Arc Raiders has lost around 80% of its player count on Steam since launch. That’s a fact. And, for some people, a specific section of Steam Charts-gawping gamers are using this as a sign that Embark Studios’ extractions shooter is dying. Is Arc Raiders dying? No. Should you worry? Also, no.
Modern gaming is a weird beast as some games have hundreds of thousands of concurrent players at all times. Valve’s Counter-Strike 2, for example, always has hundreds of thousands of people playing the game, but that’s not the norm for most games, not even wildly successful titles.
Since release, Arc Raiders has sold over 14 million copies, a huge number for a game that was originally envisioned as a free-to-play release. By February, Embark Studios made over six times the game’s budget just from sales, with an unknown additional account from microtransaction revenue.
Nevertheless, the reality is that Arc Raiders has dropped from an all-time peak on Steam of 481,966 to a 24-hour peak of 92,384 at the time of writing. Yes, that’s an 80% drop in players, but there’s three aspects to look at: 1) That’s still a lot of concurrent players. 2) That’s just a single platform. 3) Many games continue to thrive with far less.
Let’s take Embark Studios’ own library for comparison first. The Finals, a free-to-play game dependant on players buying microtransactions, hit a much higher ll-time peak of 242,619 players on Steam around 2.3 years ago. From it’s launch in December 2023, The Finals lost 79% of players on Steam three months later in February with a 24-hour peak of 49,394. By the release of Season 5 in December 2025, the game had lost 90% of players. Last month, the game’s Season 10 update released.
Outside of Embark’s library, many live-service games follow the same trend while others manage to hit massive spikes in player counts upon major updates. Helldivers 2, a game that has an all-time peak of 458,208 players frequently sees lows of just 17,000 players—that’s a 96% drop. On the other hand, the game is able to see massive spikes back up to 200,000 players during major story beats.
The reality is that concurrent player counts don’t tell the whole story. Yes, they can spell doom for games like Highguard, although that game’s quick closure is more to do with rapidly pulled funding than quickly spiralling player counts. Player counts with huge trending games start high, but they also fall, and then stabalise.
While Arc Raiders is currently sitting at around 80% less players than its peak, that remaining 20% of players is the game’s core playerbase. Within that core will be the whales—the big spenders on microtransactions—and the fans that will play the game multiple days a week. That’s the lifecycle of a game, and games can last for years with tens of thousands of concurrent players—that’s a good number of players!
If pure maths can’t do it for you, Embark has already committed to years of additional updates for Arc Raiders as the team has already earned more money than they expected from the extraction shooter’s gargantuan launch.
“We can live for a long time on the money that Arc Raiders has been generating, and that does give financial security and employment stability for the people that work there,” Embark Studios CEO Patrick Söderlund said earlier this year. “We’re growing our studio, we’re hiring people, we want to build more of Arc Raiders, we want to build more of The Finals.”
The constant monitoring of concurrent player counts on Steam does not give the whole picture of what a game’s life actually is. There are tonnes of hidden figures—such as playtime, monetisation, and more—that we don’t see outside of Steam’s numbers, and that’s not even accounting for the players on other platforms. You only see the number of players, you don’t see how many of those players have just bought a copy, you don’t see how many of those players are lifers with hundreds of hours.
For now, and likely for years into the future, Arc Raiders is doing well, not even just okay, and with major updates on the way, the game could even see Helldivers 2-like spikes. If hundreds of games can survive with significantly lower player counts, the extraction shooter certainly isn’t dying. In fact, it’s just getting started.
