Battle royale has been the mainstream mobile gaming success story of the past 5 years, with the subgenre proving so popular that it has space for multiple mega-hits. Garena’s global juggernaut Free Fire jostles with the monstrously profitable PUBG Mobile, and Call of Duty Mobile nips at their heels.

However, despite the impressive capacity of those titles to reinvent themselves month after month, season after season, and year after year, there’s a gradual decline in player enthusiasm for this particular flavor of shooter. The natural question is, if not battle royale, then what?

To answer that, we’ll take a look at one of the most strikingly innovative shooter subgenres to arise in recent years — the Extraction Shooter — including a quick analysis of what makes it compelling, how the market is reacting to its emergence, and how it might be adapted to mobile F2P.

What is an Extraction Shooter Anyway?

This subgenre is fundamentally characterized by the player being required to, you guessed it, extract in order to succeed. Basically, the player:

Chooses which gear to take into the round from their pre-existing inventory
Takes out “insurance” on high-value items
Spawns at a random location, either solo or in a group
Scavenges for randomized items, killing and looting opponents they encounter along the way
Attempts to escape via randomized extraction points
If killed, loses everything they were carrying (unless it’s insured or in a small “safe” section of their inventory)
If successful at extracting, keeps all loot

In short, it has similarities to battle royale, but the critical differences are the choice of gear, permanent loot loss on death, and retaining loot to sell or reuse upon extraction. This handful of changes make for a profoundly different shooter experience — one that’s even more thrilling than the white-knuckle intensity of chasing a chicken dinner.

Death, Loot, and Taxes

In most shooters, death is just a temporary setback, but battle royale ratchets up the pressure by making mortality matter. If the player dies, they’re done. That thrilling chapter has ended, and they’ll have to restart to write a new one.

Even when you can respawn — such as with a Beacon in Apex Legends or via COD Warzone’s Gulag — it’s a high-stakes endeavor: you might lose time, opportunity, or teammates in the process.

Extraction shooters take this tension and tighten the screws by adding loot into the equation. In this subgenre, death is not only loss of life but also potentially loss of the gear you were carrying when you died, which you might have made sacrifices to acquire in the first place. If another player loots that coveted gear — and you knew you were taking a risk when you equipped it, but you made that choice and rolled the dice anyway — then not only have you lost it, but another player has gained it, and they can then keep, sell, or die with it another day.

Plus, if you take another player out, there’s the excitement of scouring their corpse, while under pressure of attack, and of finding something rare or valuable that might save your neck. Importantly, what was once theirs is now yours. By having that impact on another player, there’s an injection of what self-determination theory calls “relatedness” — of knowing that you’ve done something that mattered to another human, and, in doing so, satisfied your own need to feel connected and important. The economic consequences of an encounter in an extraction shooter are potentially huge, and the attached emotional payload is the same.

This subgenre takes something else that battle royale excels at and threatens to blow the amp there, too: player agency.

Autonomy Galore

PUBG Mobile and its ilk start by allowing the player to choose between a low-risk/low-reward drop into a low-traffic area for a slow-paced gearing up versus a high-risk/high-reward jump into a high-traffic area for high-quality loot. Then, once the action starts, do you run towards or away from the gunfire? Do you risk going for the precious cargo drop or hang back and try to snipe the chumps who sacrifice themselves at the altar of Level 3 Helmets?

Extraction shooters offer similar but different opportunities for compelling decision-making, starting before the round even begins. Do you take your best gear and hope you can put it to use, or will you do a low-tech pistol run and hope to scrape through, extracting with more than you brought in?

Furthermore, once the round kicks off, do you aim to find something, anything, and then slink away to the exit, hoping you survive? Or do you lurk near the extraction point, aiming to pull off an ambush? Do you go in guns blazing right from the start and risk drawing everyone towards you, reaping the rewards if you survive and eating the loss if you fail?

The combination of high-stakes life and death, loot permanence, and extreme player agency makes for an even more intoxicating combo than battle royale.

Sleeper Hits

The most high-profile example of this formula is the notoriously hardcore PC-only Escape From Tarkov (EFT), which has been steadily gaining Twitch viewership year-on-year since it launched back in 2017.

EFT has numerous elements that make it brutally intricate and deep: locational damage, nuanced pain and wound management, numerous ammo types, clumsy and recoil-heavy gunplay, thirst and hunger needs, and a marked absence of hand-holding tutorials or HUD elements. Those who put in the work to understand it are rewarded with one of the richest and most adrenaline-drenched gaming experiences ever devised. However, this depth is perhaps why EFT hasn’t emerged from its niche and taken the mainstream shooter world by storm.

Meanwhile, Crytek’s 2018 cult hit Hunt: Showdown has its own complex set of systems and mechanics — including death resulting in the outright loss of a player character — that ensure only the most committed players will wade through its depths.

Mainstream Extraction

So far, it seems like extraction shooters aren’t for everyone – but could they be?

