ARC Raiders just punched 107K concurrent Steam players again on the back of the Frozen Trail update and a free weekend, while Embark's executive producer Aleksander Grøndal admitted the community is already split 37% friendly co-op, 34% pure PvP, and 27% switching between both. The October 13-20 PvE toggle test lets players opt out of damaging each other in matchmaking, and Grøndal straight-up said a full split into separate modes is "very possible" because respecting how players want to play trumps the original seven-year-old PvPvE vision. Over 70% of friendly players and even 40% of PvP players want fewer hostile encounters, with 51% of the surveyed base explicitly asking for dedicated PvE.

The studio's own blog post owns the pivot: they originally designed a raid-based PvE co-op looter, ran into problems, reset to high-tension extraction, and now the data is forcing their hand. The test is explicitly limited, excludes Night Raids and Frigate, and comes with the disclaimer that it "is not a promise" of a permanent mode—yet the numbers don't lie, and the player base hemorrhage in prior months makes clear that ignoring the split was bleeding retention.

Steam charts show the game clawing back to six-month highs with the update and free period pushing 24-hour peaks past 130K, but the real story is whether two separate queues will save the extraction shooter or just formalize the divorce. Embark is testing the split they pretended didn't exist, and the community split data proves they were lying to themselves the whole time.