Fifteen thousand bans in a single day is an extraordinary number. Speaking at gamescom dev 2026 on August 24, Embark Studios senior software engineer Tom van Dijck revealed that around 15,000 accounts were banned that day alone, as part of the company's ongoing anti-cheat efforts across ARC Raiders and The Finals (GamesRadar+). Van Dijck described the fight against cheat makers as a losing race on manpower alone: "We can't keep up with the cat and mouse game, because we'd need thousands of developers to counter the cheats," he said, characterizing the commercial cheat industry Embark is fighting as being worth roughly $8 billion (OtakuKart).
That makes the bigger story more interesting than "ARC Raiders bans cheaters." ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter where losing a fight can mean losing valuable equipment players spent hours acquiring, which makes trust essential to the entire experience. If players start wondering whether the Raider who killed them was simply better — or was seeing through walls, using an aimbot, or exploiting the economy — the whole risk-and-reward structure begins to break down. Has cheating become more than a technical problem for ARC Raiders, and started threatening the basic trust that makes an extraction shooter work at all?
What 15,000 Bans Doesn't Mean
It's worth being precise here. Embark hasn't said 15,000 people were simultaneously cheating, that every banned account represents a unique individual, or what percentage of the active player base cheats — van Dijck specifically declined to give a precise estimate, noting only that the team believes the large majority of players want to compete fairly (GameFragger). It's also worth noting the 15,000 figure appears to describe Embark's anti-cheat operation across both ARC Raiders and The Finals, not a confirmed ARC Raiders-only total. The safer read is simpler: Embark is detecting cheating at a scale where tens of thousands of enforcement actions can happen in a single day. That's alarming enough on its own without needing to inflate it further.
Why This Hurts an Extraction Shooter More Than Most
Losing to a cheater in a normal multiplayer shooter is frustrating, but you respawn and move on. In ARC Raiders, a player can enter a raid carrying upgraded weapons, rare equipment, and resources gathered over previous runs — losing all of it is part of the game's intended tension, but that tension only works if the loss feels legitimate. Losing gear because someone made a better decision can motivate you to improve. Losing it because someone was cheating creates a completely different reaction: why risk anything valuable next time? That's the core of why cheating threatens ARC Raiders differently than it threatens a typical shooter — it doesn't just ruin individual matches, it can corrode the reason players engage with the loot loop in the first place.
Perception Is Its Own Problem
Van Dijck was candid that Embark is fighting on two fronts at once: actual cheating, and the public perception that the game is overwhelmed by it. He noted that accusations spread quickly across Reddit and streams, that high-profile creators regularly encounter obvious stream snipers or cheaters live in front of large audiences, and that any public statement from the studio tends to draw significant backlash regardless of content (GameFragger). That's a genuinely difficult position — trust is shaped by perception as much as by actual detection rates, and once players believe an environment isn't fair, the statistical reality becomes almost beside the point.
The Scale of Detection Is Staggering Too
To catch cheaters at this volume, Embark says it's collecting roughly 20 billion telemetry events per day across ARC Raiders and The Finals combined, with about 5% of that data used specifically for anti-cheat analysis — mouse movement, aim behavior, recoil patterns, and other inputs used to flag suspicious behavior algorithmically rather than simply searching for known cheat software (Inven Global). That scale cuts both ways: it shows how seriously Embark is investing in detection, but it also reveals just how complex modern anti-cheat has become. The company's Inven Global interview at the same event noted the engineering trade-offs involved — withholding unseen player positions entirely could neutralize a major class of wallhack techniques, but would require continuous server-side line-of-sight computation that scales cost directly with player count.
This Isn't a New Fight — It's an Escalating One
This isn't the first time Embark has had to publicly address the scale of the problem. Back in February, CEO Patrick Söderlund told IGN the studio had banned "tens of thousands" of players since introducing a harder anti-cheat stance, while acknowledging the risk of wrongful bans and promising fast reversals when mistakes happen (GamingBolt). Söderlund compared the ongoing fight to defending against a DDoS attack — another constantly evolving security threat where developers are forced to stay one step ahead. Denuvo Anti-Cheat began rolling out to a limited ARC Raiders player pool on May 19, and Embark announced it had completed the rollout to all players by early July. Six months after Söderlund's comments — and less than two months after that full Denuvo deployment — a single day still produced 15,000 company-wide bans, showing this isn't a problem Embark has solved so much as one it's continuously managing at increasing scale.
Why Aggressive Enforcement Is Its Own Risk
The obvious question is why Embark doesn't simply ban anything remotely suspicious. The answer is that legitimate software can resemble cheating software from an anti-cheat system's perspective — van Dijck specifically cited common applications like OBS, Steam, and Overwolf as examples of the gray area involved in distinguishing malicious tools from ordinary ones. Söderlund has echoed that caution from the CEO level too, telling IGN that "the banning process is obviously delicate because we need to make sure that we ban people that deserve to be banned," while describing players who reach out personally trying to appeal what they claim are wrongful bans. A player who loses an account incorrectly can lose hundreds of hours of progression and purchased items — so speed in enforcement has to be balanced against the real cost of getting it wrong.
15,000 Bans Could Actually Be a Good Sign
There's a genuine counterargument worth taking seriously: a big ban number sounds like proof that cheating is spiraling out of control, but it could just as easily mean detection is working as intended. If a system catches 15,000 offending accounts in a day, those accounts are being removed rather than lingering undetected. What's missing from Embark's public comments — how quickly cheats get detected after they appear, how many banned players return under new accounts, what share of matches actually contain a detected cheater — would tell us far more about whether the problem is growing or whether enforcement is simply becoming more visible. Without those numbers, 15,000 tells us about enforcement volume, not necessarily about how bad the underlying problem actually is.
Why This Matters More Than ARC Raiders' Other Problems
ARC Raiders has plenty of other issues players have raised — matchmaking, progression pacing, and Expeditions, which Embark is pausing after its fifth run for a major redesign before returning in 2027. But those are balance problems operating inside the game's own rules. A frustrating weapon or an unpopular system is still the intended experience, even if players dislike it. A cheater exists entirely outside the rules. Players can adapt to a shifting meta. They can't meaningfully adapt to someone who can see through walls, and that's what makes cheating a fundamentally different kind of threat to ARC Raiders than anything else currently on Embark's list of problems to fix. Banning 15,000 accounts in a day proves Embark is fighting hard. Whether that's enough to keep players believing their losses are legitimate is the harder question — and it's one that gets answered match by match, not headline by headline.
