ARC Raiders Player Count is Down Over 80% from Its Peak

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The player base for ARC Raiders has dropped significantly on Steam, losing about 80% of its players in recent months. The game, developed by Embark Studios, now typically has over 90,000 players active on the platform at any given time. Although these numbers don’t include players on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, the decline is concerning, especially since ARC Raiders was a popular release in 2025 and has only been out for six months.

Embark Studios had a promising start with their debut game, The Finals, in 2023, quickly gaining over 10 million players. However, its performance slowed down in early 2024, according to its parent company, Nexon. Their second game, ARC Raiders, proved to be a major success. Winning the award for Best Multiplayer at The Game Awards in December sparked strong sales, reaching over 2 million copies in the first few weeks of 2026 and bringing the total sales across all platforms to over 12 million.

ARC Raiders Has Lost 80% of Players on Steam

Before it was even fully launched, the game ARC Raiders became incredibly popular on Steam. In November, it reached a peak of almost 482,000 players at the same time, and it’s continued to have a strong player base since then. While peak hours still saw around 250,000 players in February, that number has been slowly decreasing. Recently, the 24-hour peak was only 90,000 players. Although that’s still a very high number for a game like this, it’s over an 80% decrease from the beginning of 2026.

While official player numbers for ARC Raiders on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S aren’t available, the game’s performance on consoles offers some clues about its overall success. Recent data showed that Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was significantly more popular than Battlefield 6 on consoles, trailing only Fortnite. Interestingly, ARC Raiders, despite being the most-played game on Steam at the time, ranked seventh on Xbox and ninth on PlayStation. Games like Minecraft, Roblox, and even the older Grand Theft Auto 5 were more popular on consoles, suggesting that PC is currently the most popular platform for Embark’s shooter.

The number of players actively playing ARC Raiders on Steam has dropped for several reasons. While the developers at Embark have tried to fix things, many players are frustrated with cheaters. Even popular streamer Ninja recently stopped playing and streaming the game because of them. There’s also a disagreement between players who enjoy player-versus-player (PvP) combat and those who prefer player-versus-environment (PvE) challenges. PvP players feel Embark is focusing too much on cooperative PvE content, like the recent Shared Watch event. These players believe their preferred playstyle is being ignored, while a large portion of the community still enjoys the PvP aspects of ARC Raiders.

Look, as a player, I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion about the recent updates. The Flashpoint update in March was pretty well-received, but a big complaint is that the new ARC enemies feel a little… recycled. A lot of us are also really hoping for more stuff to do after you’ve finished the main game. Even the developers have said there isn’t a ton of endgame content right now. Once you’ve done everything, you’re mostly just grinding Expeditions, which are basically a fresh start every season – it’s cool, but we’re craving something more permanent to work towards.

A major update, called Riven Tides, is coming to the game within the next few weeks, planned for release by the end of April. This update includes a brand new map, a powerful new enemy, and other exciting additions. It’s still unclear if this will be enough to attract back the many players who have stopped playing on Steam.

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2026-04-17 01:34