Arc Raiders has a pretty massive online following, that much is very clear from the game’s still incredibly impressive Steam numbers and just how much hoopla there was over its performance at The Game Awards this year. It has plenty of famous fans too, though one of the biggest is Shroud, who not a month ago was calling The Game Awards rigged for not choosing it in its GOTY lineup.
He’s probably considered the biggest champion of Arc Raiders out there right now, but developer Embark Studios could potentially lose both him and his massive fanbase if it doesn’t do anything about the rampant cheating that he’s been running into.
Arc Raiders Could Lose Its Biggest Champion, As Shroud Threatens To Quit Over Cheaters
In one of Shroud’s latest YouTube videos (thanks GamesRadar) titled ‘Arc Raiders Is Ruined…’, the streamer plays a bunch of games in which he’s lost fights to self-proclaimed cheaters, or players engaging in suspicious behavior. Right at the end of the video, Shroud then drops a bombshell, and says that he’s “ready to quit” and that he’ll happily “wait for The Expedition Window to reset my account.”
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We know that cheating has been somewhat of a problem in Arc Raiders for a little bit, and it got so bad at one point that the game had to temporarily remove the Hidden Bunker event as cheaters were abusing an exploit that let them enter before the doors had been opened. Embark has been employing rather deadly methods to stamp out these exploits when they’re found, but it’s clearly not been enough.
Even if not everyone that Shroud accuses of cheating is actually cheating, he’s still bumping into a lot of people that are, which seems to be gradually turning a few fans against the game entirely. You can see some disgruntled and concerned fans in the comments of Shroud’s video, with a user called AdvancedMonkey7702 saying that “nothing will kill this game faster than cheaters running wild.”
Others have criticized Embark for not permanently banning players who have already been picked up by Valve’s anti-cheat system (also known as vac banned), while there are plenty of calls to place cheaters in their own lobbies to completely remove them from the game’s main player base. That’s not a bad idea in truth.
If cheating becomes worse and worse over time, and Embark does almost nothing to stop it, I can see the game’s popularity that it’s currently enjoying slowly draining, especially if big streamers like Shroud just pack up and leave. Hopefully, Embark is actually going to do something in the near future, and punish the players that need punishing.
- Released
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October 30, 2025
- ESRB
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Teen / Violence, Blood
- Developer(s)
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Embark Studios
- Publisher(s)
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Embark Studios
