Embark Studios released the Frozen Trail 2.0 update for ARC Raiders on October 8, 2026, and calls it the biggest update the game has had since launch. The studio paired it with the first free-play window in the game's history and a 50% cut on Steam.
The combination matters for anyone weighing a return. Frozen Trail adds a new map, three new enemies, two new weapons and a full replacement for the game's progression system.
Where ARC Raiders sits on Valve's own chart
Valve's Most Played list placed ARC Raiders at rank 10 of its top 100 when read at 20:55 UTC on October 8, 2026. The column Valve labels Current Players showed 127,297. The column it labels Peak Today showed 131,388.
That puts the live figure roughly 3% below the same day's peak. Valve's own player-count API returned 126,911 twelve minutes earlier, which is consistent with the chart.
For scale, Valheim sat one place above at 130,737 and Rust one place below at 99,740 in that same reading. Counter-Strike 2 led the chart at 926,927.
Those numbers are flattered by the moment, and it is worth saying so plainly. Free play runs from October 8 at 11:00 CEST until October 12 at 10:00 CEST, and the store page carried a weekend deal taking the US price from $39.99 to $19.99.
Valve no longer publishes an all-time concurrent peak for individual games. Its per-game chart address redirects to the charts overview, leaving only live players and the current day's peak. Valve publishes no sales or owner figures either.
So any verdict on whether the audience has slid or surged cannot be sourced to Valve, and is not made here. What the figures do support is that a game released on October 30, 2025 is still a top-10 title on Steam.
What Frozen Trail 2.0 actually adds
Embark calls the new map, Pendola Pass, its most complex to date, built around vertical terrain. Points of interest include a supermarket, a town square, an observatory and a buried train depot.
A boardable ARC carrier called the Frigate arrives as a map condition, alongside a second condition named Redirection. Three enemies join the roster: the aggressive Bully, the ambushing Skulker, and the Hydra, a three-part turret found aboard the Frigate.
Two weapons arrive, the heavy-ammo Bantam revolver and the light-ammo Stiletto battle rifle. The larger systems change is Weapon Amplification, an upgrade path run from a Research Workstation and rolling out to 15 weapons.
That workstation sits in the Outpost, a new customisable player space. The update also brings a grappling hook, cameras, a tether launcher, a yank grenade, 22 new quests, 100 furniture designs and 14 weapon stencils. Stash capacity rises by two tiers to 328 slots.
Balance and monetisation changes
Explosive weapons such as the Hullcracker now deal over 50% more damage to armor plates and around 30% less to fragile parts. The Heavy Shield loses durability more slowly, at 0.15 rather than 0.20, and its movement penalty drops from 15% to 10%.
The Snap Hook is weaker on every axis. Its range falls from 20m to 18m, durability use doubles to 4% per use, and power cost rises from 50 to 60. Loot value on Riven Tides goes up by roughly 15%.
Raider Decks are gone, replaced by the Reward Pass system Embark detailed in September. Cred is removed and replaced by Reward Points. Old decks move into a Legacy Pass and keep anything already unlocked.
The Frozen Trail Pass runs to 60 levels across a free and a premium track. Embark says the free track carries all the new base outfits plus weapons, gadgets and up to 200 Raider Tokens.
The premium track costs 1,150 Raider Tokens and can return up to 1,150 on completion. Embark states it contains no items that benefit gameplay, unlike the free track.
What Embark credits to player feedback
The reworked skill tree is the one change the patch notes tie directly to players. The notes say the studio has heard the comments, and seen in the data, that the tree was not offering interesting enough ways to build a character.
More tweaks are expected as Embark watches how players use it. Solo vs. Squads matchmaking has been pulled entirely while the studio re-evaluates its role.
Embark also says it has begun restricting accounts that hold large quantities of duplicated items, and removing those items, to correct an in-game economy long pressured by duping. On the technical side the notes list memory and stability work, lower enemy memory use, a fix for a crash when changing graphics settings, and an upgrade to AMD FSR 4.1.1.
Embark publishes no build number beyond 2.0, and the releases before it were numbered 1.48.0 and 1.47.0. Its own known-issues list already flags a quest that cannot be completed on Pendola Pass and a Tether Launcher that cannot be repaired, both with fixes promised in a later update. Neither Embark nor Valve has said anything about player counts, so the figures above are one reading at one moment and will move.
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