Arc Raiders’ Big Update Has It Surging To Numbers It Hasn’t Seen In Months

When Embark said it would take several months to deliver the major Arc Raiders update it envisioned, days like today were probably the goal. The extraction shooter is once again high up in Steam's charts for both best-selling and most-played games. Among best sellers, Arc Raiders currently ranks fifth, behind this week's other big releases, Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Gears of War: E-Day, but those came out earlier this week, and it's still early, so we may see it leap over those before the week is through. Its new cosmetic DLC, the Frozen Trail Collector's Set, is also selling very well. It currently sits at #8 on the best-sellers list. As for concurrent players, Arc Raiders has eclipsed triple digits on Steam, something it hasn't done since May. It's sitting at 106,000--that's good for 12th on the list--and has actually gained 5,000 more players since I started writing this. Like its sales surge, it seems likely that it'll keep climbing throughout the day. Not coincidentally, May was when Embark announced it would be moving to a semi-annual cadence for major updates, with today's Frozen Trail being the first such update since that change. Embark felt it needed more time to deliver bigger updates for players while giving developers breathing room for a healthier work environment. I've been fascinated by that bold move because it's rarely seen in the world of extremely popular live-service games. Arc Raiders never really dropped off completely; it still averaged 40,000 concurrent Steam players in September, but it was close to averaging half a million last holiday season, so the fall was precipitous, even if those numbers were likely never to be sustained. The first day post-update can't tell the whole story on whether this revised roadmap pays off for Embark, but it's clearly off to a strong start. Arc Raiders will be free-to-play this weekend on all of its available platforms.

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