Criticisms about the usage of AI voices and balance changes notwithstanding, Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders continues to rise in popularity. Last Thursday saw the launch of the North Line Update, with the first Community Event inviting players to commit resources and unlock the new map, Stella Montis. Lo and behold, this happened before the weekend, and the latter became available for all.
Thus, the Raiders plundered the new map in search of new resources and weapons while coming face to face with new ARC enemies (including the towering Matriarch). Yesterday, November 16th, it peaked at 481,966 concurrent Steam players – a new record. Battlefield 6, its closest competitor, reached 299,135 concurrent players (and that’s with its free battle royale mode included).
Meanwhile, another extraction shooter, Escape from Tarkov, peaked at nearly 48,000 players yesterday. Login issues were the main culprit, but tying a third-party launcher to the Steam version, which counts towards one’s playtime even if they’re not in-game, didn’t go down well either. As a result, it has a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam with only 31 percent of the currently 17,907 user reviews voicing their approval.
