Arc Games began life in 2008 as Perfect World Entertainment, the North American publishing arm of Beijing-based Perfect World, established to bring its parent company's online games to western players. The company quickly grew beyond that remit into a free-to-play publishing powerhouse: it acquired Cryptic Studios from Atari in 2011, taking stewardship of Star Trek Online and launching Neverwinter in 2013, two online worlds it still operates more than a decade later. It also backed Runic Games, publisher of the beloved Torchlight action-RPGs, and in 2019 proved it could land a premium hit when it published Gunfire Games' Remnant: From the Ashes, a souls-inspired co-op shooter that became one of the year's breakout successes and grew into a full franchise.
The corporate turns that followed reflect the consolidation wave of the early 2020s. Embracer Group acquired Perfect World Entertainment and Cryptic Studios in a deal completed in 2022, folding the publisher into the Gearbox Entertainment Company as Gearbox Publishing San Francisco. When Take-Two Interactive agreed to acquire Gearbox's core studios in 2024, the San Francisco publishing team remained with Embracer and relaunched that April under a new name: Arc Games, taking its identity from the long-running Arc games platform. Today the California-based publisher manages a catalogue spanning the Remnant series, Star Trek Online, Neverwinter and Gigantic: Rampage Edition - a mix of enduring live-service worlds and modern action-RPGs that keeps its two-decade publishing lineage in active rotation.
