ARC Raiders players have been departing in large numbers over the past year, ever since the game arrived on the scene as a surprise blockbuster release. Now, Embark is pulling the handbrake and has announced a change that will slow things down in order to try and improve the game at a more baseline level.
The 5th expedition window for ARC Raiders opens on September 8, 2026, and closes on September 29, 2026. That’s a week-long increase over past expeditions from two to three weeks. After that? A pause. There will be no more expeditions until “early 2027.” For reference, the previous expedition dates are:
- Expedition 1 – October 2025
- Expedition 2 – December 2025
- Expedition 3 – March 2026
- Expedition 4 – May 2026
- Expedition 5 – September 2026
These used to be much tighter periods of time, 2-3 months or so, but the slowdown began in the current gap between 4 and 5 with what will be a 5-month gap. Now, “early 2027” here is probably somewhere between 4-6 months, depending. Why is this happening? Embark explains in a blog post:
“We have been carefully reviewing your feedback on Expeditions, and while we’ve made ongoing improvements along the way, we’ve come to realize that some of the issues you’ve raised, like the tight departure windows, the reward structure, and accessibility for new players, need more than incremental fixes. They call for bigger changes.”
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This is all outside the release of the next actual major content update for ARC Raiders, Frozen Trail on October 8, but a worrying trend for these releases is that they have done little to reverse declines since launch, with spikes lasting about a week before the drops continue. That was the case with both Shrouded Sky and Riven Tides.
ARC Raiders’ falloff is notable, given how viral it went at launch and how drastically it has declined in the latter half of the last year. It went from a high of 481,000 concurrents on Steam, maintaining very high numbers for several months, to a steady decline that has it now at 30-35,000 a night. It’s just not ideal for what was very recently a huge live-service success story in an industry where those were rare, only to see that collapse rather sharply. The good news, however, is that ARC was such an unexpected hit for Embark in the first place that even reduced numbers may end up being just fine for the scope of the studio and its own goals, and I imagine ARC will retain support for a long while to come. Digging into things to help strengthen the foundations of elements like expeditions is probably a good move.
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