Wardogs is one of the loudest launches of the autumn on Steam, and its studio knows it. Bulkhead’s tactical shooter, which entered early access on 10 September, passed 2 million copies sold in under a week. Yet the studio’s boss is already warning that the team won’t be able to keep up with demand for content. That kind of candour is rare this early on, and it says a lot about how Bulkhead is approaching the months ahead. Here is where the game stands, and what its chief expects next.
At a glance
Wardogs announced 2 million copies sold on 15 September, five days after entering early access.
Bulkhead boss Joe Brammer admits the studio won’t have enough content to keep up with demand.
The studio is aiming for a 1.0 release on consoles, announced for 2028.
Two million copies sold in five days
The figures come straight from the studio. On the official Wardogs news feed on Steam, Bulkhead announced 1.25 million copies sold on 11 September, the day after launch, then 2 million on 15 September. In between, the studio thanked players for pushing the peak to 400,000 concurrent players.
The crowds are still there. Tracking site Steam Charts recorded 134,891 players online on Tuesday 22 September at 09:01 BST, with a 24-hour peak of 320,371 and an all-time record of 402,686. Twelve days in, the player base is still huge.
The concept goes some way to explaining the rush. Wardogs pits 100 players split into three teams against each other for control of a zone on a destructible battlefield, set in the industrial mountains of Eastern Europe. The studio openly claims the legacy of Arma’s King of the Hill mode, a mod it says it developed alongside the original creators. The game sells for €39.99 on Steam and is published by Team17.
The studio laid out the rules back in February, in a post on the same Steam page. The three teams fight for a 2 km by 2 km control zone, placed at random on a 256 km² map. The team with the most players inside the zone scores points, and the first to reach 100 points wins the match. The game also leans on a system where teamwork earns in-game cash, with a wide range of roles: close-quarters combat, sniping, medic, building, logistics and artillery.
The hype was visible well before launch. Bulkhead announced 1 million Steam wishlists on 14 August, six months after revealing the game. Community servers, run through approved hosting partners, were also part of the package from day one.
Launch day itself was not entirely smooth. On 10 September, Bulkhead pushed a stability hotfix to deal with players unable to join servers or being kicked mid-match, and then let people back in through the login queue in controlled batches. On 12 September, the studio announced a further patch to improve the server browser, deployed during maintenance on 14 September. None of that slowed sales down, but it shows how much strain the servers were under from the first hours.
Joe Brammer warns Wardogs will run short of content
This is where the studio’s message takes you by surprise. In an interview with GamesRadar+, Joe Brammer, executive director on Wardogs and CEO of Bulkhead, admits the team never planned for an audience this size. “We weren’t making it for this size audience,” he says, adding that the studio would have been happy with less.
He goes further still. “We’re not going to have enough content for people, and we’re not going to be able to keep up with the demand,” he admits. Brammer accepts that Bulkhead cannot please everyone, and that the team has to pick its battles to stay efficient.
He doesn’t frame it as a disaster, though. In his view, players will still have plenty of fun, and the studio’s focus is on growing the game towards its 1.0 launch on console. Bulkhead’s launch post on Steam indeed announces that the game is coming to consoles in 2028.
A drop in players the studio has already priced in
GamesRadar+ compares the situation to ARC Raiders, which peaked very early before settling into a smaller but loyal community. It is a telling parallel, because Bulkhead seems to have accepted that scenario before it even happens.
In practice, some of the players who arrived on the launch wave may drift away if the pace of new content doesn’t suit them. That happens to almost every game that starts this strongly, and Wardogs probably won’t escape it. Announcing the decline early changes how it will be read. A studio that warned its players will have an easier time explaining a curve that heads back down.
Brammer has also said that balance fixes are high on the to-do list. It remains to be seen how often Bulkhead will ship updates during early access, and whether this openness will be enough to keep the community patient until 1.0. We recently covered another explosive start on Steam, with Aniimo passing 160,000 players despite mixed reviews.
To see what’s landing over the next few weeks, the Hitbox release calendar lists every date with its official source.