Is Arc Raiders crossplay explained for console and PC squads

Is arc raiders crossplay

Arc Raiders is being developed by Embark Studios as a free-to-play, third-person cooperative extraction shooter set on a hostile, machine-dominated Earth. Because the game is built around three-player squads who drop into the surface, fight ARC machines, scavenge supplies, and extract together, the question of whether squads can mix players on different platforms comes up very early in any group planning to play. The honest answer right now is that full crossplay between PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S is the stated direction, but the rollout is gradual, opt-in or beta-gated on console, and may be limited by region and platform certification windows.

This page is written for squads and solo players who want a single, careful reference for the current crossplay state of Arc Raiders. It separates what Embark Studios and its publishing partners have already confirmed from what is still placeholder, beta-gated, or only inferred from prior studio practice. It also covers the related questions that always travel with crossplay: cross-progression, cross-buy, account linking, input parity, voice chat, party formation, and the technical reasons a cooperative extraction shooter chooses a particular matchmaking model in the first place.

You will not find speculation dressed up as fact here. Where a feature is platform-locked, region-locked, or still listed as “coming soon” by the studio, that limitation is named. Where a feature has been confirmed in an official post, an interview, or a closed technical test build, the source is named and the claim is restricted to what that source actually said. The goal is for you to read the page, decide whether your squad can play together on day one, and know which question to revisit when Embark publishes the next update.

What Embark Studios has officially confirmed about crossplay

Embark Studios has, in multiple public statements and on the official Arc Raiders site, positioned the game as a cross-platform experience from the outset. The studio’s stated model is that PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S players can be placed into the same squads and matches. That is a meaningful commitment, because a free-to-play cooperative extraction shooter lives or dies by queue times, and a fragmented player base would hurt matchmaking for every platform. The official ARC Raiders Wikipedia summary already records crossplay as part of the planned feature set rather than a stretch goal.

Two practical caveats follow from that commitment. First, “planned” and “available on day one of the live release” are not the same thing, and Embark has been careful to describe console crossplay as part of a phased rollout tied to testing. Second, on consoles, crossplay is almost always an opt-in setting rather than a forced default, both because of platform-holder policy and because many console players prefer to keep their matchmaking pools separate unless they actively turn crossplay on. The PC build has generally been the most permissive, while PlayStation and Xbox require the user to enable cross-network play in the game’s settings or in the platform-level privacy menu.

For squad planning, the practical summary of the official position is straightforward: crossplay is the intended baseline, console access during the pre-launch period has been gated, and the production release is the point at which the broadest pool is expected to open up. Anyone building a regular squad should design around that intended baseline while preparing for the possibility that a single member’s platform toggles or regional certification delay could split the group during the first weeks of live service.

Platform-by-platform crossplay status

Arc Raiders is being released on three platform families: PC (through Steam and the Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The crossplay picture is not identical on each, because testing access, certification, and platform-holder rules differ. The table below summarizes the current, source-confirmed position for each platform, with the columns a squad actually needs to make a decision.

The practical reading of this table is that squads who keep at least one member on PC will generally have the smoothest experience during the early period, because PC has carried the technical tests and the broadest pre-launch access. Console-only squads should expect crossplay to be available on or close to the production launch, but should not be surprised if a single setting toggle, a regional certification delay, or a phased rollout leaves them in a platform-restricted pool for the first days of live service.

Cross-progression, cross-buy, and account linking

Crossplay and cross-progression are two separate engineering problems, and Arc Raiders treats them that way. Crossplay is about who you can match with; cross-progression is about whether the gear, cosmetics, currencies, and unlocks you earn on one platform follow you to another. Embark Studios has a strong track record on cross-progression from its earlier work on the live ecosystem, and the official messaging for Arc Raiders treats cross-progression as a planned feature tied to a single player account rather than to a storefront identity.

Concretely, the intended model is that your progress is bound to your Embark account, and that account is the same across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Sign in once, and the same character, the same stash, the same unlocks, and the same progression should be reachable from any of those platforms. That is a much cleaner experience than the older generation of free-to-play shooters, where progress on PlayStation stayed on PlayStation and a player who switched to PC had to start over. It also means squad members who sometimes play on console and sometimes on PC will not be punished with duplicate progression.

Cross-buy, by contrast, is a more limited concept. Arc For additional context, Raiders is free-to-play on every confirmed platform, so the question of “do I have to buy it twice” mostly does not apply. What does matter is whether any optional premium currency, cosmetic pass, or founder-style pack purchased on one storefront is honored on the others. Embark has indicated that account-bound entitlements will be honored across platforms under the same player account, but as with any free-to-play launch, players should read the storefront’s purchase screen for the specific item to confirm the entitlement is described as account-bound rather than platform-bound before assuming a single purchase will appear everywhere.

