Arc Raiders’ next big update, Frozen Trail, is set to arrive sometime in October. For Embark Studios, it means more than it probably should. The team announced back in the spring that it would move to semi-annual major updates, pivoting away from the monthly content cadence that Arc Raiders’ executive producer Aleksander Grøndal told me wasn’t good enough for players or developers. That leaves a lot riding on Frozen Trail, and it will serve as a litmus test for what’s really expected–or even demanded–of successful live-service games.
Beneath the social media posts of anything the Arc Raiders accounts have posted since that springtime roadmap change, there’s a sentiment you’re guaranteed to read, usually more than once and sometimes even verbatim: “Embark fumbled.” For those players increasingly obsessed with post-launch roadmaps and concurrent player counts, the studio has let them down by failing to offer an unceasing parade of new things to do.
From when Arc Raiders launched on October 30 of last year through about Christmas, Embark had already delivered most of the post-launch content it had prepared, Grøndal told me in a Zoom conversation earlier this year. This meant the studio, encouraged by Arc Raiders’ enormous success in its first few months, was tasked with building out more content updates quickly to meet player demand. In the first few months of 2026, this left the team with “practically speaking, not that much production time on the features” of those updates.
Back in May, Grøndal told me how the status quo was no longer serving anyone, neither players nor developers: “We have to really think about how we change the way we work every day, and that is a little bit uncomfortable for some people on the team, and I fully respect that. I find it a bit uncomfortable myself, because we kind of built the way we worked from, like, how we thought we needed to do it, and now we kind of need to rethink that.”
They were building the figurative tracks as the train was already barreling down the railway. It’s a better problem to have than its more common alternative–making a game with lofty aspirations and finding no one shows up to play it–but still, it felt unsustainable for the team, hence the pivot to fewer but bigger updates. Frozen Trail, then, is destined to be a landmark event for both the game and the competitive arena of these so-called forever-games, because it’s going to tell Embark and teams with similar goals what it looks like to step back, focus on the long run, and re-emerge when you think you’ve found your game’s next big thing, rather than just delivering an assembly line of things.
Many self-identified gamers have become obsessed with the business of games. It’s become the metagame of the hobby. You compare a game’s launch to its predecessors and competitors. You watch out for signs of a game’s dwindling health, so you can abandon a sinking ship before you drown with it. You don’t want to be caught investing your time and money in a game like Hyper Scape, Rumbleverse, Highguard, or any of the many other games in the live-service graveyard. Pop into the Texas Chain Saw Massacre subreddit and see how those players feel about having spent $30 on a game in exchange for “only” two years of updates.
As if the live-service world weren’t cutthroat and taxing enough on studios competing in that space, even when that work is sometimes a mandate from the parent company, now these games all live under a microscope where every person with a social media account is an amateur industry analyst, remarking on your job security and decision-making.
And yet, whether it ought to be that way or not, it does have tangible stakes. Arc Raiders’ more lax content cadence as of late has coincided with fewer players engaging with the game. In April, its average Steam concurrent user count was around 75,000. Right after the team announced it would ease off the gas until October, that number fell to 61,000 in May, then to 35,000 in June. Today it sits at around 22,000–a number that may be the envy of some other studios, but it’s hard to say what constitutes success for the health of Embark’s team.
Games like Arc Raiders depend on recurring and concurrent players, as players who return often and in large groups are more likely to convert to in-game spenders. It’s the same thinking behind getting people to briskly walk around the mall for exercise. How many times will you go to the mall only to work out before you end up spending money? If you’re hopping into a live-service game to complete your daily challenges or make progress on some month-long cosmetics event, you might be enticed to buy something in the shop while you’re there.
Arc Raiders wants its mall-walkers back. It’s reasonable economics in isolation, but it gets messy when you consider just how competitive live-service games are, how they each tend to feel like part-time jobs, and how a small handful of them, such as Fortnite and Call of Duty, have claimed much of the real estate and aren’t budging. Each of us can only have so many part-time jobs.
Every time a live-service game gives you an opening to walk away even briefly, it’s a chance you’ll fall into a different game, or a different hobby altogether, never to return. Typically, games like Arc Raiders are aggressively trying to keep you in their respective ecosystems. The move to fewer major updates is a risky one for that reason, even if it seems unfair to Embark’s employees, who deserve to feel more secure in their roles.
Embark’s plan–its hope–is that Frozen Trail will reignite the passion some players have lost. Almost assuredly, players will return, but how many and for how long? These are the unknown details that will ultimately tell Embark and other teams watching and learning from this experiment what a live-service game is allowed to do in the eyes of its community.
Is a team working on a forever-game permitted to establish healthier norms? If not simply for the team’s own health, does it at least have that permission if the players themselves benefit in the long run? How will the team measure success in the days and months following Frozen Trail?
Arc Raiders was bigger than Embark anticipated when it first launched last fall, but a year later, the team’s major effort to restore its unique sense of magic will be an inflection point for the game, as well as a lesson for other teams seeking to enter or stay alive in the high-stakes world of live-service.
