New cold standard.
Arc Raiders has clearly managed to entice back lapsed players with its latest update, Frozen Trail, which upgrades the game to version 2.0. Many players see it as a re-launch of the popular extraction shooter, and the numbers back that up.
On Steam, Arc Raiders' concurrent player counts rose sharply following the update's release, shooting up to a 185,443 peak (via SteamDB). This is the highest concurrent player count Arc Raiders has seen since March, and it's notably higher than the game's usual sub-40,000 daily peaks.
Indeed, looking more closely at player numbers you can see that daily concurrents have been on a near constant decline in recent months, only bouncing briefly back up following the release of other major updates.
There is, however, a bit of caveat to these numbers: Arc Raiders launched a free trial right alongside Frozen Trail, meaning some of those players are new and may never buy a copy of the game.
Frozen Trail is a massive update, touching almost every element of Arc Raiders. It primarily adds the game's largest new map, Pendola Pass, and introduces a number of new Arc enemy units. Some other exciting additions include new weapons, a player home called The Outpost and a complete revamp of the skill tree.
The update notably also creates a new weapon meta that's intended to cater to PvE and PvP players separately, breathing life into many underused weapons and tools.
That focus on serving both of the game's audiences is perhaps why studio Embark saw fit to - finally - officially test a dedicated PvE mode. The test runs from 13th to 20th October, but there's no telling whether that's going to result in the permanent addition of a PvE-only mode.
The free trial ends today, so it'll be interesting to see whether the PvE test is enough to bring players back and keep the numbers high. A dedicated PvE mode has been one of Arc Raiders' most requested features, though, so we could see another surge.
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