Arc Raiders gives free money to everyone to say sorry for the weekend server struggles

For Embark Studios, it was a classic 'good news, bad news' weekend. Arc Raiders hit a new high in concurrent Steam players on Sunday, falling just shy of 355,000 people playing all at the same time. That's very good indeed—what's less good is that 355,000 people playing all at the same time put a little extra strain on the game's servers, and there was, as Embark put it, a wobble.

Reports of Arc Raiders server issues began popping up on Reddit in the early afternoon (Eastern time) on November 2, as eager players ran headlong into login and matchmaking issues. The cause of the outage was no great mystery:

WE PEAKED AND NOW THE ARC BROKE THE SERVERS! from r/ArcRaiders

Evidence of the servers struggle can be seen on SteamDB, where a high of nearly 338,000 concurrent players was achieved before sudden palpitations threw everything into disarray. It doesn't appear that the game was down completely, nor does it seem the troubles lasted for very long.

Up, up, up, whoa whoa whoops!

Even so, Embark wants to say sorry for the hassle.

"We are overwhelmed by how many of you joined the fight against the ARC. Your bravery and resilience are truly inspiring," the studio wrote on Discord. "Our team is working with determination to get you into those shuttles in a timely manner and we thank you for your patience while we're fine-tuning the system. To show our appreciation, we're sending you 500 Raider Tokens to use as you see fit."

Raider Tokens are Arc Raiders' premium in-game currency, used to purchase in-game cosmetics. 500 tokens costs $5, a relatively modest mea culpa, but extended across 300,000+ players, it adds up in a hurry. And given that it's not uncommon for studios to simply say "sorry" and move on when things go sideways, I think it's a pretty nice gesture.

A similar message was also posted to X, where Embark also said the Server Slammer backpack cosmetic promised to everyone who took part in the October server slam will go out today—eligible players will find it in their inboxes.