The poor servers trying to keep up with the influx of players logging into Arc Raiders are starting to buckle. Many players, including PC Gamer's own Morgan Park, are reporting matchmaking errors and queue times just as the extraction shooter hit just over 330,000 concurrent players on Steam. Considering it's on consoles and other storefronts too, Embark might be dealing with a bigger server load than it anticipated.
Players are having trouble finding matches and are getting stuck in queue times ranging from 5 to 10 minutes before they're let back in. The subreddit is filling up with posts from players encountering errors and I can see several Twitch streamers waiting to connect.
You can actually see a fairly sharp decline in players on SteamDB just after the game hit another all-time high at 337,834 players. It's currently sitting at around 286,000 players an hour after the spike.
Plenty of people still seem to be able to play the game judging from the player numbers and ongoing streams, but there's enough commotion that the official Discord server has put a 15-minute timer on how often you can post in the main chat channel.
I think we killed the game with the amount of players in the game from r/ArcRaiders
I already see jokes calling the game a "queue simulator" and people claiming they're going to "explode" if the servers don't come back up. This is what happens when you make a slick extraction shooter with big evil robots that everyone wants to play right now.
Developer Embark Studios hasn't made any official comments about the servers on social media or in the Discord. Players have reported that waiting long enough on the pre-game queue can eventually work and let you queue up again, but you're running the risk of the matchmaking stalling out and bringing you back to step one. This might be one of those rare times where the only thing you can do is step away from the PC and pray things stabilize in a few hours.
