ARC Raiders Devs Explain Player-Tracking Data Pipeline and System Costs
At the Nexon Developers Conference, Embark Studios talked through the player tracking setup behind ARC Raiders, including how the system shaped design changes and what it took to keep everything running when the game was at its busiest. For a stretch of time, ARC Raiders managed to stand out as one of the clearest extraction-shooter entry points—pulling in longtime hardcore players while also giving newcomers a reason to try the genre.
After launching on October 30, 2025, ARC Raiders quickly became a hit, offering a more approachable path into a style of gameplay that many felt was too harsh and too hard to break into mainstream audiences. Even if the road wasn’t perfectly smooth, Embark managed to hold onto that momentum for a while, helped by frequent updates and a monthly rhythm of new content. Under that cadence, a tracking system gave the team visibility into how people were interacting with the game—highlighting both positives and problems—so the studio could make adjustments based on real usage data.
With its latest update now out, Embark Studios also shared that it’s preparing to take tougher action against players who take advantage of certain glitches.
ARC Raiders Reveals New Player Tracking Details
To handle the scale of the player base, Embark built and relied on a large-scale analytics pipeline known as BigQuery. It enabled extremely detailed tracking across many kinds of gameplay and system activity. During the game’s high-water mark, Embark was processing roughly 30 terabytes of data each day, with that peak largely lining up with the period when monthly updates were rolling out from October 2025 through February 2026. The studio said developers were able to sift through more than 100 billion events while keeping latency under two seconds. As data engineer Mattias Andersson explained, the approach made it possible to run a query about two seconds after a player fired a shot—allowing the team to determine whether that bullet connected or missed.
Identify the cover art while scratching off as little material as possible.
The same system could support a range of tasks, from handling bigger concerns like cheating and monitoring bugs to digging into day-to-day player behavior. There has been plenty of discussion around how ARC Raiders matches players into rounds, and part of the reasoning behind those decisions came from what the team observed in the data. Embark could examine things like who fired first in a confrontation and who took damage, along with the steps between those moments—but the system couldn’t automatically infer player intent. To go further, Embark also created a custom round viewer that replays player actions and adds a heatmap showing where players move, where they die, and where fights happen most often. The studio says this information supports future tuning and changes as needed.
Even so, Embark isn’t expected to run at the same data volume today, since ARC Raiders doesn’t currently draw the same level of players as it did at its height. Still, the studio is looking ahead to 2026 and is aiming to bring players back once the next wave of updates lands. Embark has shifted away from a monthly schedule, opting instead for two major updates per year—each larger than anything it had previously added. In October, Embark plans to release the Frozen Trail update for ARC Raiders, teasing what it calls the biggest map the game has ever seen, along with new enemy types, additional loot, and other major improvements.
Find the odd one out before the countdown reaches zero.
Which option doesn’t belong?
Alongside the change in how often content arrives, Embark continues working to strengthen its anti-cheat approach. Earlier, the studio confirmed an update to ARC Raiders’ anti-cheat measures, and in the June 30 update it said the integration work for Denuvo into the game is finished. Denuvo Anti-Cheat is already used in Embark’s other title, The Finals, and the studio says it will keep monitoring the transition to make sure everything stays stable.
