Arc Raiders has faded away while I wasn't looking

Jamie Hore: Are We Really Witnessing the "Downfall" of Arc Raiders?

That’s according to a 9 August 2026 Twitter post from content creator ‘Adio’. The post was reacting to the hit extraction shooter’s decline in player count on Steam in recent months, and several more similar posts from notable social media accounts followed in the subsequent days.

I gave ARC Raiders a try when it came out and bounced off it pretty quick. The game seemed very well made, it just wasn't a genre that I have any interest in personally. The one thing I did know was that it was a huge success and people really loved it. It seemed like it was going to be the next big live service game.

Now look, I know a lot of people seem to spend most of their time online tracking things that they don't like so they can complain about them, but I simply stopped paying attention to this game once I stopped playing it myself. It wasn't until today when I saw this news story that I checked in, and wow, the drop-off is pretty severe. The notable thing for me compared to other live service games is that the two notable updates in February and April seem to have done nothing to cause a spike in users.

Sometimes people will post these Steam charts for single-player games, and I just think it's so stupid. Of course, there's a spike when the game comes out, and then fewer people play it after that. It's a single-player game. You're not going to play it forever. However, live service games rely fundamentally on people playing them for as long as possible.

I bring this up not to dunk on Arc Raiders. Like I said, it seems like a really good game that a lot of people loved, especially when it was new. I am going to take this as an opportunity to dunk on Sony for going all in on a live service strategy several years ago that I think has been monumentally unsuccessful. They've had their best studios waste years of development time on projects that either get canceled or release to absolutely zero interest. They've shut down studios that were really good at making certain types of game and then were made to work on some live service God of War bullshit that was never going to work, and now the studios are gone.

Frankly, I think this massive chase for the next big live service game is a fool's errand. I just feel like a few games figured this out a long time ago, and we really don't get hits like this anymore. When I look at the most played games on Steam, a lot of them are live services, but the top game is Counter-Strike 2, which released in 2012. Then there's Dota 2, which released in 2011. There's PUBG, which released in 2017. There's Apex Legends, which released in 2020. And while it's not on this list since it's not on Steam, Fortnite is a big success everyone's chasing as well, and it was also released in 2017. I'm not saying there haven't been smaller success stories over the years, but I do think it's notable that the games listed above are the ones that companies like Sony want to have, and only 1 of them is from the past 9 years. I think it's fine for these games to keep being made, and even if they're smaller successes, those can be big wins for the companies who make them. But I find the obsession with creating the next game like this foolish. The odds of achieving something like this are so low, and betting the company on it is not a risk I think worth taking.