherently wrong with the name ‘extraction shooter’? Let me know what you’re thinking on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
The mistake was taking a beloved cult classic single player shooter and making into an PTW extraction shooter, not that it was called an extraction shooter. Everyone knows what to expect with an extraction shooter, and what they’re expecting is shit, not a quality single player experience.