ARC Raiders moves to slower larger updates as it crosses over 16 million sales

Embark Studios / Nexon are slowing down on updates to ARC Raiders to address concerns from players, and make bigger updates - as it crossed a massive milestone.

In an official development update Embark Studios noted how it grew beyond anything they imagined, and their original plan was to provide monthly updates but they've now seen "that the kind of long-term experience we want to create for ARC Raiders requires more transformative updates" and the monthly pressure was limiting what they could do. Which seems fair enough.

Now, instead, major updates to the game will be twice a year to ensure they're larger in scale while also still providing smaller "regular live updates, plus balance fixes, bug fixes, store updates, and player events" to keep things ticking over between each major release.

The next one they've announced is for October, named Frozen Trailer which will be the biggest update to the game so far with plans to include:

• A Sprawling New Frontier - Explore a new landscape in the Rust Belt with layered design and new mysteries to uncover in the largest map in the game.
• Our Most Ambitious ARC Operation So Far - including new ARC enemies with fresh designs, and unique behaviors that will challenge Raiders in new ways.
• New Systems of Progression - Many players have maxed out their Raider Den and hit the Skill Point ceiling. Frozen Trail will introduce new goals and more ways to shape your Raider’s progression.
• Exploring the origin of ARC - What are ARC and where do they come from? Frozen Trail gives Raiders the opportunity to begin uncovering that mystery.
• Improved Skill Tree
• Alongside new weapons, items, instruments, cosmetics and more

All sounds pretty good, now they've got a longer-term plan to keep players invested in it. Hopefully sorting out the end-game properly because it just falls flat once you've done everything.

Plus going by Nexon's recent investor presentation, ARC Raiders has truly been one of the biggest hits around across all platforms as it managed to cross over 16 million sales. They said that "More than half of the active players spent 100+ hours in the game, totaling 1.5 billion hours". Very few new IP manage to get even close to that, so it's really quite impressive.

ARC Raiders continues running well on Linux with the anti-cheat systems enabled.