ARC Raiders Launches, Servers Promptly Collapse Under The Strain

As tends to happen with highly-anticipated online games, ARC Raiders players have already been running into server issues.

The game launched earlier this morning, and has already accumulated hundreds of thousands of players, which has led to many players being unable to play the game due to server overload.

At time of writing, the game has over 240,000 concurrent players on Steam alone (via SteamDB), having shot well over 100,000 players within minutes of release.

It just shows how much the fans were itching for another good extraction shooter, especially with the game topping Steam sales charts.

Running Into Connection Errors

Many players trying to get into ARC Raiders (via Eurogamer) have been hit with an “Online Connection Error” popup, which says, “Online services are currently unavailable.”

Some have been able to eventually get into the game by retrying enough times, but it seems like at least as many have been stopped in their tracks by the error.

ARC Raiders held a “server slam” earlier this month, which pulled in almost 200,000 players on Steam, which should have prepared them for launch, but clearly the influx of players on launch was still even bigger and faster than they were ready for.

At least the server slam did still give players an opportunity to offer their feedback to help improve the game before launch, even if there were still server issues on launch.

It’s ultimately not that surprising that there would be problems on launch, especially with how anticipated ARC Raiders was and how common server problems are for big releases like it.

The beta test for Battlefield 6 suffered from incredibly long login queues in its open beta (even before the test properly began), and the Skate reboot had similar problems when it launched in early access.

Personally, I remember when Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker launched and not only had thousands-long server login queues, but connection errors that would pop up and cause players to lose their position in that queue.

Hopefully Embark Studios is able to get their server issues sorted out quickly, especially since it wouldn’t surprise me if the player count continues to grow as we get into peak hours and the weekend.