ARC Raiders Player Count Has Been Bleeding For Five Months and Isn’t Slowing

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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