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ARC Raiders has shed nearly a third of its active player base on Steam just weeks before Bungie’s rival shooter Marathon is set to launch. While the game initially dominated the charts following its late 2025 release, numbers have dipped significantly from their January highs.
Embark Studios’ retro-futuristic extraction shooter exploded onto the scene last October, hitting a staggering all-time peak of 481,966 concurrent players on SteamDB. It was the sort of launch Bungie must have watched with clammy hands. However, the honeymoon phase appears to be waning. From a healthy 410,000 concurrents during the ‘Headwinds’ update in January, the count slumped to roughly 290,000 this past weekend, opening a precarious gap in the market just as competition heats up.
It is not quite a death knell—plenty of live-service titles would kill for six-figure concurrency—but the trend is undeniable. Recent data indicates daily active users have halved from a peak of 3.2 million to estimated figures closer to 1.6 million across all platforms.
Content creator Floopy_ argues this is natural attrition rather than a fatal flaw, noting in a video breakdown that “players that want to leave will leave,” leaving behind a dedicated core to sustain the ecosystem. Still, with Bungie’s Marathon Server Slam scheduled for February 26 and a full release on March 5, the timing of this exodus is conspicuous. Embark isn’t sitting idle, promising a “scrappy update” in March and a massive map update in April, but they are undoubtedly facing their first real retention test.
This presents a fascinating scenario for the extraction genre. The dip could simply be the “hype tourists” packing their bags, or it might signal fatigue with the high-stakes PvP loop before Marathon even lands. Bungie now has a distinct window to court these drifting players, provided they can shed their own baggage and prove the delay was worth the wait.
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