“ARC Raiders” Player Count Plummets By 80%

Movies have box-office. TV has ratings. Games, on the other hand, are more like streaming – there are some third-party metrics in place, and occasional first-party figures touted, but consistent & publicly available sales numbers are lacking.

One of the few that is available, and used a lot by games journalists, is the Steam Chart, which tracks the concurrent player count of a game via that PC platform.

It doesn’t cover consoles, so it is blind to a big chunk of the market, and its focus on concurrent players means it heavily favours multiplayer titles over single-player ones.

The one thing it does fairly well is indicate which live service game titles are hot right now on PC and overall trends for said titles. On that front, last year’s much hyped “ARC Raiders” appears to be hitting a rough patch.

Forbes reports that the game has seen an incredibly fast drop in players since the turn of the year. The game launched at the end of October, growing to a peak of 481,966 in mid-November.

While the holidays saw a bit of a drop off, the audience grew again quickly and hit 466,732 on January 4th. The title proved remarkably stable in its first 2.5 months or so of release, leading to breathless suggestions this could be the next “Fortnite”.

Since then, however, it has been fairly consistently losing about 30% of its audience each month and has dropped to 90,138 by mid-April – a fall of 80% overall from its peak this year. While it’s still a number that’s solid for now, and live service titles generally do drop after launch as the casuals move on, the steepness of the drop is raising questions.

What’s confusing people is that there is no obvious single cause, but rather a number of factors. New content isn’t moving the needle, seasonal resets are causing player fatigue, and game streamers are moving on to other things, and arguably the biggest factor of all – significant issues involving cheating.

The news comes as the industry was shaken the other day by a survey revealing that almost half of game developers are thinking of changing professions.