It has been more than seven months since ARC Raiders hit the extraction shooter space, bringing about an all-new concept in the genre and introducing millions of people to the notion of escaping. Embark Studios made bank from this sensational game, pushing out content and keeping things fresh while retaining players, but the situation started going south fairly quickly.
In the last five months, ARC Raiders has seen a drastic drop in players, with each successive major update failing to capture the attention and interest of gamers worldwide. The copies have been sold, and the millions have been made, but with each new month, ARC Raiders dwindles further down the charts.
And as we all know, that’s never good news for a live service game with ‘years of content’ in the pipeline.
The Degradation of ARC Raiders is Tangible
If we go by Steam’s player numbers, which is the only accurate and publicly accessible data out there, we can see a dire picture being painted. In November 2025, during the game’s first full month on the market, ARC Raiders hit lofty peaks, securing a top player count on Steam of 481,966 users.
The next month saw a sizeable dip, but that’s to be expected, with early adopters who don’t quite enjoy the game enough inevitably dropping off during the holiday season while they play other games.
But when the new year came around, a minor uptick hit in January, only to be followed by months of consistent downward trending for ARC Raiders.
At the worst, ARC Raiders saw a -39% drop month on month in peak player count. As the months have pushed on, the percentages have eased off, but that’s because the stabilization is coming from the core community holding on in the hopes that more content will come soon.
Here’s how the data looks for ARC Raiders’ player count drop in the last few months (using peak player numbers from Steam):
- January 2026: 466,372
- February 2026: 375,294 (-19.5%)
- March 2026: 252,050 (-33%)
- April 2026: 154,498 (-39%)
- May 2026: 122,157 (-21%)
June has already started with a -9.5% drop, with a peak of 110,659 being secured, but at the time of writing, ARC Raiders was sitting at an all-time low of just 29,688 active players.
What’s Wrong with ARC Raiders?
There’s not much that’s inherently wrong with ARC Raiders, but there are a few things that have pushed players in the opposite direction in recent months. This is visible by taking a cursory glance at the game’s review history and seeing just how many days negative reviews have been outpacing positive reviews:
Put simply, a two-fold thing kicked in to push players away.
The most recent major updates, including Shrouded Sky and Riven Tides, simply weren’t as ambitious or exciting as players were hoping for. They failed to deliver, and that left an impact on the community. Then, Embark Studios emerged and said that the next major update wouldn’t be dropping until October.
The team said that they couldn’t sustain the cadence of updates they were maintaining, and instead, they’d opt to roll out just two major updates a year.
Combine that with some bizarre choices around weapon balancing and durability, PvP vs. PvE content, and a lack of innovation in the ARC enemy space, and you’ve got a game that’s working its way down the charts relatively quickly.
Of course, it doesn’t help that streamers have long since abandoned ARC Raiders en masse, moving on to greener pastures. That’s one of the hardest-hitting areas where ARC Raiders has all but imploded in the last few months. When content and streams were booming, ARC Raiders was flying high, but that’s a thing of the past.
At the time of writing, just 8,000 people were watching ARC Raiders content, compared to an all-time peak of almost 400,000 viewers.
Also, we’ve seen other competing games come up into the fold a little more. Marathon recently had a major update that introduced some PvE content, Escape from Tarkov has a new map, and Call of Duty fans started getting excited about the reveal of DMZ.
Escape from Tarkov is retaining players better than any other extraction shooter out there, but it’s worth stressing it has pioneered the genre for the last decade, so that’s almost expected.
For now, all eyes in the ARC Raiders space are fixed firmly on October’s Frozen Trail update, and whether it’ll revitalize the game to any meaningful standard, just a year down the line.
Are you still playing ARC Raiders? Do you think we should be concerned about the player count drop? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
Dude something happened with Arc Raiders for me on my PC… Whenever I try to play it crashes and says “Unreal Engine crash, Pioneer something something” I cant remember what it says exactly but it is something to do with Unreal and it says Pioneer. I have done absolutely everything to try and fix it… Most recently I even under clocked my CPU in attempts to fix it. And nope,. still jacked up. I have messaged Embark and haven’t gotten it fixed yet too. I have slightly over 800 hours in Arc, I love the game, and I haven’t been able to play for like 4 or 5 weeks now.
I have found plenty of other people who are going through the same problem when I have been looking for how to fix it. So that is one thing Embark could do to help their numbers. I can play on my Series X still, but I don’t like playing the game as much on my TV being like 10+ feet away… My eyes aren’t good far away, I like being on my PC with 150+ FPS on my nice monitor and sitting right up next to it.
IF ANYONE KNOWS ANY WAY TO FIX THE UNREAL PIONEER CRASHES, I WOULD BE INSANELY GRATEFUL IF YOU COULD CLUE ME IN! THANK YOU!
I know the game has multiple huge detailed maps, all of which I really like and some even love. They added Stella Montis, which became the main PvP map and was a fun change of pace for the game and gave the game a bunch of playability for me personally. But I have been craving g some more new maps or new event types.The map we just got was very much a dud for me. The beach is cool, and using the metal detector was pretty cool the first day. But I really do not like the stupid model boats all over all the maps now. And it wasn’t even a week before I felt like I really wanted something new with the game. The trials give me something to do, but I need something more. My best friend loves doing the quests, and its great that they let you do them over when you reset. But they need to add a bunch more of those seeing as they use AI voices anyways, so adding new ones should be too hard. Its a great game and has a lot of content, but live service games need to have so much more content than any studio ever seems to expect. Like Embark says they are getting burnt out trying to make all the content, and the hard core players are sitting here like damn there is no new content haha.
I put many hours in the first few weeks.
The exploration and comradeship between a majority of users was really unique because while the machines would slow down that exploration it was manageable.
But then came the sweaty players, those who didn’t even want your loot, they just wanted the joy of taking you joy away.
Rather than adding map conditions to allow everybody have fun embark started putting out content glorifying what the sweaty gamers where doing this is when they lost me and a lot of like minded players.
Players who would have stuck around long term, people who enjoyed the mechanic’s people who would have purchased thier gold, embark made it clear that there priority was the kind of people who enjoy stealing fun, people who would drop the game like a rock as soon as something else got their attention.
Gradually they have put out content about “care bear” matchmaking (yes that’s definitely not an insulting phrase) but it’s too late, they had literal fire in bottle that could have lasted much longer than it will.
They made their bed and I’ll never buy an embark game again.
It is very simple.
MOST players have NO INTEREST in PvP. They want PvE ONLY – both SOLO and WITH FRIENDS (gasp) – without the constant risk of RATS, CHEATERS, and PvP players taking our hard-won loot at any time – especially when we are at extract, shooting ARC or have our head in a crate.
Until 3 weeks ago, Embark treated any player that shot another as “aggressive” – including THOSE WHO ONLY DEFENDED THEMSELVES.
It takes VERY FEW TIMES of this happening for players to ABANDON THE GAME – and most will NEVER give it another chance – and they are TELLING THEIR FRIENDS
That’s it and it’s very simple. The chart is a brutal downward slide, month after month.