How crossplay is enabled in the menus

Even when a shooter supports crossplay at the engine level, the actual experience is shaped by the menu path required to turn it on. Arc Raiders is no exception. The crossplay toggle typically lives in one of three places, depending on the platform and the build: the in-game settings menu, the platform-level privacy menu, or both. The default in many modern shooters is that crossplay is on, but it is always worth checking before assuming an empty queue is a server problem rather than a setting problem.

• In-game settings: On all three platforms, look under a Settings or Gameplay menu for an option labeled Cross-Platform Play, Cross-Network Play, or similar. Set it to On to be matched with players on other platforms. Set it to Off to be matched only with players on your own platform family.
• PlayStation 5 privacy menu: Sony exposes a Cross-Play setting under Settings, then Users and Accounts, then Privacy. If that toggle is off, the PS5 client will refuse cross-network matchmaking regardless of what the in-game setting says.
• Xbox network privacy menu: On Xbox, the equivalent is under Settings, then Account, then Privacy and Online Safety, then Xbox Live Privacy. Cross-Network Play must be set to Allow for crossplay to work even if the in-game toggle is on.
• PC clients (Steam, Epic): The PC clients do not require a separate platform-level toggle for crossplay, but the launcher should be online and the user must be signed in to the same Embark account on each device they play from.

If a squad member is in a mixed platform group and cannot join the party, the first diagnostic is always to check both the in-game toggle and the platform-level privacy menu. The second is to confirm the party leader’s crossplay setting actually permits joining from other platforms, because some shooters default to a “crossplay on for matching, but party invitations only from same platform” behavior that surprises players who did not read the small print.

Input parity and the aim-assist conversation

Any crossplay conversation in a shooter eventually reaches the input parity question. The concern is legitimate: a controller player and a mouse-and-keyboard player have very different physical input devices, and the balance of a duel can be affected by aim-assist strength, sensitivity curves, and the precision ceiling of each input. Embark Studios has not, to the studio’s public credit, pretended that this question does not exist. The development team has talked about input-based matchmaking, sensitivity normalization, and aim-assist tuning as active areas of design for the game.

For most players, the practical answer is that mouse-and-keyboard and controller players will share the same general pool, with the studio reserving the right to introduce input-based matchmaking pools or to tune aim assist if data shows a clear imbalance. That last clause is important: the studio has not committed to a permanent input-separated queue, and the early live service period is the most likely window for the matchmaking rules to change as telemetry comes in.

What that means for a real squad is that the right framing is not “are controller players at a permanent disadvantage” but “is my squad willing to play the live game during a period when balance tuning is still moving.” Squads that include both input types should expect to revisit the conversation after the first major patch and after the first seasonal update, because the studio will be acting on the same data the squad is generating.

Why a free-to-play extraction shooter depends on crossplay

Crossplay is not a marketing checkbox for a free-to-play extraction shooter. It is a load-bearing design decision. The genre depends on short, intense sessions, on squads finding matches quickly, and on the social loop of inviting a friend who happens to own a different platform. If a developer ships a three-player extraction shooter without crossplay, the player base on the smaller platform can quietly rot: queue times climb, the friends who were on the other platform drift away, and the remaining player base feeds a feedback loop that ends with the smaller pool being abandoned entirely.

Arc Raiders is also unusual in that the studio behind it, Embark Studios, has a parent organization, Nexon, with extensive live-service operational experience. That context matters because a live extraction shooter does not simply launch; it has to be operated across seasons, balance passes, content drops, and platform updates. A unified cross-platform player base makes every one of those operations easier to plan. The studio can tune difficulty, drop events, and adjust economy with a single population in mind, rather than maintaining three parallel balances that drift apart over time.

For players, the consequence is that crossplay is very unlikely to be removed once it is enabled. Studios that ship crossplay in a live game almost never turn it off, because doing so re-fragments the player base and the operational math stops working. Squads can plan around the assumption that crossplay, once on, will stay on. The much more realistic scenario is that crossplay settings will get more granular over time, not less, with options like input-based matchmaking, region locks, and friend-only matchmaking sitting alongside the master crossplay toggle.

What is still unconfirmed, beta-gated, or in flux

Even with crossplay as the official baseline, several pieces of the cross-platform picture are not yet fully settled. Listing them honestly is more useful than pretending they are confirmed, because each one can change the practical answer to “is arc raiders crossplay” for a specific squad.

