ARC Raiders Hits 166,670 Steam Players After Frozen Trail, but New Reviews Dip to 63%

ARC Raiders has its biggest Steam crowd in six months. Embark Studios' extraction shooter peaked at 166,670 concurrent players on 10 October, according to Steam's most-played chart, two days after the Frozen Trail 2.0 update went live alongside a free weekend. The newest players are harder to please, though: the latest Steam reviews are far less positive than the game's lifetime score.

This story is built on Steam's public player and review data, read on 11 October 2026 at 06:40 UTC, Embark's own announcements, and reporting from IGN and Eurogamer. We have not played the update; the review analysis below is a count of what players wrote, not our verdict.

How big is the ARC Raiders comeback?

Big, by recent standards. IGN, citing SteamDB, reports that the game reached an all-time peak of nearly 500,000 players on Steam, then struggled to pass 35,000 on PC from July, with a low of around 10,000 in September. According to IGN, 166,670 is a level the game had not reached since early April.

Steam's daily chart shows the jump from the other side: on 10 October ARC Raiders was the ninth most-played game on the store, up from 57th a week earlier. At 06:37 UTC on Sunday 11 October — a quiet hour for both European and American players — 84,924 people were in game. Console player counts are not public.

What did Frozen Trail add?

Embark calls Frozen Trail its biggest update since launch, and IGN notes it is the first substantial content drop since Riven Tides in April. The headline additions, from the official patch notes:

• Pendola Pass, an icy mountain village that Embark describes as its most complex map to date, with a new Flash Freeze weather condition.
• The Frigate, a huge airborne ARC carrier pitched as a very high-risk, high-reward encounter.
• Three new enemies (Bully, Skulker and Hydra), two new weapons (Bantam and Stiletto) and Amplified Weapons.
• New gear, including the Grappling Hook, Tether Launcher, Yank Grenade and two cameras.
• A revamped skill tree, the Outpost base with a Research Bench, 22 new quests and a new Reward Pass.

It has not been a clean launch. Hotfix 2.0.2 on 9 October fixed several server crashes and weapons turning partly invisible, and Embark said it was still working on the Reward Pass not progressing for some players.

Why are the newest Steam reviews so much lower?

We pulled the 1,000 most recent Steam reviews in all languages on 11 October: 627 were positive, or 62.7%, against 81.6% for all 421,534 reviews. Every one of the 1,000 was posted during the free weekend, after 10:24 UTC on 10 October.

The drop comes mostly from newcomers. In a second sample of the 600 newest English-language reviews (59.7% positive), 179 were written by players with under five hours in the game, and 104 of those were negative. Among players with more time logged, only about a third were negative. We also counted themes in the 242 negative English reviews: player-versus-player complaints (being killed on sight, camping, "ratting") came up in 45, PvE in 38, servers, crashes or lag in 22 and cheating in 20. This is a keyword count, not a survey, and Steam's headline rating still reads Very Positive.

Is Embark doing anything about PvP and cheating?

The PvP complaints line up with Embark's own data. In a 24 September blog post, the studio said 37% of players are friendly co-op players, 34% pure PvP and 27% mixed, and that 51% of surveyed players want a dedicated PvE option. A PvE matchmaking toggle test runs from 13 to 20 October, though Embark says it is not a promise of a permanent mode. Executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told GamesRadar+, as reported by Eurogamer, that "the community is already split along those lines" and that a PvE/PvP split is possible.

On cheating, Embark said in an anti-cheat update on 30 September that any account caught using cheats is now permanently banned, with no warnings, and that it has widened licence restrictions so a banned copy of the game cannot simply move to a new account.

What should you do now?

• The free weekend ends on 12 October at 10:00 CEST (09:00 BST, 04:00 EDT). It covers the full game, Frozen Trail included.
• If you want to keep playing, ARC Raiders is 50% off on Steam ($19.99 instead of $39.99) until 15 October; IGN reports the discount applies on all platforms.
• If PvP is the deal-breaker, the PvE toggle test from 13 to 20 October is the cheapest way to find out whether co-op-only matchmaking suits you. Eurogamer notes that Night Raids and the Frigate are not part of the test.

ARC Raiders is the latest in a run of Steam comebacks this autumn; we tracked the others in our feature on Steam's biggest risers. We will update this story when the PvE test ends on 20 October.