ARC Raiders

Embark

While yes, there is admittedly some level of annoyance with the recent trend of spamming Steam Chart numbers every few hours for various games, at times, that data, often the only trackable metrics of a game, is alarm-sounding. And that’s what’s currently happening with ARC Raiders on Steam.

ARC Raiders has experienced an absolutely tremendous, very fast drop in players on Steam, down from a peak concurrent player count of 466,000 in January to 90,000 today. It’s not just that it’s a big drop; it’s that it’s a big drop extremely quickly. The game is down 80% in just 3.5 months since 2026 started.

This is, of course, not a single-player game where that kind of falloff is expected. But it’s a departure from the storyline before this, when ARC Raiders had a very, very solid hold on its playerbase, staying almost even, or at times increasing, from its launch in October to that 2026 turnover. But something happened, and it’s just not pulling out of this current slide, which keeps dropping every week. Nearly 90-100,000 concurrents isn’t bad, certainly, and ARC Raiders is always going to be considered a hit to some degree, given that expectations were far below this, but this kind of drop this quickly is worth studying.

What’s going on? It’s not as if there was one big change that led everyone to flee at once, but a conflagration of factors.

New content isn’t catching – Even Embark has previously acknowledged that there isn’t enough to do in ARC after a certain point, which is why they’ve tried to add new enemies and quests over time, but none of them have reversed these declines. The game's Shrouded Sky update, its largest since mid-December, barely moved the needle and if anything, declines have only accelerated since then.

Fatigue - Extraction shooters are unique in the sense that they have seasonal resets that wipe out a fair amount of progress including many upgrades and your cache of gear. It’s kind of necessary for the loop of the genre to work, but it can be a tiring cycle.

PvE focus – ARC Raiders found success drawing casual players in by leaning more heavily on PvE content and making PvP less brutal than in other entries in the genre. That has increased in time, leading some PvP players to leave. But if you’re catering to more casual players, casual players are also…more likely to leave in time, which is what we’re seeing here, in part.

Cheating – I mean, self-explanatory. Cheating is even more brutal in an extraction shooter when dying to a hacker isn’t just losing a round, it’s losing all your gear. And there is plenty of cheating in ARC Raiders.

Streamer anti-advertising – While streamers can help elevate a game by showing it to tens or hundreds of thousands of their fans, the opposite can be true. Every week, it feels like a new high-profile streamer announces they’re pulling back from the game. Recently, it was Ninja, who called the game “unplayable” due to cheaters and stream snipers. Most notably, TheBurntPeanut, arguably the biggest ARC Raiders creator, has been playing less ARC, even as he acknowledges it costs him a significant number of viewers. Most of these situations are a combination of dealing with cheaters and community targeting, simply running out of stuff to do, or being fatigued by the seasonal reset.

Another larger update is coming in April, the Riven Tides update, which will add a big ARC and a new map for once, but it’s unclear if that’s enough to level out or reverse this decline. Losing this many players this quickly indicates major issues that need major overhauls, and Embark has to be brainstorming on that front as we speak.

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