• Day-one console crossplay versus phased rollout: Embark has been careful to describe console crossplay as a planned feature rather than a day-one guarantee. The most likely outcome is that console crossplay is on at production launch, but a cautious reader should watch for any platform-specific delay note in the patch notes.
• Region pairing rules: A free-to-play shooter with a global audience has to decide whether matchmaking pairs North American players with European players, Asian players with Oceanic players, and so on. Embark has not, in public materials, given a clear regional matrix for the live release. Squads that span continents should expect higher latency for some pairings and may want to coordinate play times that respect each member’s region.
• Cross-progression edge cases: The intended model is single-account progression, but the real world of storefront integrations always has edge cases: items bought before a player linked an account, items granted through a platform-specific promotional event, items that are gated to a specific storefront for legal reasons. Squads should expect the studio to publish a knowledge-base article on the first day of live service that documents the migration path for any progress that did not auto-link.
• Crossplay in the first technical test builds: Early technical tests have historically been PC-only, with console crossplay being introduced in later waves. A player who joins a very early test on console should not assume that the matchmaking behavior they see is the same one that will exist at production launch.

None of these caveats are reasons to assume the worst. They are reasons to read the official patch notes on the day a build is updated, because the most reliable way to know whether crossplay is working in a specific session is to look at the matchmaking telemetry the studio publishes, not to extrapolate from prior studio practice.

Troubleshooting common crossplay problems

Even when a shooter supports crossplay at the engine level, real squads run into real problems. The list below covers the most common failure modes and the order in which they are usually worth checking. The order matters because some of the diagnostics take seconds, while others require a friend on the other platform to be available, and you do not want to burn a friend’s evening on a setting that takes ten seconds to fix.

1. Confirm the crossplay toggle is on in-game. On every platform, the first thing to check is the in-game crossplay setting. If it is off, the player will only see other players on the same platform, and a cross-platform squad will appear to be empty even when the server is healthy.
2. Confirm the platform-level privacy menu permits cross-network play. PlayStation and Xbox each have a privacy menu that can override the in-game setting. If the platform-level setting is set to “friends only” or “blocked,” cross-platform invitations will fail silently.
3. Confirm all squad members are on the same Embark account region. If a player created their account in a different storefront region, the matchmaking system may place them in a regional pool that does not overlap with the rest of the squad, and the squad will see the party as “not joinable” without an obvious error.
4. Confirm the party leader has crossplay on. Some shooters let a party leader match with crossplay on while restricting party invitations to same-platform friends. If the leader has the stricter setting on, the squad will be unable to form, even if every member’s individual crossplay setting is on.
5. Confirm network conditions. Crossplay does not change the underlying latency. A player whose connection to a given data center is poor will still feel that poor connection in a crossplay match, and the squad may mistakenly blame crossplay for what is actually a routing or ISP problem.
6. Confirm the game client is up to date. A squad that mixes an updated PC client with a console client that has not yet pulled the latest patch can be in different build versions. The matchmaking system can refuse to put them in the same session, because the build hashes no longer match.

For most squads, the first three items on this list resolve the issue. The remaining items are the ones that take longer to diagnose, which is why they appear at the bottom rather than the top. A useful habit is to check the simple toggles first, then escalate to the slower diagnostics, rather than the other way around.

How a mixed squad should plan around the live release

For a squad that wants to be ready on day one of the live release, the practical plan is less about crossplay itself and more about the supporting decisions that make a cross-platform group run smoothly. The list below is a squad-readiness checklist that has been organized so each item can be resolved before launch night, when server load tends to be highest and small problems compound.

• Create or link a single Embark account per player. Cross-progression depends on every squad member having a stable account they can sign in to from any platform. The launch window is the worst time to discover that a player was playing on a guest account and cannot carry progress forward.
• Decide a platform-level region per player. A squad that wants to play together should align on a region, even if the alignment is “we will all play on the North American data center, even if two of us live in Europe.” Misaligned regions are the most common silent cause of “I cannot join your party” errors at launch.
• Bookmark the official Arc Raiders status page. The studio will publish maintenance windows, hotfix notes, and known-issue lists on a status page. During the first week of live service, the most common cause of “crossplay is broken” is actually “the studio is rolling out a fix,” and the status page is the fastest way to tell the difference.
• Agree on voice chat and party tooling. A crossplay squad usually has a third-party voice channel, because in-game voice is often the first feature to be regionally gated or to be optional. The squad should agree on the channel and the backup channel before the first session, rather than during it.
• Pick a primary and a secondary platform per player. The player who is on a flaky Wi-Fi connection should know in advance that they will be the first to swap platforms if the squad needs to keep the queue moving. Planning for that swap in advance is faster than improvising it during a failed match.

