Embark Studios’ game brought together even more simultaneous players—perhaps the tipping point when the servers began to give up.

Struggling to handle the flood of players logging into Arc Raiders, the servers are starting to give up the fight. Many users report matchmaking errors and long wait times, while the shooter has drawn more than 330,000 concurrent players on Steam. Considering the game is also available on consoles and other stores, Embark is likely facing a heavier server load than expected. Players are having trouble finding matches and are seeing 5–10 minute queues before getting back into the game. The subreddit is full of posts reporting errors.

SteamDB shows a sharp decline after a new peak of 337,834 players; about an hour later, the count fell to around 286,000. While many are still able to play, the disruption is big enough that the official Discord has set a 15-minute slow mode for the main chat. Jokes about a “queue simulator” are already circulating, and some claim players will “explode” if the servers aren’t restored.

I think we killed the game with the amount of players in the game
byu/CaelusTheWolf inArcRaiders

Players report that if they wait long enough in the pre-game queue, they may eventually get in—only to risk matchmaking resetting and sending them back to square one. This may be one of those rare cases where the best move is to step away from the PC and hope things stabilize in a few hours. Embark Studios says it’s aware of issues with servers, voice chat, and squad systems and is working to fix them as soon as possible.

As a temporary measure, the team introduced a login queue to ease problems with party formation and voice channels that are making matchmaking take longer than usual.

Source: PC Gamer, SteamDB