Marauders closed alpha on Steam was "three times" bigger than expected

The last time we spoke with Small Impact Games, the developers behind Marauders, the team were confident they were at the "precipice of a new genre". Extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, and Vigor had long been knocking on the door of mainstream success and Small Impact wanted a slice of the pie. Fast forward a couple of months, and it seems the studio's predictions are looking good, with Marauders' first closed alpha surpassing all expectations.

The alpha, which was available to anyone who pre-ordered the game on Steam, was open for just six days, from May 4-9. During that time, thousands of players flooded the servers - overloading them on the first day - in a bid to take to the skies in their very own spaceship and loot the hell out of floating raid locations.

"It was stressful but crazy exciting at the same time," James Rowbotham, lead designer, tells The Loadout. "It proved to be a lot bigger than we expected - three times that, actually - but the game held up really well, people seemed to find it fun, and loads of people streamed it."

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