Two years of radio silence, and then out of nowhere: a Steam post.
Small Impact Games just dropped a production update for Marauders, the dieselpunk extraction shooter that briefly had people asking whether it could challenge Escape from Tarkov back when it launched into early access in October 2022. The post, published on the game's Steam page, is the first developer communication in over 20 months, arriving after the game's last content update, the Retribution update, shipped in August 2024.
What the developer actually said
"We've been reworking core systems and rebuilding mechanics that needed it," Small Impact Games wrote in the production update. "This isn't a patch. It's a full overhaul aimed at getting Marauders where it should be."
The studio says what started as a round of fixes expanded into something much larger, and they made the call to commit to the bigger rework rather than push out smaller incremental updates in the meantime. Here's the thing: that explanation does track with how these situations sometimes play out in early access development. A bug fix spirals into a systems rewrite, the rewrite takes six months, and suddenly you've gone dark for nearly two years.
What makes this harder to square is that publisher Team17 apparently told at least one Reddit user in 2025 that active development on Marauders had stopped entirely. That directly contradicts what Small Impact Games is now saying. The studio hasn't addressed that discrepancy publicly, which leaves a pretty significant question hanging over the whole announcement.
The extraction shooter space that Marauders is returning to
Back in 2022, Marauders had a genuine pitch. Set in a dieselpunk alternate-history space setting, it offered a more approachable angle on the extraction shooter formula that Escape from Tarkov had defined. PC Gamer's Morgan Park noted at the time that while it lacked depth in its closed beta build, it had Tarkov beat on theming and accessibility.
That was a fair read. The aesthetic was genuinely distinct, the boarding-and-looting loop had a rhythm to it, and the game launched with strong concurrent player numbers on Steam for a paid early access title.
danger
The Steam early access notice for Marauders currently carries a warning that the game has not been updated in more than 20 months. The $30 price tag is still active, and the development roadmap on the store page ends at "late 2023."
The market Marauders is returning to looks nothing like the one it left. Arc Raiders launched and built a following. Marathon arrived from Bungie. Gray Zone Warfare pulled players back with a major update that sent its concurrent player count up over 1,000 percent. The extraction shooter genre has gotten louder, more crowded, and more competitive at every tier.
Community reaction: cautiously alive
The Steam announcement generated 11 pages of replies within a few hours of going up, which is a meaningful signal regardless of the tone. Plenty of responses fall into the "let it die" camp, and that skepticism is earned given the timeline and the Team17 contradiction. But a real contingent of players expressed genuine excitement, and that split reaction is actually more encouraging than a wall of indifference would be.
The key here is that Marauders never really failed because of its concept. The dieselpunk setting, the ship-to-ship boarding, the compact extraction loop, those things held up. What the game struggled with was content depth and a development cadence that couldn't sustain a live early access community.
Whether a full systems overhaul addresses those structural problems, or just polishes a foundation that still needs more building on top of it, is the real question. For players who bounced off Tarkov's punishing complexity and wanted something with more personality, Marauders was always worth watching. That hasn't changed.
For more on what's happening in the extraction shooter space, check out our latest gaming news, and if you want to get up to speed on the genre's best options right now, browse our guides for a full breakdown.
