Arc Raiders is off to a blistering start. Just days after its October 30, 2025 launch on Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, Embark Studios’ extraction shooter surged to 354,836 concurrent players on Steam by November 2. The sudden spike cemented it as one of the platform’s hottest new shooters—but it also pushed the game’s servers to their limits.
Players eager to scavenge and survive in the clanker-ridden streets of Speranza have run into long wait times and frustrating disconnects. Reports describe login queues averaging 5–10 minutes, with some outliers stuck for 30 minutes. Others say they’re being kicked mid-match or funneled into unwanted parties despite selecting solo extraction runs, compounding early growing pains.
Data underscores the turbulence. According to SteamDB, Arc Raiders peaked at 354,836 concurrent users on November 2 at 20:00 UTC before dropping to 133,384 by November 3 at 09:00 UTC amid ongoing server woes. Concurrency has since stabilized somewhat, hovering around 223,286 players—figures that don’t even include those on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
The popularity spike pushed Arc Raiders into the upper echelon of Steam’s most-played games, briefly trading places for the number three slot with Battlefield 6 and trailing only Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2. But the momentum has been bittersweet. Across the Arc Raiders subreddit, players have vented about “Infinite In-Queue” screens with no visible timers, while the official Discord saw a wave of memes dubbing it a “queue simulator.” Moderators even instituted a 15-minute cooldown to cool the chaos.
Embark Studios acknowledged the situation on Discord, citing server, voice chat, and party system issues. As a stopgap, the team has implemented a login queue to ease strain on party formation and voice channels—an approach that will make matchmaking longer than usual while broader fixes are rolled out “as soon as possible.”
Despite the bumpy launch weekend, the demand speaks volumes. Arc Raiders has struck a chord with extraction shooter fans, and with stabilization efforts underway, the core loop of looting, fighting, and extracting under pressure looks poised to keep player counts high. If you’re jumping in soon, expect longer queue times during peak hours and keep an eye on official channels for updates as the servers scale to match the game’s runaway success.
