ARC Raiders Smashes Its Own Record, Surging Past Helldivers 2 on Steam

ARC Raiders, the extraction shooter from Embark Studios, is still on a rocket trajectory: the game has broken its own Steam record yet again, peaking over the weekend at 462,488 concurrent players. That doesn’t just leave its earlier 300k-range peak in the dust – it also means ARC Raiders has now surpassed Helldivers 2’s all-time concurrent player record on Steam, firmly cementing itself as one of the hottest multiplayer titles of the year.

ARC Raiders launched on October 30 and came out swinging: it quickly hit around 250–260k concurrent players on Steam, then climbed into the 330–350k range in the following days. From there, it pushed into a new tier: first breaking past 400k, then peaking at 416k, and finally hitting 462,488 concurrent players, essentially flirting with the half-million mark. According to SteamDB, this doesn’t just set a new personal best – it also edges past Helldivers 2’s 458,709 peak and pushes ARC Raiders higher up the all-time Steam charts.

Those numbers sit on top of a serious commercial performance. Estimates suggest ARC Raiders has already sold over 2.5 million copies across PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC combined, translating to roughly $100 million in gross revenue for a $40 premium title. All this without a free-to-play model, built instead on a straightforward one-time purchase. On Steam, user reviews sit at a solid “Very Positive”, with close to 90% recommendation from tens of thousands of reviews – an impressive signal for a newly launched, online-only game.

The game itself is a third-person PvPvE extraction shooter that drops players onto a retro sci-fi version of Earth overrun by a mechanised force known as the ARC. Three-player squads (or solo “raiders”) head topside to scavenge while both ARC enemies and other players hunt them down. You loot, survive and exfil; fail the run, and your hard-earned gear can vanish with it. One of the title’s big talking points is the team behind it: many developers previously worked on Battlefield and Battlefront, and the game runs on Unreal Engine 5, making it an early technical showcase for what the engine can do in a demanding multiplayer setting.

The massive influx of players did, unsurprisingly, have a downside. In the days after launch, servers visibly buckled: login queues, long matchmaking times, random disconnects and “queue simulator” memes became a familiar sight in the community. Embark reacted relatively quickly, implementing separate login queues and compensating players with 500 Raider Tokens – essentially the value of a small microtransaction bundle in in-game currency. Subsequent patches have gradually stabilised the situation, and instead of shrinking, the concurrent player numbers have continued to climb to new highs.

This latest record is especially notable given the competition. ARC Raiders is fighting for attention in a crowded space: Battlefield 6 REDSEC, the still-popular Helldivers 2, and a host of other live-service shooters are all in the mix. Despite that, the new extraction shooter has at times overtaken Battlefield 6’s concurrent player count on Steam, and is being listed alongside some of the platform’s biggest co-op FPS hits on various charts. Not bad for a genre that, just a few years ago, many dismissed as a niche for hardcore Tarkov fans.

The developers have already stated they’re thinking in at least a ten-year horizon for ARC Raiders, even if they’re avoiding a rigid, overly detailed public roadmap. New maps, fresh ARC enemy types, mission variants and different event formats are all on the table, while the community has already started calling the game a GOTY contender and a “multiplayer benchmark.” If Embark can actually deliver on that long-term vision and keep the content flowing, this newly set player record may end up being just one of many milestones along a very long road.

Sources:
– PC Guru – ARC Raiders breaks its own record
– SteamDB – ARC Raiders player count stats
– GamesRadar – Arc Raiders climbs to a new Steam peak over 460,000 concurrent players
– Twisted Voxel – ARC Raiders surpasses Helldivers 2’s all-time Steam peak
– Notebookcheck – Arc Raiders sells 2.5 million copies, grosses over $100 million
– TechRadar – Arc Raiders players receive free in-game currency after server issues