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

ARC Raiders has lost a whopping 80% of its player base on Steam over the last few months, as the hit extraction shooter from Embark Studios is now struggling to peak at more than 90,000 active players on the platform. While these figures don’t take into account how well ARC Raiders is doing on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, it is a worrying indication that the breakout hit of 2025 is already losing the attention of players just six months after its release.

Embark Studios found relative success with its very first title, The Finals, in 2023. While the shooter managed to attract more than 10 million unique players in its first two weeks, Embark’s parent company, Nexon, later said that it underperformed in early 2024. The studio’s second title, however, has been much more successful. After winning Best Multiplayer at the Game Awards in December, that momentum continued into the new year, with ARC Raiders selling over 2 million copies in the first few weeks of 2026, taking the total to over 12 million copies sold across all platforms.

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ARC Raiders Has Lost 80% of Players on Steam

Even before its full release, ARC Raiders was blowing up on Steam. The shooter peaked at nearly 482,000 concurrent players on the platform in November and has managed to maintain an impressive player base on the platform ever since. Even in February, peak hours still saw around 250,000 concurrent players, but that figure has been steadily declining. The most recent 24-hour peak was just 90,000 players, and while that’s still massively impressive compared to other similar titles, it’s more than an 80% drop when compared to the beginning of 2026.

Again, it should be noted that there are no official player count figures for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of ARC Raiders, but it could be an indication of how the game is performing as a whole. Earlier this year, data from Circana revealed that Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was thrashing Battlefield 6 on consoles, with the shooter only being beaten out by Fortnite on PlayStation and Xbox. The data also revealed that ARC Raiders, which was the most-played game on Steam at the time, was in seventh position for Xbox and ninth position for PlayStation. Titles such as Minecraft, Roblox, and even the 13-year-old Grand Theft Auto 5 ranked higher than ARC Raiders on consoles, which suggests the most popular platform for Embark’s shooter is, in fact, PC.

Why ARC Raiders has had such a decline in active Steam players comes down to a multitude of reasons. Despite Embark’s best efforts, many are growing tired of the cheaters infesting the game. Popular streamer and content creator Ninja even recently said he was taking a break from streaming after losing his desire to play ARC Raiders due to the constant cheaters. Then there’s the divide between PvP and PvE players, as the former believe Embark is catering too much to PvE, with the likes of the recent Shared Watch event, which actively encouraged players to work together to take down the ARC. However, there is a large portion of players who love the PvP aspects of ARC Raiders and feel as though they are being left out.

Recent content updates have also been criticized by fans. While March’s Flashpoint update was praised by much of the community, a common critique has been that Embark is recycling designs for its new ARC enemies, while others have called for more endgame content. Embark has even admitted that there is a lack of endgame content in ARC Raiders right now, as many die-hard players no longer have anything to work towards outside of the optional Expeditions, which are essentially ARC‘s take on seasonal progression wipes.

Fans can expect the game’s biggest update to date in just a couple of weeks, however, as the studio is gearing up to launch Riven Tides by the end of April. The massive patch will see the addition of a new map, a new large ARC enemy, and much more. Whether or not it will be enough to bring back the hundreds of thousands of players that have ditched the game on Steam remains unknown.