Embark rolls out Denuvo anticheat to Arc Raiders players

The newest threat in ARC Raiders is not a Rogue or a bad drop. It is the software meant to stop the people hunting with wallhacks and other cheats from turning every run through Speranza and the Rust Belt into a rigged fight.

Embark Studios started rolling out Denuvo Anti-Cheat to ARC Raiders on May 19, 2026, but only to a limited player pool at first, with expansion planned after close monitoring. In Patch Notes 1.29.0, the studio said it was using Denuvo’s anti-cheat layer only, not its DRM service, and said it was working to keep the performance hit minimal. The timing matters for anyone deciding whether this is welcome protection or another invasive layer sitting between them and the game.

This did not come out of nowhere. Embark has been fighting cheating since launch, after ARC Raiders drew more than 700,000 concurrent Raiders on the surface during its first weekend. The studio’s May 7 anti-cheat update said the game already uses a stack built around kernel-level protection from Easy Anti-Cheat, machine-learning detection, and research with Anybrain that has been in motion since the start. Embark also said it was testing a new kernel-level solution intended to improve both detection and precision, while keeping ban appeals in human hands rather than leaving them fully automated.

The studio has already taken other steps to close loopholes. It blocked a Steam Family Sharing exploit that let suspended accounts try to sidestep punishments, and said bans would now apply to all accounts tied together through Family Sharing. It has also issued enforcement actions and carried out ban waves, treating cheating as a live problem rather than a hypothetical one.

For players, the tradeoff is immediate and practical. If Denuvo Anti-Cheat does its job, honest squads get cleaner matchmaking, fewer suspicious deaths, and a fairer extraction loop where risk and reward still mean something. If it stumbles, or if it feels too intrusive, it adds another layer of distrust to a game that depends on confidence as much as gunskill. Embark’s same patch also added an option to block players after reporting, another sign the studio is still tightening the rules around how ARC Raiders handles bad actors.

The message from Embark is clear: fair play is no longer a side system in ARC Raiders, it is part of the game’s core infrastructure. After a launch that pulled in hundreds of thousands of players, that fight is now happening in plain sight.