After months of decline, Arc Raiders has seen an enormous resurgence in players thanks to its new Frozen Trail update and recent free trial, but while things are suddenly looking a lot healthier for Embark's shooter, one dev knows it "won't last."
Although Arc Raiders was undoubtedly a massive hit when it launched last year and maintained an extremely strong player count on Steam for months, as with any live service game, things eventually began to dwindle. Until recently, the game hadn't seen a concurrent player count on PC above 100,000 since May, with numbers dropping as low as the low 30,000s in September.
Things changed since October 8 and the release of the big Frozen Trail update, though. That Steam concurrent number flew past 125,000 on the first day of the patch, and this past weekend, went even higher, reaching 185,443 yesterday according to SteamDB. That's still a ways off its all-time record of 481,966, but an enormous improvement on what we've been used to seeing these days. In fact, it's not seen numbers that high since March. But despite it all, even one dev knows this is fleeting, too.
Sharing a screenshot of Arc Raiders' concurrent player count on Steam when it hit 150,000 again, Embark full-stack engineer Leon San José Larsson writes on Twitter: "It won't last forever, of course, but it's great seeing so many people back again after almost a year." As one player suggests that perhaps the number could go higher when Embark implements PvE – it's testing a matchmaking toggle for this for a week starting tomorrow – the dev says: "One can always hope."
It won't last forever, of course, but it's great seeing so many people back again after almost a year https://t.co/2pPiRK5rcEOctober 10, 2026
It might sound a bit pessimistic, but truthfully, he's not wrong. It's only natural for the player count in live-service games to decline over time as people decide they've had their fill and move on to new things. Big updates like Frozen Trail, as well as things like free weekends, will cause a surge in interest but ultimately just restart the cycle; that doesn't mean a game is dead, either, however.
Palworld dev and Pocketpair Publishing boss John "Bucky" Buckley has been shrugging off the "dead game" comments aimed at the hit survival game for years, but as it continues to hold steady interest, it's clear he has a point.
Will PvE mode split Arc Raiders in two? "It's very possible," says executive producer.
