ARC Raiders has been gaining ground in the extraction space since October 2025, yet the absence of trading still fuels constant discussion.
Anyone coming from Escape from Tarkov quickly realized ARC Raiders doesn’t have a Flea Market equivalent, meaning there’s no player-driven economy where items can be bought and sold at will.
For extraction veterans, that lack can feel strange or even frustrating, because Tarkov’s Flea Market has long acted as a “safety net” for quests, kit-building, and securing rare items without being at the mercy of loot RNG.
Many ARC Raiders fans didn’t initially know that Embark Studios experimented with an auction-house-like trading system during development, but dropped it because it risked reshaping the game entirely.
Did Arc Raiders Actually Plan to Include a Flea Market / Auction House?
According to ARC Raiders design lead Virgil Watkins, the team considered a marketplace and even partially built an auction house-style system similar to the Flea Market.
The system would’ve made it possible to trade items for tokens or currency, meaning players could upgrade gear through economic advantage rather than exploration. On paper, that sounds like an obvious quality-of-life win.
The ability to buy what you need reduces frustration, saves time, and gives players more control. Embark could have built a marketplace system. The bigger problem was what it would do to the game.
Watkins has stressed that ARC Raiders is “about the items,” but a marketplace makes items feel like transactions rather than finds.
In a marketplace-driven meta, the smartest strategy becomes farming whatever sells for the highest value, turning that into coins, and then purchasing the exact loadout you want.
At that point, raids become less about scavenging and more about optimizing income, and that shift is exactly what Embark wanted to avoid.
Why Doesn’t Embark Want a Flea Market in Arc Raiders?
That decision makes a lot more sense in the context of ARC Raiders’ core loop, which depends on uncertainty.
Every raid plays out differently, every container can surprise you, and finally pulling the item you’ve been hunting for hours is what makes extraction shooters so addictive.
A Flea Market-style system undermines that emotional loop because it removes the satisfaction of earning rare gear through exploration.
The difference between “finally, I found it” and “I’ll buy it after this raid” sounds small, but it’s huge, because it discourages deep engagement with maps and loot routes.
It makes players care less about spawn locations, which containers matter, and how to efficiently explore danger zones, which are exactly the skills Embark wants players to master through experience rather than transactions.
How Would an Auction House Affect Crafting and Progression?
Another major reason an auction house could have been disruptive is how closely ARC Raiders ties crafting and progression together, pushing players to build workbenches, upgrade their workshop, and craft better gear over time.
This creates a steady progression ladder: you slowly become more capable, more equipped, and more dangerous, but only because you’ve invested time and effort into upgrading your base infrastructure.
A player marketplace adds a third option, and it’s so convenient that many players default to it.
Instead of upgrading workbenches, players could just buy the gear they need from others, and instead of investing in crafting, they could treat coins like the answer to everything.
That would gradually devalue the workshop loop and weaken one of ARC Raiders’ biggest progression differentiators in the extraction genre. Put simply, the auction house would change the game’s pacing by replacing existing progression systems.
What Does Tarkov’s Flea Market Prove About the Risks of Player Economies?
Meanwhile, Escape from Tarkov is often held up as proof of both how powerful and how dangerous a Flea Market can be.
Tarkov’s market improves quality of life for players. It helps counter bad RNG, supports quest progression, and makes it easier to secure specific keys, attachments, and rare tools.
But Tarkov has also spent years battling the darker side of having a player-run economy.
Developers have constantly attempted to balance the Flea Market and stop it from breaking progression — including restrictions that prevent certain items from being traded until players reach milestone levels.
The fact that Tarkov has needed years of constant tuning is a warning sign, because once your extraction shooter is balanced around an auction economy, it becomes incredibly difficult to undo.
Many players believe Tarkov is now permanently shaped by the Flea Market meta, to the point where removing it would cause the entire game balance to collapse.
ARC Raiders, in response, looks like it intentionally avoided being pulled into the same economic structure.
Can Players Trade in Arc Raiders Right Now?
The irony is that ARC Raiders doesn’t offer a proper Flea Market, but trading still happens anyway, with players swapping blueprints and items by teaming up, entering a match, dropping loot, and extracting with the deal done.
It’s slow and inconvenient, but that inconvenience creates natural friction that prevents the economy from being completely dominated by traders, flippers, and market manipulation.
Embark has openly acknowledged this player behavior and doesn’t appear alarmed by it — if anything, they view this “organic trading culture” as part of what makes ARC Raiders interesting socially.
Watkins has suggested that if they expand trading in the future, they’d rather lean into that face-to-face interaction rather than replace it with an automated auction interface.
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