It has been a week since Wardogs opened its doors on Steam Early Access, on 10 September, and in that week Bulkhead’s tactical shooter has sold two million copies, pulled more than 400,000 people into its servers at once, and then, just as the celebrating should have started, handed the internet an argument about crunch that its own CEO walked straight into.
The numbers came first, and they came fast. On launch day Bulkhead posted to Steam that the game had moved 1.25 million copies, thanking players for their patience and apologising for the delays – “We’re watching everything, monitoring servers, and enjoying watching you play,” the post read, which, if you have ever sat in a queue on a big launch night, tells you roughly what that first evening was like. Inside a week the official account on X had a bigger number to share: “2 MILLION COPIES SOLD. Thank you all. Beyond humbled.” VGC put the concurrent player peak at over 400,000, which is the kind of figure you do not often see attached to a game still wearing an Early Access badge.
What you’re actually buying, if you have not been caught up in it yet, is a big-team shooter built around a single, stubborn idea, 100 players split across three teams, fighting over a Control Zone on destructible industrial maps of two kilometres by two, with cash as the thing that decides what you can carry into the next fight. The Steam page lists building and destruction, vehicles and proximity voice chat, it is developed by Bulkhead and published by Team17, and in the US it’s listed at US$39.99 for the standard edition and US$49.99 for the Supporter Edition, while a local price was not something we could confirm from the listing. A console release is planned, but not until 2028.
The more interesting story, though, is how close it came to never shipping at all. Speaking to Christopher Dring at The Game Business on 15 September, Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer laid out a history that does not read like the lead-up to a hit, a game that had been backed by Tencent before Tencent walked away, a team of around 100 people, and a studio that had been cutting staff on a schedule. “For the last six years, we have made redundancies every single year, about 20% of the company,” Brammer said, adding that “this will be the first year we haven’t done it.” By his account, the team was facing the prospect of redundancy again as recently as December 2025, and still he is careful about how he talks about the old partner: “We had a great time with Tencent, and this game wouldn’t be possible without them.”
Pre-orders alone reached a million copies, according to the interview, and the launch was, in Brammer’s words, “a lot bigger than we expected,” which goes some way to explaining why he also admitted, “We haven’t had much time to celebrate.”
Then there’s the part everyone’s been sharing. On how the game got over the line, Brammer didn’t dress it up, and it is worth reading his words rather than anyone’s summary of them: “For the last three months, Wardogs has been more important than a lot of [our team’s] family lives,” he said, and later, “We always try and avoid crunch, but it’s going to happen.” PC Gamer ran with it under a headline saying he won’t hire developers who aren’t on board with crunch, and that is the version that has been doing the rounds since, with the whole studio getting December off being the part that tends to get left out of the retelling.
He was just as blunt about the way Bulkhead talks to its players, which, for a studio whose marketing has leaned hard on straight talk, is a strange thing to hear its boss say out loud. “We’re not transparent, and we’re not honest. We’re being clear,” Brammer told The Game Business, arguing that there are things the studio will share and things it won’t, and that saying so is the point.
For anyone who’s been around long enough to watch a few breakout shooters come and go, the pattern is a familiar one, a smaller studio finds an audience nobody predicted, the numbers arrive faster than the servers can handle, and the conversation shifts from the game to the people who made it within days. Where Wardogs goes from here depends on whether Bulkhead can grow a team that has spent six years shrinking, keep 400,000 people interested through an Early Access roadmap, and do it without leaning on the same months it has just asked its staff to give up – and none of that gets settled on a sales chart, it gets settled over the next year of patches, in a community that has already shown it will turn up.
The Game Business – Joe Brammer interview, WARDOGS on X – 2 million copies sold, Steam – 1.25 million copies sold announcement, Steam – WARDOGS store page, VGC – concurrent players and console plans, PC Gamer – crunch comments