The first week of a live extraction shooter is a stressful, high-traffic period, and the squads that have the most fun are usually the ones that made these small decisions before the first session rather than during it. Crossplay is the headline feature, but the supporting decisions are what let a mixed squad actually play together.

What to revisit after the first major patch

Crossplay in a live game is a moving target. Embark Studios will be reading telemetry, responding to player feedback, and adjusting matchmaking, input parity, and party rules. The practical advice is to set a reminder to revisit the crossplay picture after each major patch, and to treat any new toggle the studio adds as a deliberate response to player behavior. The list below names the patch-time questions that are worth asking, and the answer that would justify updating the squad’s plan.

The honest version of the crossplay answer is not a single sentence. It is a small set of decisions that a squad makes, revisits after each patch, and adjusts as the studio publishes new data. The most useful thing a player can do is to keep the squad’s expectations in line with the most recent official post, rather than the most recent rumor.

Frequently asked questions

Is Arc Raiders crossplay between PC and console?

Yes, crossplay between PC and console is the stated baseline for Arc Raiders. Embark Studios has positioned the game as a cross-platform experience, with PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S players intended to share the same matchmaking pool. On consoles, crossplay is typically opt-in through the in-game settings or the platform-level privacy menu, so each player needs to confirm the toggle is enabled in their build.

Will Arc Raiders have cross-progression?

Cross-progression is part of the planned feature set. Progress is intended to be bound to a single Embark account, so the same character, stash, and unlocks should follow a player between PC and the supported consoles. Players who want to be certain on launch day should make sure every account they use is signed in to the same Embark account, and they should read the launch-day knowledge-base article for any edge cases involving pre-link progress.

Do I need to buy Arc Raiders twice to play on PC and PS5?

No. Arc Raiders is a free-to-play title on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, so there is no second purchase required. Any optional cosmetic packs or premium entitlements you buy should be honored across platforms under the same player account, but it is still worth reading the specific product page for each item to confirm that the entitlement is described as account-bound rather than platform-bound before assuming it will appear on every device.

Is crossplay on by default in Arc Raiders?

In the PC builds used during the technical tests, crossplay has generally been on by default. On console, the setting is more often opt-in because of platform-holder rules, and the player needs to enable crossplay either in the in-game settings or in the platform-level privacy menu. The exact default can change between builds, so the safest habit is to verify the toggle on every device you play from.

Can I party with a friend on a different platform?

Yes, cross-platform parties are part of the intended feature set. The most common reason a cross-platform party fails to form is that one member’s crossplay setting is off, or that a platform-level privacy menu is blocking cross-network play. The party leader’s setting also matters, because some shooters default to allowing crossplay for matching but restricting party invitations to the same platform.

Is there input-based matchmaking in Arc Raiders?

The studio has discussed input parity, aim-assist tuning, and sensitivity normalization as active areas of design, but the live game is not expected to ship with a permanent input-separated queue. The more realistic scenario is that the studio will tune aim assist and may introduce input-based matchmaking pools as an opt-in if telemetry shows a clear imbalance. Squads with both input types should expect the matchmaking behavior to be reviewed after the first major patch.

Does Arc Raiders support crossplay on Steam and Epic?

Yes, the stated crossplay model treats PC as a single population, with Steam and Epic Games Store players in the same matchmaking pool. That matters because the smaller of two PC storefronts would otherwise face longer queue times. The studio’s intent is to keep the PC player base unified, while also matching PC players with the console player base, so that no single storefront is fragmented out of the live ecosystem.

Will I be able to turn off crossplay if I do not want it?

Yes, the crossplay toggle in the in-game settings is expected to give players the option to match only with players on their own platform family. On console, the platform-level privacy menu provides a second switch. Squads that prefer a same-platform pool can keep the toggle off, but they should be aware that doing so will reduce the number of available players and can lengthen queue times, especially during off-peak hours.

Is regional crossplay supported in Arc Raiders?

The studio has not published a detailed regional matchmaking matrix for the live release. The general expectation for a free-to-play extraction shooter is that matchmaking pairs players within a geographic region to keep latency reasonable, with cross-region play available when regional pools are thin. Squads that span continents should expect higher latency for some pairings and may want to coordinate play times that respect each member’s region.

Where can I check the official Arc Raiders crossplay status?

The official Arc Raiders site, the studio’s social channels, and the in-game news feed are the most reliable sources. Embark Studios also publishes patch notes and known-issue lists, and a third-party preview such as the Game Informer preview of Arc Raiders can give a useful read of how the studio is framing the live game. For the most current answer to “is arc raiders crossplay,” the official channels should always be treated as the source of truth.