Perhaps hundreds of thousands of people turned out to watch or participate in a gang war on ARC Raiders, the popular post-apocalyptic multiplayer game.
The faux war started out as a grudge match between a couple of streamers inside ARC Raiders. One was TheBurntPeanut, the leader of the Bungulators faction. He’s a a popular streamer who began in Escape From Tarkov and has expanded to Battlefield 6 and ARC Raiders. Mark Chandler watched all this and helped me piece together what happened.
He squared off against HutchMF. HutchMF was playing ARC Raiders and was downed by a random player who said, “for the Bungulators.” HutchMF shared the recorded clip and said, “This means war!” It was all in good fun, and it was evidently all organic.
Streamers moved in on both sides. TimTheTatman, Nadeshot, Symfuhny, and NickMercs sided with HutchMF. Then cloakzy, Myth, summit1g, RNGingy, Shroud and Ninja joined sides with TheBurntPeanut and the Bungulators.
HutchMF’s faction was called The FMF. They wore skins in the game that included Torpedo Skin (red), Goggles On, and Helmet/Mask Off.
The Bungulators used a Striker Skin (red), Helmet/Mask On. These clothes were referred to as “clothes stained with the blood of the enemy.”
There was also a neutral faction led by xQc, with Origin Skin (blue) and headgear On.
The rivalry quickly moved beyond individual encounters and became a coordinated, server-wide event. An unofficial map was created dubbed The Battle for Speranza. The Bungulators controlled the northern regions and FMF controlled the sound.
Fans adopted the designated uniforms to participate in the conflict, engaging in mass stream-sniping and coordinated Player-vs-Player (PvP) attacks against the rival faction’s streamers and supporters.
In a key defection, Ninja publicly sided with TheBurntPeanut, citing the overwhelming numbers and chaotic dedication of the Bungulator fan base as the primary reason to avoid conflict.
It was dubbed The Battle for Speranza, after the underground city where the humans dwell to hide from the ARC AI machines that have wiped out life on the surface of Earth.
HutchMF shared an “official map” of the battle lines. Everyone wore different gear identifying themselves with one faction or another.
The war culminated in a massive, winner-take-all battle to stop the escalating, server-crashing madness.
Players went into the game in trios and some went into the rival team’s ranks with their colors and tried to spy on them. Players who were pretending to be part of TheBurntPeanut team would take the opportunity when things were in a state of mayhem. Then they would suddenly kill TheBurntPeanut. Then chaos would break out again as the team tried to identify the spy who did the killing.
The final showdown happened on Saturday, November 2022, at 5 p.m. Pacific time on the Spaceport map.
In the battle, thousands of players attempted to queue into the same match, resulting in large, disorganized, and frantic fights across multiple servers as the armies sought to eliminate the opposing faction’s core leadership.
The Bungulators (TheBurntPeanut’s Faction) were declared the victors. Their win was primarily attributed to the sheer numerical superiority and chaotic dedication of their massive community, which successfully overwhelmed the FMF forces and defended their core leadership.
That is a difficult number to pinpoint exactly, as the streamers were broadcasting across multiple platforms (primarily Twitch and Kick) and the event was massive. However, based on the total concurrent viewership for the game during that period, we can provide a strong estimate and a known peak for the game category.
The total live audience for the Arc Raiders Streamer Gang War was likely well over 300,000 to 400,000 concurrent viewers across all platforms during the peak of the Saturday showdown, Chandler estimated.
Arc Raiders Game Category Peak
The entire Arc Raiders game category on Twitch saw a peak viewership of approximately 374,000 to 359,000 concurrent viewers around the time of the war and the game’s recent launch. The final showdown was likely responsible for a significant portion of this peak.
Key Streamer Contributions
When you combine the numbers from the other major streamers involved—Shroud, Ninja, xQc, TimTheTatman, Nadeshot, NICKMERCS, Myth, and summit1g—each of whom typically pull tens of thousands of viewers, their combined audience easily pushed the total viewership for the event well into the hundreds of thousands.
The event was such a huge driver of engagement that the game itself confirmed reaching over 700,000 concurrent players in the game client, showing the massive interest the war generated. The peak for the game today was 427,000 concurrent players.
Some of the streamers were being DDoS’d and had to go to a Home Depot and buy a Starlink to deal with the problem. TheBurnPeanut had more than 80,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch and more than 55,000 on YouTube.
Meanwhile, the makers of the game at Embark Studios and its parent company Nexon are no doubt enjoying all of the free publicity for their game, which is one of the surprise hits of the fall for video games. The title debuted on October 30 and it has sold well over four million copies. The word-of-mouth publicity from social sharing and events like this one can explain why ARC Raiders is trending above both Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 on Steam now. (Of course, Call of Duty has its home base on Battle.net).