To make last year’s release of ARC Raiders a success, Embark Studios teamed up with Twitch to saturate the platform with the extraction shooter game.
During the first week of ARC Raiders’ launch in October 2025, as much as 15 percent of all gaming content on Twitch featured Embark Studios’ popular shooter title — and this figure was much more than a happy surprise. It reflected an intentional partnership between Embark and Twitch featuring drop rewards, streamer incentives, and an in-person activation at TwitchCon 2025. This collaboration between Embark and Twitch was the focus of a panel discussion at GamesBeat Summit in Los Angeles last week featuring Embark marketing director Ashley St. Germain, Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton, and Sandbox Strategies senior influencer strategy manager Joe Raysinger.
What’s a server slam?
In game development, the term “server slam” refers to any large-scale stress test for an online service or product, with the goal of intentionally pushing infrastructure beyond its expected real-world usage to ensure that engineers can catch any failure before it occurs. Twitch has borrowed this term to refer to events during which game developers intentionally invite a large number of players to log in and play, with developers pairing this push with creator campaigns and Twitch Drops to spark engagement.
“The server slam that we ran was approximately two and a half weeks before launch. It was important for us that we called it a server slam, because we didn’t want to set the wrong context with our players,” St. Germain said during the panel discussion. “We certainly like taking feedback all the time, but that’s a pretty tight window for product implementation. So, with the server slam, our goals were really to get in as many players as possible, get them to share it with their friends, talk about it, and then stress-test our systems.”
ARC Raiders is not the only game to have engaged in a Twitch server slam in recent memory; Bungie ran one for Marathon alongside the game’s launch earlier this year. But ARC Raiders’ server slam was particularly successful because its gameplay aligns well with the preferences of the Twitch creator community, per Minton.
“The ARC Raiders team was very leaned-in on all the things that work well on Twitch — like community type content, badges, drops. One of the most powerful marketing tools we have, as it relates to amplifying a game launch, is the game itself, and the game itself is tailor-made for Twitch,” said the Twitch CPO during the panel discussion. “You have the competitive element with the co-op piece of it, potentially you have the psychological drama, the big peak moments, the betrayals — just a fantastic game, as it relates to the format.”
The key numbers
During Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders Twitch server slam:
- 15 percent of all gaming content on Twitch featured ARC Raiders
- 216,000 creators enabled Drops on their channel
- Over 1.5 million viewers claimed rewards
“They’re a very rare breed of games that reach that level of share of voice — you’re into the Grand Theft Auto franchise, and things like that,” Minton said. “I don’t want to say it’s unprecedented, but it is, as a comparative measure, quite large. Probably top-five, I would assume.”
Extra value
The highly engaging nature of ARC Raiders on Twitch allowed Embark and its influencer marketing team at Sandbox Strategies to glean more value than anticipated out of their deals with Twitch streamers. Typical bookings for sponsored streams during the Server Slam lasted about two hours, but some streamers played for 20 hours straight, going live for multiple days in a row. This helped drop the campaign’s average cost per watch hour to “pennies,” per Raysinger — much less than the typical amount of between $1 and $2 per hour.
“It just made my budget go way farther — and just looking at everything, the numbers were pretty insane,” Raysinger said.
The TwitchCon factor
St. Germain described TwitchCon as a “force multiplier” for Embark’s ARC Raiders campaign, enabling in-person connections with creators, particularly those on the micro- or mid-tier. Embark sponsored TwitchCon and hosted a booth that allowed visitors to participate in the ongoing server slam, with TwitchCon taking place during the open beta window ahead of the game’s official launch on October 30, 2025.
“Thinking about creators, they’re all independent contractors, kind of like small business people. I don’t know if that sounds cliché, but they’re all these folks who are fully responsible for their own destinies,” St. Germain said. “And so getting to be there in person with our dev team, and just getting to meet people and talk to them, and then allow them to have a chance to play the game and ask questions, and just get to like make that connection with us, I think is really important.”