Wardogs Sells 1.25 Million After a Don’t-Buy Campaign

Wardogs sold 1.25 million copies on its first day of Steam early access, after its studio spent August listing 10 reasons not to buy it. Bulkhead, the Derby team behind the 100-player shooter, priced the unfinished build at $39.99 in the US and £36.99 in the UK and said daily concurrent players would settle toward 3,000 to 5,000.

Servers filled anyway. By the first weekend Bulkhead was thanking players for a 400,000 peak, then setting a one-hour outage for September 14 to fix a browser it said it had rushed.

They Listed 10 Reasons Not to Buy Wardogs

On August 11 Bulkhead opened Steam pre-orders and posted a Steam news item walking through 10 reasons not to buy, covering early-access content, stair-stepped pricing, and long-term monetization. The same pitch is in a fifteen-minute warning video on the studio’s YouTube channel. The opening line tells players that most big-publisher marketing teams would never hand them 10 legitimate reasons to walk away.

The list was blunt. Early access would ship with 37 weapons and three maps, and players should not expect regular content drops while the team chased bugs, balance, and a new map. The US price started at $39.99, with a planned step to $49.99 as systems landed and $59.99 at version 1.0. “If the price sounds too high for an early-access game, please don’t buy it yet,” the video said.

Reason 3 was the player count. Bulkhead expected a launch spike, then a drop, and named a sustainable band of 3,000 to 5,000 daily concurrent players. Pre-orders also bought a closed beta on August 21-23, and the studio said it was fine to refund after that weekend if the build was not for you.

THE AUGUST WARNINGS AGAINST THE SEPTEMBER LAUNCH

The honest read is that the campaign was not a fake-out. Bulkhead named the holes, asked people to wait, and still watched the wishlist pile convert. The joke, if there is one, is on the warning, not on the people who ignored it.

What a 100-Player Match Looks Like

Wardogs is a 100-player three-team shooter set in derelict industrial mountains in Eastern Europe. Three sides fight for randomized 2x2km control zones inside larger maps. The team with the most players in the zone scores, and the first to 100 points wins. Steam’s store copy is clear that this is not a battle royale and not an extraction shooter.

Every player starts a run with $10,000 and buys a loadout, gear, and vehicles from that pot. Cash carries from match to match, so a fat wallet in the next round is part of the loop. Revives, lifts to the zone, and time on the point all pay. You can chase a hot zone for double cash, fly a helicopter as a taxi, build a forward base, or put an artillery tank on a town. Local voice chat is in the build, on the same list of caveats as gamepad support.

The launch trailer that went out with early access is a period piece on purpose. Shooter fans clocked it as a riff on Halo 3’s old Believe ad, which is why the film travelled faster than another slate of gun barrels. Consoles are in the same spot: PlayStation 5 and Xbox, dated 2028, no day on the calendar.

Launch Queues Turned the Store Page Mixed

Early access opened on September 10. Bulkhead’s own Steam news post that night put sales at 1.25 million copies and apologised for the delays in the same breath. Everplay, Team17’s parent, reported the day-one sales to the market the next morning and said the game had also passed 340,000 concurrent players on Steam. Mikkel Weider, everplay’s group chief executive, called the result a fantastic achievement by Bulkhead and Team17.

The concurrent figure was already past anything the closed tests had shown. A pre-launch test peaked at 245,118 players on Steam. The August closed beta, which Bulkhead and Team17 said drew nearly half a million people, was the dress rehearsal they had used to guess launch load. It was not enough. The studio let people in by waves, shipped a client hotfix for kicks and failed joins, and watched the store page sit on Mixed while queue posts piled up.

THE FIRST-WEEK BOARD

• Copies sold: 1.25 million on day one, posted by Bulkhead on Steam.
• Day-one concurrent: Over 340,000, in everplay’s September 11 notice.
• Later peak: 400,000 concurrent users, in Bulkhead’s Patch 0.11 notes.
• Reviews now: Very Positive, 85% of 30,227 English reviews, with 44,456 reviews across all languages.

Once people were in matches, the score recovered. English reviews flipped to Very Positive, and the remaining complaints clustered around logins, community servers, and the in-match economy rather than the gunfeel. Joe Brammer, Bulkhead’s chief executive, had already framed the sales number as a shock, not a target.

To cross a million copies sold as we launch into early access is mental. We’ve spent the last few months showing people exactly what Wardogs is, what it isn’t, and at one point literally gave everyone ten reasons not to buy it. We didn’t want people buying into blind hype.

Joe Brammer, CEO, Bulkhead

He added that the build is still early access, with things to fix, things to improve, and more to build, and asked players to keep sending the ridiculous moments.

The Last Shooter Ended in Kickstarter Refunds

Reason 7 on the August tape was Battalion 1944, later rebadged Battalion: Legacy. It was Bulkhead’s first multiplayer game, funded on Kickstarter in 2016 by 10,096 backers who pledged £317,281 against a £100,000 goal. Square Enix was in line to publish consoles, then the relationship broke, the console versions died, and the PC game faded.

