ARC Raiders was one of 2025's biggest games, with 16 million copies sold across all platforms and, for a time, hundreds of thousands of players diving into the Rust Belt every day on Steam alone. While some of its momentum has waned, developer Embark Studios is looking to address the problems the community has recently had with the game, and has announced a new strategy for how ARC Raiders will evolve going forward.
The long and short of it is that Embark is moving away from its previous cadence of updates for ARC Raiders, and that the third-person extraction shooter will now be updated two times a year, so Embark can deliver significant changes and evolutions to the game with each update.
"When ARC Raiders launched, we planned to offer monthly updates," the studio began in its statement on the game's website. "The intention was to keep you all engaged, to ensure the game always felt fresh, and to give you reasons to keep braving topside. But once the game was in players' hands, we saw that the kind of long-term experience we want to create for ARC Raiders requires more transformative updates."
"Over time, we've found that the pressure of a monthly cycle limits how impactful these updates can be. You feel it, and we feel it too. Running at that pace isn't sustainable, or compatible with the bigger ambitions we have for this game. Going forward, we've made the decision to release major updates twice a year - larger in scale, more impactful, with the goal to genuinely change how you play the game."
This change doesn't mean players will stop seeing new events or updates to the store. Those smaller updates, along with a regular cadence of bug-fixing updates, will still happen more often than twice a year. But new content like new maps, weapons, ARCs, and more will be reserved for those major, twice a year updates.
"This additional development space also allows us to invest more deeply in the health of ARC Raiders, from progression and economy balancing to fair play and anti-cheat efforts. We know these are foundational to the experience, especially in a game where every encounter and extraction matters," Embark continues.
Embark also talked about how it is looking to make changes that are geared towards ensuring the long-term health of the game, namely around how it can improve the game's progression systems. Having more time between major updates will help facilitate those changes.
"Some of the progression improvements we want to implement simply need more development time that we haven't been able to address properly while running on a monthly cycle. Moving to larger updates allows us to spend more time refining the systems players engage with the most."
As for when we can start seeing some big changes to the game, beginning next week ARC Raiders will get its first new Trader, who will offer things like extra stash space, and introduce an Expedition Vault. Beyond that though, the next major update won't arrive until October 2026 at this point. But at least it is looking like it'll be a huge update with the game's largest map, a new ARC operation, and a whole new progression system set to be implemented, with an improved skill tree to boot.
ARC Raiders is still an excellent game despite the community's issues with it, and these changes indicate there's an even brighter future ahead for it.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
