ARC Raiders is Right to Stop Monthly Updates

1 week ago 9

Published May 13, 2026, 6:06 PM EDT

Jaime Tugayev is the News Editor at DualShockers, where he covers gaming news, reviews, features, guides, and major industry updates. He has been writing professionally since 2013 and covering games since 2015, with a focus on FPS games, tactical shooters, strategy titles, JRPGs, and PC and console gaming.

His work often covers games and franchises such as Escape From Tarkov, Gray Zone Warfare, Battlefield, ARC Raiders, Arma, STALKER 2, and Six Days in Fallujah. Before joining DualShockers, Jaime contributed to IndieGameCulture and Aviator Insider. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Developmental Psychology from the University of Coimbra.

The life of a popular live service game is not an easy one. If you spam patches, you are bound to break the game sooner or later, and have to wrestle with balancing micromanagement from players. On the other hand, taking too long between updates, you get exposed to the 'dead game' discourse.

Neither option is particularly fun to deal with, but ARC Raiders developer Embark decided to double-dip this year.

Following a bombastic launch in 2025, the world's prime post-apocalyptic extraction shooter kept a tight monthly update schedule. Once the honeymoon period wore off, however, the cracks in the content and balancing started to show. The first symptoms of 'Helldivers Syndrome' had set in.

ARC Raiders: Complete Guide & Walkthrough

All you need for successful time spent Topside.

To fight this, Embark has dropped a new update schedule out of the blue: instead of one content update a month, you get two updates per year. It may be an overcorrection, but right now, it is ARC Raiders' best shot to crawl out of the update death spiral.

ARC Raiders is Avoiding a Helldivers 2 Cycle

Although it is not in the DSM-5, Helldivers Syndrome is characterized by a cycle of updates that focus on fixing the previous update because somewhere, somehow, it made something unbalanced, and people are now very mad about it.

Helldivers 2 came out in February 2024 and had a meteoric rise, but Arrowhead has spent most of the last two years having to either defend or correct their previous decisions. Inevitably, many of these corrections go too far, causing further problems and exhausting community outrage.

Update 6.2.0, released two weeks ago, has gotten Mostly Negative reviews on Steam, and it's far from the first time an update sends Helldivers 2 reviews tumbling.

Although Embark has not been anywhere as errant as Arrowhead with its updates to ARC Raiders, the fact is that a monthly update cycle makes a terrible patch a matter of when, not if.

The cracks in the content and balancing started to show. The first symptoms of 'Helldivers Syndrome' had set in.

A slower update schedule is the way to go for ARC Raiders, but it is a path with its own challenges that Embark will have to deal with.

That is not to say the execution of this transition has been flawless. I don't feel it's particularly fair to the community to jump from a monthly update schedule straight to a twice-a-year one. A phased approach would have been a lot easier to stomach and probably would have avoided some of the immediate backlash.

Another potential issue is whether getting content drops twice a year is enough to keep the game alive. ARC Raiders doesn't exactly have a traditional endgame, and while that's not an unusual thing for live service games, six months is a long time between content updates.

Inevitably, a lot of players will leave: some for good, others to only come back twice a year to 'check how things are' before vanishing again.

ARC Raiders is currently available for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5.