The term ‘extraction shooter’ is being used more and more as games like Escape from Tarkov and Arc Raiders command huge audiences. It is the popular genre of the moment. But the label is deeply flawed, according to former Bungie product manager Chris Sides, who worked on extraction shooter Marathon. Personally, he hates the term.

“The genre name is so bad,” Sides told the Shooter Monthly Podcast (via The Game Post). “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.”

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What about ‘battle royale’, the host of the podcast quickly countered. “Battle royale is not a mechanic,” Sides said, “it’s a mode. Extraction is the mechanic to get out. Is Helldivers 2 an extraction shooter because you extract? No, it’s not like Tarkov at all.”

And therein lies the problem: the mislabelling of games and potential misleading of players. Sides said the “terrible” terminology also makes it very hard to compare games within the extraction shooter genre. Arena Breakout and Escape from Tarkov: yes, they can be compared because they roughly fit the same mould, he said. But Arc Raiders and Tarkov? Nope. “Comparing Arc Raiders to maybe Rust could fit,” he said, “and then Rust – is that an extraction? Because it’s survival…

“It’s a problem,” he went on. “I cannot stand the name of it. When you say ‘the extraction genre’, it should hit your spot. 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 that’s one of the real issues with the genre itself.”

Chris Sides left Bungie in 2024 to become a freelance consultant, and to create a new studio making something he’s not ready to talk about yet, he said in the podcast. Marathon, meanwhile, continues to wobble, having received vicious feedback in a technical test last year, then disappearing from the release schedule, only to reappear very recently amidst pledges by publisher Sony that the game will be released by March 2026. Whether it will arrive then – and in what shape it will arrive – we cannot yet know.