Based on the number of titles in development, the industry seems to think so. In HD-land, the future of the subgenre looks juicy, with Team 17’s Marauders and Ubisoft’s F2P cross-platform The Division spinoff Heartland looking promising, while Shrapnel plans an extraction shooter with crypto hooks. Let’s not forget the sad tale of Battlefield 2042’s highly anticipated Hazard Zone mode, doomed to failure by a multitude of technical and design issues in the host game. Bold prediction: BF2042 will return as a F2P title late in 2022, which will give many millions a chance to enter the Hazard Zone…

Looking more towards the present, several F2P imitators have tried to open up the subgenre for the masses, with varying degrees of success. Bohemia Interactive’s console-only Vigor is a noteworthy kick at the can, held back by weak core gameplay. HD cross-platform title The Cycle: Frontier from Yager is making waves in closed beta, as it appears to have taken the most vital elements of EFT and added various mass-market-friendly trappings, including a lengthy introductory player experience, a social hub, and metagoals that facilitate a sense of success even in cases where the player fails to extract.

Most relevant to mobile F2P are several unsuccessful titles from NetEase, including the short-lived Lost Light and the more enduring Badlanders, a cross-platform Android & PC release. The latter takes the core of an extraction shooter and mangles it by treating it like a fast-paced battle royale, with high movement speeds resulting in a lack of stealth. Plus, auto-collection of plentiful loot leads to the sense that nothing really means anything, rendering insurance pointless and completely missing the magic of permanent loot gain and loss.

Arguably, the most successful attempt comes from PUBG Mobile’s much-loved Metro Royale mode (a game within a game), which popped up late in 2021 and has returned 3 times since. It’s telling that the most recent incarnation of Metro Royale requires players to reach Level 10 in the rest of the game before they can access it, perhaps an acknowledgement that this particular type of experience requires commitment to meaningfully participate.

Extraction shooters haven’t exactly exploded in popularity, but the first developer to really crack the nut will be rewarded with a highly engaged and committed audience.

Square Peg, Round Hole?

The sheer scale of player base and potential spend means that mobile F2P is the best place to blow up a subgenre and ride it into the mainstream, but in some ways extraction shooters are ill-suited to the platform and business model. Mobile devices aren’t good for the kind of nuanced and cautious control that extraction shooters tend to require, and mobile gamers often play without sound, limiting their situational awareness in a subgenre where one false move can mean losing super-valuable investments.

What about F2P as a business model? How might players feel about having the stuff they’ve paid for stolen? As long as you charge them a reasonable price — and give them ample opportunities to earn decent free loot — it’s potentially fine. Of course, the flipside to permanent loss of valuable items is that players can gain the same stuff for free, as long as they’re skilled or lucky enough.

Free Fire’s temporary gun variants have proven that at least some players are ok with paying a modest amount for powerful items and then losing access to them, so loss of loot in this context might prove to have a similar dynamic. Arguably, the fact that the power players buy can be taken away from them will make it feel less pay-to-win, as long as those with purchasable power aren’t untouchable by a less well-geared player.

It’s interesting to note that numerous elements of EFT feel like they’re lifted straight from a mobile F2P game, which should make adapting it relatively painless. These include the regular “Scav run” mechanism that allows players to earn randomized gear for free (if they manage to extract), a complex metagame where you scavenge resources to upgrade a base that awards incremental buffs, a periodic season-like reset that levels the playing field and starts the chase anew, and the insurance mechanism that taxes players with high-end gear.

The Fundamentals

As with any other promising subgenre, to truly excel on mobile, the extraction shooter will need to be stripped back to its roots and reimplemented with a “mobile-first” mentality. This means incorporating plenty of polish, an emphasis on accessibility, and a fair business model that generates genuine long-term value for players.

What will we need to see in that game? Here’s a solid start:

The core extraction shooter ruleset: choose (and insure) gear, spawn, loot, extract
Slow movement to create tension and caution, complementing the high-stakes nature of the experience
Sparse loot, to create the sense that every item matters and to reward exploration
Enemy movement and gunfire HUD elements to act as player situational awareness aids, encouraging stealth and maximizing accessibility
Reasonably small maps, low player counts, and short round durations to keep the gameplay relatively “snackable”
Metagoals and progression systems that alleviate the sense of loss upon failure
Fairly priced power items for purchase and opportunities to earn randomized free gear
A modest gap between low- and high-power players — and ranking-based matchmaking — to create a sense of fairness
Diverse monetization methods — both cosmetic and power-based — to avoid an over-reliance on any single revenue stream and to maximize live ops potential and spend depth
A smooth onboarding experience, including a polished FTUE and believable but non-challenging AI opponents
High technical accessibility — including a small memory footprint, minimal initial download, strong performance on low-tier devices, and tight netcode — to maximize audience size and facilitate success in Tier 2 & 3 regions

Escaping With The Loot

Who has the best shot?

Tencent could spin out its PUBG Mobile Metro Royale mode into a separate, streamlined app. This would enable them to purpose-build an economy, metagame, and UI centered around extraction shooter gameplay, as well as enabling bespoke marketing and targeted UA.

Yager is also in the running with The Cycle: Frontier, which already hits a lot of the right notes and might end up going cross-platform, especially with an injection of funds and expertise from your favorite global gaming behemoth, Tencent (again).

Or maybe someone will come along and “Supercell” the subgenre with an elegant distillation of everything that makes extraction shooters sing. For example, perhaps a studio will discard the first/third-person perspective and build an ultra-accessible yet exhilarating persistent loot-based competitive experience. We also wouldn’t be surprised to see more crypto game developers get in on the trend, too, since the combination of true item ownership and permanent gear seems like a natural fit. Regardless, there’s plenty of blue ocean out there, and whoever arrives first will find plunder aplenty.

Big thanks to Thomas Baker for writing this essay! If Naavik can be of help as you build or fund games, please reach out.