When you fire a single shot in Arc Raiders, Embark Studios knows about it almost instantly. During a developer conference held by publisher Nexon, data engineer Mattias Andersson pulled back the curtain on the massive data pipeline the team uses to monitor player behavior, revealing that the studio tracks every bullet fired and every hit registered in the game.
The scale of this operation is immense. During the game’s peak between November 2025 and February 2026—a period when Arc Raiders consistently saw over 400,000 concurrent players on Steam—Embark was processing more than 100 billion events per day. That translates to 30 terabytes of data daily, all routed through BigQuery with less than two seconds of latency. This allows developers to query whether a specific shot landed or missed almost immediately after it occurs in-game.
Refining Matchmaking Through Aggression
While this data serves clear technical functions like bug detection and anti-cheat enforcement, a primary use case is tuning the game's matchmaking. According to Andersson, the goal is to group players based on their combat tendencies rather than raw skill.
"We try to find out how aggressive a player you are," Andersson explained. "We want to know who shot first in any encounter. And then we try to make sure that people who want to PvP a lot get matchmade with people who PvP a lot, and the people who never initiate fights, the friendly players, get moved in together with the more friendly players."
This "aggression-based" approach has been a point of clarification for the team. Earlier this year, design director Virgil Watkins noted that the system is not intended to track "intent." Because the game cannot distinguish between a highly skilled player and someone who simply missed their shots, the system merely records the data points of who initiated the fight and who took damage.
Tools of the Trade
To visualize this flood of information, Embark utilizes a variety of analytical tools, including a custom "round viewer" that replays player actions and movement. Heatmaps generated from this data show developers exactly where players cluster, where they die, and how they navigate specific environments, such as the Stella Montis map.
While Arc Raiders currently maintains a smaller, more stable player base compared to its peak, it remains a consistent fixture in the top 50 most-played games on Steam. The team is currently shifting to a twice-a-year release schedule, with the next major update, titled Frozen Trail, slated for October 2026. This update promises to introduce the largest map currently available in the game.
As Embark continues to iterate, they remain focused on fair play. The studio has confirmed that the rollout of Denuvo Anti-Cheat is complete, though they are planning more extensive updates to further address gameplay integrity.