What we think about, what we're building, and why.
The extraction shooters worth your time in 2026, on PC, console and mobile: ARC Raiders, Escape from Tarkov, Delta Force, Hunt: Showdown 1896, Arena Breakout and more, with who each one is for. Ours comes last, unranked.
Hand-coding abilities works right up until a designer has an idea. Every character ability in MISFITZ is built from Combat Actions instead: small pieces our designers snap together. Here is Ray's main attack, rebuilt step by step, and the editor I built over a Christmas break to make it readable.
Your character's kit is predictable on purpose: people need to know what a Rush can do when one skates up next to them. Tricks are the opposite. Loot them, craft them, burn through their charges and watch them break. Plus what manholes, elevators and rooftops do to a run.
A social game that goes quiet between runs isn't much of a social game. In MISFITZ the lobby is a place you hang out: you can paint it, test characters with your friends in it, watch their runs from it, and still see who's around while you're deep in the menus.
Proximity chat is common on PC and rare on mobile, where a lot of what gets called proximity chat is really squad voice. What the difference is, which mobile games really have it, and what it changes when strangers can hear you.
Plenty of multiplayer mobile games play much the same whether your friends are online or not. Eight where playing together changes the game in 2026 (Brawl Stars, Pokémon UNITE, Among Us, Stumble Guys, MISFITZ and more), and which one fits which kind of group.
Among Us made hundreds of millions of people fall in love with one specific feeling: looking at another player, knowing they might be lying, and having to decide what to do. What do you play if you want that feeling but with action instead of meetings?
Brawl Stars: three-minute matches and friendly chaos. ARC Raiders: extraction tension, uneasy alliances with strangers, real loss when you go down. They look nothing alike, but both are about people, not just gunplay. MISFITZ is built for that intersection, by a team that worked on Brawl Stars, Clash Royale and Candy Crush.
Most of the extraction games worth playing on mobile in 2026 are already out: Tom Clancy's The Division Resurgence, Delta Force, Arena Breakout and Call of Duty: Mobile's DMZ: Recon, with MISFITZ coming free to iOS and Android. How they differ, and where ARC Raiders stands on mobile.
The best new and upcoming mobile games of 2026 are easy to argue about and hard to rank, so here's our take, from a team that has shipped a few: the ten titles that defined the year, from Rainbow Six Mobile, Arknights: Endfield and Honor of Kings: World to MISFITZ, and what each one is trying to do.
Extraction games are having a moment on PC and console. On mobile the choice is wider than it looks: Arena Breakout's Tarkov-style raids, big shooters that run extraction as one mode, smaller studios' takes and MISFITZ, still in development. Here's how they compare, and what happened to PUBG: Black Budget.
Every competitive game you've ever played has the same premise: here are the rules, here is what winning looks like, now go. Extraction shooters threw that out. They dropped you into a world full of valuable things and dangerous people and said, "Leave whenever you want. If you can."
We plastered posters over street art. The graffiti community called us out. So we tracked down the artist, apologized, and turned a mistake into something real.
Extraction shooters produce some of the best moments in gaming. On PC they usually ask for long raids and deep system knowledge, and their fans love them for it. We wanted those moments on mobile, in runs of 2.5 to 7 minutes.
MISFITZ players keep telling some version of the same story: two strangers team up for a whole run, share loot and play like friends. Twenty meters from the extraction point, one of them stops walking, turns around and takes everything. How alliances work in MISFITZ, and why trust is worth more when it's optional.
Every character in MISFITZ tells you something about the person playing them: Ray, Rush, Beat, Gloss, Shade and Drip. Not because we designed it that way, but because when you give people six distinct personalities and a world where trust is optional, people self-sort.
Why we built MISFITZ. The social play that defines PC extraction games was still rare on mobile, so the team behind Clash Royale, Brawl Stars and Candy Crush set out to change that.
I want to tell you what it feels like to watch 83,500 strangers play a game you built in a small office in Barcelona. It feels like losing control. In the best possible way.
Nobody says "wanna hang out?" anymore. They say "get on." The lobby is the parking lot. The Discord server is the group chat. And if you built something people play alone in a dark room, you built it for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
Ask someone who isn't a gamer who made their favorite mobile game. They know Candy Crush but not King. They know Clash Royale but not Supercell. The studio that built the thing they play every day is completely invisible to them. This has always struck me as one of the strangest dynamics in entertainment.
In a battle royale, 100 players drop in and one walks out the winner. That format defined a generation of multiplayer, and it still works. Extraction asks a different question: what if several players could walk out with something? That one change turns every encounter into a decision.
Somewhere in 2017, a studio in South Korea put 100 players on an island with guns and a shrinking circle. Within two years, battle royale was the format every studio was chasing. We are at that same inflection point with mobile extraction. The concept is proven. What it becomes on mobile is still being decided, and the people building right now are the ones who get to write the rules.
