183.8 hours played. That’s the investment behind ARC Raiders’ most prominent Steam review. The verdict? A thumbs-down that doubles as an ultimatum: “This review will stay negative until the cheaters get dealt with. Get your s**t together embark or rip ARC.”

That review sits atop a pile 232,842 reviews deep. Below it, the numbers tell a rosier story: 85% positive, 64,252 concurrent players, #6 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart. Embark Studios’ parent company Nexon already admitted the game performed twice as well as expected. By most metrics, ARC Raiders is a hit.

But extraction shooters live and die on competitive integrity. And that top review is doing real damage.

Streamers Sound the Alarm

The cheating problem escalated fast. By December 2025 — two months after the October 30 launch — high-profile creators were going public. Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, one of ARC Raiders’ most dedicated streamers, quit indefinitely on April 7, 2026, calling the game “unplayable.” His on-stream criticism was blunt: “These developers are clueless bro, they don’t know what they’re doing. They have some AI anti-cheat and they think it covers everything.”

Shroud was equally direct, saying Embark had “zero control over their game” and questioning why anyone would keep playing. Nadeshot called the cheating “genuinely might be worse than peak Call of Duty” — a quote from someone who otherwise placed ARC Raiders in his personal top 10 games of all time.

The matchmaking compounds the problem for top players. ARC Raiders uses an aggression-based system that funnels highly competitive players into shared lobbies — the same pool where cheaters concentrate. Streamers don’t encounter cheaters at average rates. They get flooded.

From Wrist Slaps to Real Bans

Embark’s anti-cheat response has been a study in escalation — slow escalation. In January 2026, the studio started banning cheaters with 30-day suspensions. Players were livid. Reports confirmed that even aimbotters and wallhack users were getting month-long timeouts. The leniency was consistent with Embark’s approach in The Finals, where permanent bans were also reportedly rare, according to VICE.

By the time the Shrouded Sky update landed, the studio had shifted course. Community lead Ossen announced that “strong detections will receive permanent bans right off the bat, while others will receive a temporary suspension and a single chance to correct the behavior.” Embark also tightened Steam Family Sharing restrictions, which cheaters had been exploiting to circumvent bans.

CEO Patrick Söderlund told IGN that “tens of thousands” of players have been banned. He described an ongoing arms race with cheat developers: “The minute you do something, the minute you come up with something, they’ve come up with something else to do.”

Two Detection Layers, One Trust Gap

ARC Raiders runs Easy Anti-Cheat at the kernel level and layers Anybrain’s machine-learning behavioral analysis on top, flagging statistically impossible patterns — perfect headshot chains, inhuman reaction times. There’s also a compensation system: when a cheater is confirmed, affected players get their lost gear returned via in-game mail.

Smart systems on paper. But the gap between backend enforcement and the real-time experience in matches is where trust erodes. Tens of thousands of bans sounds decisive. It rings hollow when you’re the one losing a raid to someone snapping onto your head through a wall.

The Clock Is Running

The 85% positive rating tells you the core game works. 34,558 negative reviews out of 232,842 total is a ratio most studios would celebrate. But extraction shooters demand that players trust the system — trust that when they lose gear, they lost it fairly. Every undetected cheater chips away at that foundation, and once players leave, they don’t trickle back. They leave in waves.

Bungie’s Marathon is already promising permabans with zero second chances for cheaters. The extraction shooter space is about to get crowded, and burned players will have alternatives. Embark has a content roadmap, a healthy player base, and a game people clearly love. What it’s running short on is patience — from the people who’ve already put hundreds of hours into a title they want to keep playing.

That top reviewer has 183.8 hours of investment and one demand: fix the cheaters. They haven’t uninstalled. Not yet.

Sources