Features
Three extraction games charted on Steam this week, and not one of them has PvP. That is not a coincidence and it is not a coding shortcut. The extraction shooter is quietly removing the single feature it was built around — other players — because after four years of live-service failures, the other players turned out to be the part that breaks.
The three that charted
All figures from the Steam 250 seven-day chart and Steam store pages, checked 20 September 2026. Every one of these is tagged Single-player on Steam.
| Game | Chart | Score / reviews | List price | Studio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CONVRGENCE | #10 | 8.12 from 1,784 (88%) | $24.99 | Monkey-With-a-Bomb |
| RIG Riot | #17 | 7.88 from 284 (95%) | $19.99 | Sage Boatman |
| HOPE 01 | #37 | 7.40 from 98 (94%) | $11.99 | Bending Boy Games |
Three different studios, three different price points, three different presentations — CONVRGENCE is VR-only with a dog companion, RIG Riot is a third-person mech roguelike that calls its runs raids, and HOPE 01 is a top-down survival RPG. What they share is the loop and the absence.
What an extraction game actually is
Strip the genre to its rules and you get three: you enter with what you can carry, you accumulate more than you can safely keep, and you must reach an exit to keep any of it. Dying does not send you to a checkpoint. It takes the run.
Notice that none of those rules mentions other players. PvP was the traditional way of supplying the threat, but it was never the mechanic. It was an implementation detail that the genre mistook for its identity.
Why PvP keeps killing these games
Cheating scales worse here than anywhere else
Yager shut down The Cycle: Frontier on 27 September 2023, and named the cause. The studio said it “quickly realized we needed to improve our anti-cheat efforts,” acknowledged a “significant decrease in” the player base after the cheating surge, and concluded that even after third-season improvements it was “still not enough to make The Cycle: Frontier financially viable.”
The reason cheating hurts extraction games more than other shooters is that the loss is permanent. In a round-based shooter a cheater costs you ten minutes. In an extraction game a cheater costs you everything you spent three hours accumulating, and the game is explicitly designed to make that hurt. The genre’s core emotional hook doubles as its worst exploit surface.
Players collude, and the game cannot tell
The subtler problem is that in a PvPvE game, not fighting is often the optimal play. Opposing squads quietly agree to leave each other alone and farm in peace, which is rational for them and ruinous for everyone still playing properly.
We covered a live example: Bellring Games added teaming to the bannable-offence list in Mistfall Hunter and issued 76 suspensions in the first wave — after putting the rule to a community vote that more than 80% backed. It was handled about as well as it can be handled. That it needed handling at all is the point: PvP imports a social problem that no amount of code fully solves.
Population is a cliff, not a slope
A PvP extraction game needs enough concurrent players to fill lobbies at every skill tier, at every hour, in every region. Fall below that and queues lengthen, which drives players away, which lengthens queues. There is no stable small version of a PvP extraction game. A single-player one works identically with eleven players or eleven thousand.
What the PvE versions do with the freed-up space
Removing PvP is only interesting if something fills the gap, and the three charting games each answer differently.
HOPE 01 spends it on systems: over 70 weapons separated by rate of fire, muzzle velocity, reload time and penetration, and a fabricator holding 200+ scanned items that you can reprint at the hideout. That fabricator is the quiet masterstroke — it means a lost run still leaves you with the knowledge, so permadeath stops being purely punitive.
CONVRGENCE spends it on atmosphere and procedural generation, replacing the unpredictability of human opponents with a zone that rearranges itself. RIG Riot spends it on build depth, with thousands of permanent parts and Volatile Mods, which is the roguelike answer: make the variance come from your own loadout.
The honest caveat: what gets lost
PvP extraction at its best produces stories that no AI director has ever produced. The stand-off in a corridor where neither player fires, the betrayal at the exit, the stranger who lets you go — those exist because a human being on the other end was making a real decision with real stakes. No scripted enemy has ever done that, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
There is also a real risk that a PvE extraction game collapses into an ordinary looter with an inconvenient walk at the end. The tension in Tarkov-likes comes substantially from not knowing whether the thing that kills you is thinking. Remove that and the designer has to manufacture dread from spawn tables, which is much harder than it looks.
And the sample here is small and early. HOPE 01 has 98 reviews and is in Early Access; RIG Riot has 284. Only CONVRGENCE, at 1,784, has enough of a sample to call durable. Three games in one week is a pattern worth naming, not a proven shift.
What is still unknown
Nobody has yet shown that a single-player extraction game holds players for hundreds of hours the way the PvP ones did at their peak. The loop’s long tail was always partly social — rivalries, reputation, the meta shifting because people adapted. Whether systems alone can carry that weight over a year is genuinely open, and none of these three has been out long enough to answer it.
Frequently asked questions
What is a single-player extraction shooter?
It is a game that keeps the extraction loop — enter a dangerous area, gather loot, and reach an exit or lose everything you were carrying — but replaces human opponents with AI enemies and environmental threats. Examples on Steam include HOPE 01, CONVRGENCE and RIG Riot.
Are there extraction shooters without PvP?
Yes. Several charted on Steam in the same week of September 2026, all tagged single-player: CONVRGENCE at number 10 on the Steam 250 week chart, RIG Riot at 17 and HOPE 01 at 37.
Why did The Cycle: Frontier shut down?
Developer Yager closed the game on 27 September 2023, citing cheating that caused a significant decrease in the player base, and said that even after improvements the game was not financially viable.
What is teaming in an extraction shooter?
Teaming is when players from opposing squads secretly agree not to fight each other so they can farm loot safely. Mistfall Hunter made it a bannable offence and issued 76 suspensions in its first enforcement wave.
Is HOPE 01 multiplayer?
No. HOPE 01 is listed on Steam as single-player only. It keeps the loot-or-lose-it extraction stakes without any PvP component.
Is CONVRGENCE playable without VR?
No. CONVRGENCE is tagged VR Only on Steam, so a headset is required. It is also single-player.
Sources and citation
- Steam 250 seven-day chart — positions and scores for all three games
https://steam250.com/7day - GameSpot on Yager shutting down The Cycle: Frontier and blaming cheaters
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/dev-shuts-down-pvp-shooter-says-cheaters-are-to-blame/1100-6515539/ - HOPE 01 Steam store page — single-player tag, weapon and fabricator counts
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4562940/ - CONVRGENCE Steam store page — single-player and VR Only tags
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2609610/ - RIG Riot Steam store page — single-player tag and raid structure
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3180340/ - Our reporting on the Mistfall Hunter teaming bans and the community vote
https://indieforgames.com/mistfall-hunter-teaming-bans/
Recommended
- HOPE 01 — Price, Gameplay & Reviews
- Mistfall Hunter Banned 76 Players for Teaming, and the Community Voted for the Rule First
- Indie Shooters That Are Better Than Call of Duty
- Asynchronous PvP Games, Explained
- The Best Action Roguelikes on Steam (Pick the System, Not the Score)
- New Multiplayer Games on Steam: The Best Co-op Releases Right Now
- The Best New Steam Releases This Week (Ranked by Actual Reviews)
- 12 New Indie Games Released This Week on Steam (And Which Are Worth It)
- How to Actually Find Good Games on Steam (The Front Page Is Not It)
- The Best Indie Games for Steam Deck (Plus the Two Settings That Actually Matter)
