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ARC Raiders fell from 481,966 Steam players (Nov 2025) to a 39,900 monthly peak in September
ARC Raiders lost 92% of its Steam players between launch and September. Frozen Trail and a free weekend brought them back, and a week later they're still here at nearly four times pre-update levels. Can it hold on with six months to the next big update, MW4's DMZ and GTA 6 on the way?
ARC Raiders fell from 481,966 Steam players (Nov 2025) to a 39,900 monthly peak in September
Frozen Trail and a free weekend pushed it to 185,443 on 11 October, the highest since March
A week after the free weekend, daily peaks are holding at 150-160K, nearly 4x September
Critics like the Frigate raids, and players love the PvE test, but cheaters and the Solo vs Squads removal still annoy
The PvE test ends 20 October. The next big update is roughly six months away, with MW4 DMZ and GTA 6 coming first
Six months ago, ARC Raiders looked like it was bleeding out. From a launch high of nearly half a million Steam players, it had lost more than nine in ten of them by September. Then Embark dropped Frozen Trail, its first big update in about half a year, and the raiders came back in force.
Eleven days later, the big question is whether they’re staying. We dug through the Steam numbers, thousands of player reviews and everything Embark has said since 8 October. Here’s where ARC Raiders stands.
Here’s ARC Raiders’ monthly peak player count on Steam, per SteamDB:
That’s a 92% drop from peak to September. To be fair, every big launch falls off, and with 16.3 million copies sold by the end of June (according to publisher Nexon), ARC Raiders was never in danger of shutting down. But for a live game, the trend was ugly. Forbes reported back in April that it was “down 80% in 3.5 months”. Shrouded Sky barely moved the numbers, the endgame felt thin, cheaters were a constant complaint, and players who wanted a co-op game against the robots kept clashing with players who came to hunt other raiders. Then in May, Embark said big updates would only come twice a year, and the summer was very quiet.
Frozen Trail went live on 8 October with a free weekend attached, and it’s the biggest update since launch: the snowy Pendola Pass map, new ARC (the Bully, Skulker and Hydra), Frigate raid events, a grappling hook, the Outpost player base, a reworked skill tree, a 60-level Reward Pass and 22 new quests.
The effect was immediate. Daily peaks were sitting between 36,000 and 49,000 in the first week of October. Then, per SteamCharts:
That’s the important bit. Free weekends usually inflate the numbers and then crash. This one didn’t. A week after it finished, ARC Raiders is still peaking at around 150,000 to 160,000 a day, nearly four times its September numbers. When we checked at lunchtime on Monday NZT, a time when hardly anyone’s on, there were still 116,267 people playing on Steam. And that’s just PC. Neither Sony nor Microsoft publishes player counts, so the PS5 and Xbox players aren’t in these numbers.
It’s still only a third of the launch peak, and it’s roughly back to where it was in April. But it’s clearly recovered, and it’s no longer heading down.
The critics like it. PC Gamer reckons “Frozen Trail finally puts the ‘raid’ in Arc Raiders”, calling the Frigate events “exactly what the game needed” and “properly fun”. Its main complaint is getting jumped by other raiders at extraction after you’ve done all the hard PvE work. Digital Trends’ impressions piece is simply titled “I’m having a blast”. TheSixthAxis liked the new Skulker and Bully enemies. We haven’t seen a big outlet re-review it with a score yet.
Players mostly agree. Overall, ARC Raiders is “Very Positive” on Steam, with 82% of more than 427,000 reviews positive. Since the update it’s a bit lower: in a count of about 6,000 Steam reviews posted from 11 to 18 October, around 77% were positive, and the latest 100 when we checked on Monday were 85% positive. Here’s what keeps coming up:
Embark’s biggest experiment isn’t on the Frozen Trail feature list. From 13 October, it switched on a PvE toggle so you can run raids against just the ARC, with no other players. Embark says it’s for “a large and growing group of Raiders who come… for the co-op and the ARC”.
It’s split people. According to GamesRadar, some players say it’s “the game they always wanted”, while others call it bland. Creator Loochy says it “doesn’t have a strong enough endgame… It just feels hollow”, and one complaint is that without the threat of other raiders, the tension disappears.
The test ends at 11am CEST on 20 October (10pm Tuesday NZT), followed by a survey. Embark says player feedback and in-game data “will help us decide if the toggle becomes a permanent part of the game.” So far, its results aren’t public.
This is where it gets tricky. Embark’s plan is still “roughly one Frozen Trail-sized update every six months”, as executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told GamesRadar, adding: “We haven’t really set the dates for our next update yet.” Between now and then, there’s Trials Season 6 (which started 12 October), Twitch Drops until 4 November, and smaller patches.
And the next six weeks are packed. Modern Warfare 4’s DMZ extraction mode goes into early access on 20 October and launches for everyone on the 23rd. GTA 6 lands on 19 November. A free weekend and a shiny new map got people to come back. Keeping them around through November will be much harder.
The good news for Embark is how far ahead of other extraction shooters it is. Bungie’s Marathon was down to about 3,600 Steam players last week, per tracker Raijin, so ARC Raiders on a quiet Monday lunchtime has 30 times that.
So, has ARC Raiders recovered? Yes. Holding nearly four times its pre-update numbers a week after the free weekend is a proper result, and it shows people never stopped liking ARC Raiders. They just ran out of things to do. Frozen Trail gave them a reason to come back, and the Frigate raids and the PvE test are giving them a reason to stay.
But we said it when Embark announced the twice-a-year plan, and we’ll say it again: six months is too long to go quiet. ARC Raiders fell from 154,000 in April to 40,000 in September because there was nothing new. Frozen Trail fixes that for now, but if nothing meaningful lands before the next big update, the same thing happens again, this time with MW4 and GTA 6 pulling players away.
Two things would make the biggest difference. First, make the PvE toggle permanent. The reviews say a big chunk of the player base wants it. Give the PvP players something to hunt for too, but stop making co-op players get ganked at extraction. Second, add some smaller drops between the big updates, like new Frigate variants, ARC events or rotating modes. Anything to give lapsed raiders a reason to check back every few weeks instead of every six months. Oh, and the anti-cheat needs to actually catch cheaters.
Are you back on ARC Raiders since Frozen Trail, and are you keeping PvE on? Tell us in the comments, or come and find a squad in the GetRekt Discord.
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