I am willing to say that in a year of great games and big stories, ARC Raiders is right up there in contention with one of the most significant uh, arcs. A week after launch, ARC Raiders has actually gained players since its initial spike, and what we’re seeing here indicates a rapid, viral spread of interest in the game, snowballing to what is now a 416,000 concurrent playercount peak on Steam.
To put that in context, the launch window peak for ARC Raiders was 354,000, a 17.5% increase in this second week (it’s also possible it goes higher by the end of Sunday here). There’s a reason most blockbuster movies peak in their opening weekend, and games are often no different. But what’s even more wild is that three weeks ago, the ARC Raiders open beta had a peak of 189,000 concurrent players. A free open beta, mind you, when the final game costs $40 or more for bundle packages. Now, ARC Raiders has more than doubled that.
These are not all-time Steam records or anything, but in the context of what’s happening here, a smaller studio like Embark releasing a game in a (relatively) niche genre using a brand new IP, this level of success is absolutely one of the biggest stories of the year. I am, in fact, reminded of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and the tiny team at Sandfall Games who somehow just made the best game of 2025 and by some accounts, one of the best of all time. And will you look at that, neither of them cost $70.
There is obviously going to be a drop-off as time goes on here, as that is true for loads of games. Live service multiplayer games want to retain more than most, but again, for a game like this, you could not have had a better start. Two years ago, Embark’s The Finals also had a strong launch with 242,000 concurrents. It didn’t light the world on fire, but it retains a satisfying population for the studio and is still trucking along in a multiplayer landscape full of corpses. ARC Raiders feels like it has the potential to be much more than that.
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We can only comment on what’s happening now, and that is that ARC Raiders is surpassing all predictions from both fans, industry analysts and even the devs themselves. Add onto that sky-high player scores and close to all-time great multiplayer-only critic scores, and we have one of the biggest stories of 2025. And nothing can take that away from it, even when it loses Game of the Year to Expedition 33.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