In July 2023 Bulkhead and then-owner Splash Damage offered every Kickstarter backer a full refund, no questions on platform, pledge tier, or hours played. Brammer said the team had flown too close to the sun and tried more than it could handle, above all the missing console release. “Without that initial Kickstarter support, Bulkhead wouldn’t exist today,” he said at the time.

Putting that failure in a pre-order video was the point of the campaign. The studio that once had to write cheques to backers is now the studio writing patch notes for a 400,000-player peak. The risk did not vanish. It changed shape, from too few players to too many owners waiting on a slow drip.

Tencent Passed, Then the Staff Bought In

Wardogs did not come out of a quiet indie shed. Bulkhead, founded in 2015, had already shipped Pneuma: Breath of Life and The Turing Test before Battalion. Splash Damage bought the studio in 2022 while both were under Tencent after the Leyou deal. A licensed Transformers project was cancelled. Square Enix was already gone.

Tencent later sold Bulkhead. The buyer was a new holding company, Super Media Group, with Bulkhead bosses on the board. Everplay, the listed parent of Team17, took a 20% stake in that company in December 2025, valued at £2 million. Close to half of Bulkhead’s staff own stock in the vehicle. Team17 publishes the game.

The budget story around the spin-out is the other half of the don’t-buy tape. Bulkhead had pitched Wardogs at about £10 million to £12 million. The studio later said Tencent would not look at a game budgeted under £50 million and wanted to go bigger. The 100-player shooter that resulted is the smaller plan, now carrying a day-one audience that looks like the larger one Tencent wanted.

A 5,000-Player Plan Met 400,000 at Once

Four hundred thousand concurrent players is 80 times the top of the 3,000 to 5,000 band Bulkhead named in August. The studio did not pretend otherwise. Patch 0.11, posted ahead of a September 14 outage, opens by thanking players for that 400,000 peak, then admits the community-server browser was poor because the team rushed it.

📢 We are delivering a patch to improve our server browser experience. We acknowledge that we have let down growing communities and underdelivered on Community Servers.

By way of apology and to help seed and grow community servers, for the next week community servers will offer… pic.twitter.com/RGu7tdC11w

— WARDOGS (@WARDOGS) September 12, 2026

Community hosts are the people who keep a tactical shooter alive after the launch graph bends. Official matchmaking can hide a thin browser. A 100-player game with persistent cash cannot, because clans need a door they can find again after a map change. Bulkhead said server IDs had been wiping on restart. That is a small bug with a large social cost, and it is the kind of miss a 5,000-player plan would have papered over.

WHAT PATCH 0.11 CHANGES

• Two browsers: The front end splits into Community and Official so hosts are not buried under matchmaking.
• Findable rooms: Text search, persistent server IDs, and a show empty/full toggle land on the community side.
• Apology bonus: Community matches pay 5% extra end-of-match cash for a week.
• Asia capacity: More servers in the Asian region after demand there outran the original footprint.
• Economy bans: Cash exploits get timed bans and a wipe to zero cash and XP; tutorialising those exploits is treated as a permanent-ban offence.

The ban note is the other tell. Cash persists across matches, so a dupe is not a private cheat, it is inflation in a shared pot. Bulkhead said it will come down hard, and that XP-farm servers are already being watched. Launch-week chat had already moved from “let me in” to gold prices, kit stripping, and team kills, which is what a live economy sounds like once the queue breaks.

Consoles Are Due in 2028, After a Slow Drip

Steam’s early-access FAQ from the studio says Wardogs should stay in early access for around 1 to 2 years, and that the team does not want to live there longer. The full game is supposed to add maps, weapons, vehicles (fighter jets are named), deeper progression, and a seasonal metagame. Price rises are tied to that work. That is not a live-service calendar of weekly drops. The August video said the opposite out loud.

Wishlists had already advertised the scale. The game hit 100,000 Steam wishlists three days after its February reveal, 500,000 in May, and 1 million in August, the same month as the don’t-buy tape. Those 1 million wishlists became 1.25 million copies on September 10. PlayStation 5 and Xbox still sit in 2028. Anyone buying a pad copy is walking into a PC game that will have had a year or two of patches, economy fights, and whatever is left of this launch crowd.

THE ROAD INTO EARLY ACCESS

1. February 5, 2026: Team17 and Bulkhead announce Wardogs as a tactical all-out warfare shooter.
2. May 2026: Steam wishlists pass 500,000.
3. August 11, 2026: Pre-orders open, wishlists sit at 1 million, and the 10-reasons video goes up.
4. August 21-23, 2026: Closed beta weekend for pre-orders, with refunds encouraged.
5. September 10, 2026: Steam early access launches; Bulkhead posts 1.25 million copies sold.
6. September 14, 2026: Servers due down for about an hour from 08:00 UTC for Patch 0.11.

Bulkhead set that outage for 08:00 UTC on September 14, about an hour, with the community-server cash bonus running for a week after the browser split.