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?
