Surveillance mode on.
Embark Studios openly detailing the staggering scale of data it harvests from ARC Raiders is a rare, unguarded look at what a modern multiplayer game actually is beneath the surface, which is a real-time surveillance operation that happens to be a shooter. At the game's peak, Embark was capturing more than 100 billion events every single day, amounting to roughly 30 terabytes of data, all funnelled into Google's BigQuery with less than two seconds of latency. Data engineer Mattias Andersson, a veteran who previously worked at Candy Crush maker King, laid it out plainly at a Nexon developer conference: "We track every bullet in these games. We track where the players are. We track whenever a bullet hits something." As he put it, the moment you fire a shot, two seconds later he can query the system and know whether you hit. Every step you take, every trigger you pull, logged and searchable almost instantly.
On its own, that scale is impressive rather than sinister, since telemetry like this genuinely does help studios squash bugs, balance weapons, and catch cheaters, all of which Embark uses it for. Tracking more than 1,000 distinct event types across ARC Raiders and The Finals is exactly how a live-service game keeps miniguns from being broken and aimbotters from ruining lobbies. The framing gets more interesting, though, once you realise the studio isn't just watching what happens in the game. It's building a behavioural profile of you specifically, and it's using that profile to shape your actual experience in ways most players have no idea are happening.
The Part That Should Give Players Pause
Here's the detail that turns this from routine analytics into something genuinely eyebrow-raising, and it's the piece that tends to get glossed over. All that bullet-tracking feeds directly into ARC Raiders' matchmaking, which players have come to call "aggression-based" or "karma-based" matchmaking. Embark isn't just recording that a shot was fired, it's determining intent. As Andersson explained, "We try to find out how aggressive a player you are. We want to know who shot first in any encounter." The system logs who initiated combat in every single interaction, then sorts players accordingly, funnelling the trigger-happy PvP enthusiasts together while quietly grouping the "friendly" players who tend not to start fights into their own gentler pool. Sit with what that means for a second. The game is constantly judging your behaviour and, based on that judgment, deciding what kind of opponents you deserve, all invisibly and without ever telling you your aggression score exists. It's a system that watches how you treat other players and then engineers your social experience around that assessment.
Why the Data Firehose Couldn't Stop the Slide
There's a quiet irony running underneath all of this, because for all its god-tier visibility into player behaviour, Embark still couldn't keep ARC Raiders at its peak. The game was a genuine phenomenon, hitting over 700,000 concurrent players and selling 14 million copies by February 2026, briefly outselling Battlefield 6 and standing as one of the format's biggest success stories. Then, from around March 2026, sentiment soured, with the community growing frustrated over demands for more PvE content and a slower update cadence after Embark shifted from monthly drops to just two major updates a year. Knowing where every bullet landed, it turns out, is not the same as knowing what will keep your players happy, and no amount of voxel heatmaps or replay visualisations flowing into Unreal Engine could translate raw telemetry into community goodwill. Embark is betting the October Frozen Trail update, teasing the game's largest-ever map, brings people back, and when they return, the 30-terabyte machine will be waiting, logging every shot and quietly deciding, once again, exactly who shot first.
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