ARC Raiders Anniversary Trailer: Every Year-One Stat Explained

ARC Raiders turned one year old on October 30, and Embark Studios marked the occasion the same way it has marked every other milestone this year: with a trailer, a pile of year-one numbers, and a free gift waiting in every Raider's inbox. The centerpiece is 1st Anniversary Accolades, a short recap video posted straight to the official ARC Raiders YouTube channel that pairs clips from the extraction shooter's first twelve months with the praise it picked up along the way. Here's what the trailer covers, what the studio's own stats say about the year that led up to it, and how to grab the gift before it expires.

01What's in the 1st Anniversary Accolades Trailer

Embark built the Accolades trailer around a simple idea: let the game's own highlight reel do the talking. It cuts between raider-versus-raider firefights, close calls with roaming ARC machines, and the kind of last-second extraction most players remember long after the loot gets spent, while weaving in nods to how the game has been received since its October 2025 launch. It's a victory lap rather than a patch rundown, and it leans hard on the Frozen Trail era of updates as the freshest reason to still be excited a year in.

The trailer went up alongside Embark's official one-year anniversary post, which is signed simply "The ARC Raiders Team" and keeps the tone the same way the video does: thankful, a little nostalgic, and pointed squarely at what's still ahead rather than a victory speech. There's no named developer quote attached to either the post or the trailer, just a collective note that the team has "lots planned for the future."

Embark Studios' official "1st Anniversary Accolades" trailer, posted October 30, 2026 to the ARC Raiders YouTube channel.

02ARC Raiders by the Numbers: One Year of Raiding

The anniversary post ships with its own infographic, and the figures it lays out are the real story of the trailer. Over the game's first year, Raiders fired six billion rounds between them and destroyed more than 14.8 billion ARC in the process. The two toughest regulars on that kill list racked up huge totals of their own: 3,920,595 Queens destroyed and 2,919,521 Matriarchs put down, numbers that only make sense once you remember how many separate raids it takes to see either boss even once.

Weapon-wise, the Anvil pistol came out as the single most-used gun of the year, which tracks with how often early fights get decided before anyone reaches for something heavier. On the cooperative side, one player alone healed 5,643 other Raiders over the year, and the record for most strangers patched up in a single raid sits at 18. Not every stat is flattering: 3,625 Raiders were killed by a stray volcanic rock, a reminder that ARC's own terrain is still deadlier than most players expect. Scrappy, the game's resident companion, ate his way through more than 6,800 tons of food over the same period, with apricots confirmed as his favorite.

None of that would mean much without people still logging in to generate it. ARC Raiders had already crossed 16 million copies sold by the time Nexon reported its most recent quarterly numbers, and the current Steam listing shows the kind of review volume that only comes from a year of sustained play rather than a single strong launch month.

03Frozen Trail Carried the Anniversary Momentum

The timing of the Accolades trailer isn't an accident. Embark's Frozen Trail update landed on October 8 as the game's biggest content drop since launch, adding the Pendola Pass map along with a wave of new weapons and ARC enemies, and player counts climbed sharply in the weeks that followed. By the time Live Update 2.3.0 shipped on October 27 with a Heavy Shield buff, a Flame Spray buff, and easier access to several key blueprints, the game was riding its strongest stretch of the year, which is exactly the kind of momentum an anniversary trailer is built to capture rather than create.

That sequencing matters if you've been away from ARC Raiders for a while. The trailer assumes you already know Frozen Trail reshaped the map rotation; if you don't, the patch notes above are the faster read before you jump back into a raid that now looks noticeably different from the one you left.

04Claim Your Free Anniversary Gift

Embark is giving every player a free in-game gift to mark the anniversary, delivered the same way the studio has handled every past milestone reward: quietly, through the in-game inbox, with no purchase or challenge attached.

How to Claim the Anniversary Gift

1. 1Launch ARC Raiders and sign in with the account you normally raid on; the gift is tied to your account, not a redeemable code.1 min
2. 2Head to the inbox/mail tab from the main menu. Embark delivers anniversary rewards there rather than dropping them directly into your inventory.1 min
3. 3Accept the gift from the inbox message to move it into your inventory or stash before heading out on your next raid.1 min
4. 4If you've been away, make sure you're on Live Update 2.3.0 before raiding; several weapon and shield balance changes from Frozen Trail carried into this patch.2 min

05What Embark Says Comes Next

The anniversary post is light on specifics about the future, but it's not silent. The team describes itself as "already hard at work on what comes next" with "lots planned," language that lines up with the steady cadence Embark has kept since launch: a major content update roughly every few months, smaller store and hotfix patches in between, and recurring seasonal content like the current Trials Season 6 run. Nothing in the post names a date or a feature for the next major drop, so treat any specific prediction you see elsewhere as unconfirmed until Embark says otherwise on its own news page.

What is confirmed is that the studio, Embark Studios, has treated ARC Raiders' first year as a live platform rather than a finished product, and the Accolades trailer reads as a pause to acknowledge that before the next update cycle starts. If you want the deeper mechanical rundown of where the current meta stands rather than the victory-lap version, the build and weapon choices that came out of Update 2.3.0 are a more useful starting point than anything in this trailer.

06Where to Watch the Trailer

The full 1st Anniversary Accolades video is posted on the official ARC Raiders YouTube channel and embedded directly in Embark's anniversary post. It runs short by trailer standards and doesn't require any context beyond having played the game at some point in the last year, so it's worth the two minutes even if you're mainly here for the stats above. For background on the shooter itself, the game's Wikipedia entry covers its development history from Embark's earlier, shelved projects through to launch.