ARC Raiders Leads US Steam Player Engagement for 9 Straight Weeks, Early Signal It Could Dominate 2026
ARC Raiders is continuing to convert its late 2025 momentum into a 2026 leadership narrative, and this time the signal is not just sales headlines or social buzz, it is weekly engagement dominance in the United States Steam market. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella shared that ARC Raiders led Steam in the US for a 9th consecutive week in total weekly active users, specifically noting the metric is not concurrent players, but total weekly active users, which is the more strategic indicator for stickiness and long tail health.
Circana Player Engagement Tracker - US Top 10 Titles by Total Weekly Active Users (Not Concurrent) - W/E Jan 10, 2026 - ARC Raiders leads Steam for 9th consecutive week - DOTA 2 returns to Steam top 10 for first time since Nov 2024 - Top 4 across PS/XBX are unchanged, in the same ranked order
— Mat Piscatella (@matpiscatella.bsky.social) January 19, 2026 at 11:30 PM
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That 9 week streak matters because it reframes ARC Raiders from a big launch into a sustained engagement platform, and it puts a spotlight on a key competitive reality: extraction shooters do not win by day 1 hype, they win by repeatable sessions, social pull, and a content loop that keeps players coming back even after the initial discovery wave. If ARC Raiders is holding the top engagement slot in the US Steam ecosystem week after week, it suggests Embark Studios has built a loop that is resilient against the usual churn cycle that hits most multiplayer releases once the novelty wears off.
The engagement story also aligns with what public player count tracking has shown on Steam. SteamDB charts for ARC Raiders show an all time peak of 481,966 concurrent players on November 16, 2025, and the game remains at a scale where daily live player counts are still materially high by any modern Steam standard.
It is also worth grounding the conversation in the broader performance picture that has been circulating from publisher level reporting and mainstream coverage. Nexon has stated ARC Raiders passed 12.4 million units, and coverage tied to that update has referenced concurrent players nearing 960,000 across platforms in January 2026, which would place it in rare air for a new IP this quickly after launch. Even if you strip away the headline numbers and focus only on what we can observe directly, the combination of sustained US Steam engagement leadership plus durable Steam concurrency creates a credible thesis: ARC Raiders is not just winning a moment, it is building a year.
From a gamer and reviewer lens, this is where 2026’s biggest game conversations start to make sense. The best case scenario for Embark is clear. Maintain weekly engagement leadership, deliver new content on a predictable cadence, protect the integrity of the loop, and keep the community confident that balance and progression will evolve without breaking what already works. The risk case is just as clear. If the content cadence slips or trust gets disrupted, engagement leaders can fall quickly, especially with ever present incumbents like Counter Strike waiting for any opening. Piscatella’s note itself already frames that pressure by calling out Steam’s competitive landscape shifting week to week, even while ARC Raiders holds the crown right now.
Even with the recurring controversy discourse around generative AI use, the market is delivering its verdict in the simplest way possible: players are showing up, and they are doing it consistently. If ARC Raiders keeps leading US Steam engagement through the next major update cycle, the industry will have to treat it less like a breakout hit and more like a durable platform that sets the standard for what a modern extraction shooter can be.
Do you think ARC Raiders can hold this pace through all of 2026, or will a major content drop from a rival finally break the US Steam engagement streak?
