Embark's extraction shooter was fading — down to 40,000 daily players after months of silence. Then Frozen Trail dropped, and the numbers exploded to 131,000.
The comeback numbers
ARC Raiders hit a 24-hour Steam peak of 131,388 concurrent players after the Frozen Trail update — the highest since the Riven Tides update in April 2026, and a massive jump from the 30,000–40,000 daily range it had been sitting in. The game is back in Steam's top charts for both best-sellers and most-played, and its new Frozen Trail Collector's Set cosmetic DLC is selling well too.
GameSpot notes it's sitting around 106,000+ and still climbing — with the weekend ahead, there's real potential to push past 200,000.
What Frozen Trail brings
The update is the game's largest yet: a massive new Pendola Pass map with unique conditions and extraction options, new guns, tools and gadgets, four new ARC enemies, a new quest line, a reworked skill tree, outposts — and the first tentative steps toward a dedicated PvE mode. Embark has also promised to get stricter on cheating: “no warnings, no second chances” for cheaters.
Free to play right now
The timing is no accident — ARC Raiders is free to play from October 8 to 12 across Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation, doubling as the game's first anniversary celebration. The Deluxe Edition is also 50% off at $29.99. It's a classic win-back play: lower the barrier, put the biggest update ever in front of lapsed players.
The context
This is a remarkable turnaround. ARC Raiders launched in late 2025 to an overwhelmingly positive reception, peaking at over 400,000 concurrent Steam players in January 2026. Then Embark went quiet for months — the team committed to a semi-annual major update cadence to give developers breathing room, and players drifted away. The cheating problem didn't help.
Frozen Trail is the first big test of that strategy. Day one says it's working.
KongMNG's take
Embark bet that bigger, less frequent updates would pay off over the live-service drip feed — and this launch vindicates that call. The open question is the anti-cheat: a free weekend is exactly when cheaters swarm, and Embark's “no second chances” promise gets its first real test right now. If the game survives the weekend clean, this could be a genuine second wind.