One of the best launches of the year.
Bulkhead's 100-player shooter released on early access on 10 September at 39.99 dollars, sold 1.25 million copies in 24 hours, and hit 400,196 concurrent players on Steam over the weekend.
Steam's third-biggest new release of 2026 by concurrent peak, behind only huge titles such as Subnautica 2 and Slay the Spire II, both of which were full launches rather than early access. On the day it peaked, only Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2 had more players than Wardogs
Fun fact it also launched the same day as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's early access beta, and beat it on Steam.
The numbers nobody expected
Game director Howard Philpott named the studio's sustainable target before launch was 3,000 to 5,000 daily concurrent players/
The first closed beta in August peaked at 105,000 players. The second beta was in early September, hit 245,118. When that happened, CEO Joe Brammer told people to expect a decline since hype will fade adding "this doesn't make it a bad game or even a problem."
Then launch produced eighty times their first projections and broke the systems.
What actually happened on day one
Queue positions ran past 300,000 in servers. Players waited 40 minutes to several hours, then got a crash or an Access Denied error at the end of waiting.
The cause was normal Valve was rate-limiting Bulkhead's login requests, a cap AAA studios typically get raised in advance. No one was expecting this.
The Steam score fell to 57%, into Mixed and it was because of these issues.
The recovery
The company posted updates through the night, took responsibility and shipped a hotfix for failed joins and disconnects. By the following night the official account showed zero players queued.
The score climbed back to 76 to 78% across more than 37,600 reviews.
What is Wardogs
Three teams with up to 100 players, fighting over a central zone on a 256 square kilometre destructible map in industrial Eastern European terrain. Ground vehicles and helicopters are plenty.
The economy is the angle. You buy loadouts, weapons and vehicles with accumulated cash before each round, and team actions like reviving squadmates, holding the zone and transporting allies can generate income. Coordination is incentivised rather than enforced players have a reason to play cooperatively.
Six classes, a traditional server browser instead of skill-based matchmaking, no battle pass, no microtransactions during early access, cosmetics earned in-game. Built on Bulkhead's own War Dynamics Framework over Unreal Engine.
The game is a mixture of several concepts executed with an economy angle, every bullet and every vehicle is valuable.
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