Arc Raiders has had a tumultuous start to 2026. According to SteamDB, the first week of January saw it nearly beat its peak concurrent player count, topping out at 466,372. Since then, it’s been a steady and somewhat alarming decline: prior to April’s Riven Tides update, its peak player count each day had dipped below 100,000.
There are a few important factors to consider. Firstly, player count isn’t everything, and averaging just shy of one hundred thousand concurrent players each day is something most studios can only dream of, which is to say Arc Raiders is still massively successful. These are also the stats from Steam players only, and given the game is also on PS5 and Xbox Series X, the real number is likely considerably higher.
However, it does indicate a concerning trend. A 350,000-player drop after a very stable first three months is huge. The Riven Tides update, the game’s biggest yet, brought a new map and a new large Arc enemy in the form of the Turbine. Alongside those, there’s a new event and project to complete, numerous new quests, and as always, a balance patch.
Unfortunately, most of the update is underwhelming. The Turbine is undoubtedly the highlight: it looks freaking awesome as it plummets towards the Earth like a meteor, before hovering above the ground, almost like a Cromulon from that iconic Rick & Morty episode. Rather than belting out “Show me what you got!”, Turbines unleash a flurry of projectiles at anyone who strays near.
Despite its badass appearance and attack pattern, the Turbine fight doesn’t require much innovation from players. If you can get on top of one, likely by using a Snap Hook, it can be taken down in the same manner as most big enemies in Arc Raiders: a swift Deadline mine or two will do the job. It’s disappointing for players who were hoping for an enemy at the same scale as the Queen or Matriarch, something that requires teamplay and coordination.
The new Riven Tides map is the smallest yet, with just two extraction points and three raider hatches, and it doesn’t offer much that you can’t get from the other maps in the game. It feels like a mix of Buried City, with its sandy paths and a similar environment (you can even see Buried City in the distance if you look south), and Spaceport, with its colossal industrial-style points of interest. The new map-based mechanic, Beachcombing, where you take a metal detector to the sands in the hopes of finding semi-decent loot, is also incredibly slow and feels antithetical to Arc Raiders‘ typically fast-paced nature.
The new quests are more of the same. There’s a fairly straightforward narrative through each of them, and they all connect in terms of the game’s lore back down in Speranza. But for the player, they’re little more than fetch quests. It isn’t engaging gameplay, and while some of the rewards you can get are neat, quests still don’t grant XP, which makes them even more of a slog to get through if you embark on an expedition and reset all of your progress.
Across the entire Arc Raiders community, though, the biggest complaints following this update center on the balance patch. Weapon durability has been adjusted, meaning common, uncommon, and rare weapons all lose significantly more durability per shot. On paper, this makes epic and legendary weapons more valuable, which they should be. But in practice, it means more casual players have less incentive to stick with the game.
Repairing weapons consumes a lot of materials, which casual players probably don’t have. When their favorite weapons are breaking after only a couple of rounds and they’re forced to use free loadouts more often, it’s hard to see that declining player count turning around. There’s even a Reddit petition to revert the changes.
“When are the devs going to understand that making the game tedious does not equal more fun or engagement,” commented Reddit user FoxInTheClouds. That was a reply to a post from user AmericanBAMBAM, who posted a quote parodying Embark Studios: “We noticed an issue where players were enjoying the game. We fixed that.”
The changes to the Photoelectric Cloak, an item that was a useful tool for players to hide from Arc enemies, have also proven to be unpopular. In the patch notes, the dev notes describe the item as “quite aggressively over-performing,” but rather than a reasonable adjustment, the power consumption has been quadrupled from 2.5/s to 10/s. It’s now almost entirely useless. It also follows an ongoing trend of Embark nerfing the Hullcracker, Trailblazer, and Wolfpack grenades, all of which were strong in PvE gameplay, but not PvP. So it isn’t like other players were complaining about dying at the hands of something too strong.
Even the new items introduced with Riven Tides miss the mark. The Powered Descender is a device that, according to the description, “reduces fall speed when used in the air,” but all it does is help you maintain the speed you were falling at when you enabled it. This means that it can’t be used to jump off any ledges that are too high, because it’ll either run out of power before you reach the bottom, or it won’t slow you down enough to prevent damage.
Arc Raiders isn’t meant to be a hardcore extraction shooter like some of its genre competitors, such as Marathon and Escape From Tarkov. Let us have fun with the tools at our disposal. Imagine the clutch plays that could come out of someone jumping off the top of the Launch Towers on Spaceport with a Powered Descender, or even better, someone using it to escape a Turbine.
Reddit user slayermario posted an interesting quote, allegedly from a Blizzard developer: “I remember watching a video where a Blizzard developer said something along the lines of: ‘You can’t keep taking things away or nerfing them indefinitely, because eventually players get frustrated and move on. If you’re going to nerf or remove something, you need to balance it by adding or improving something else.'” Whether attributed accurately or not, it’s a fair point.
I love Arc Raiders. From launch until the new year, I played practically every day. Despite my anticipation for each update in the early 2026 roadmap, nothing has rejuvenated that early enjoyment, and it’s evident from the declining player count that many players feel the same. I’m still going to dip in and out because it’s one of the best multiplayer shooters in recent memory, but the game is in serious need of some innovation — something that will really impress.
What does that look like? Maybe it’s a PvE-exclusive mode. Maybe it’s a PvP-focused mode that doesn’t impact the aggression-based matchmaking system they use. Maybe it’s a mode without any Arc enemies whatsoever, but considerably more raiders. Outside of new content, tweaks to the formula feel like the best bet.
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