Wardogs, the upcoming military FPS from The Turing Test and Battalion: Legacy developer Bulkhead, is now launching in Steam early access ahead of schedule "later this summer." Ahead of the launch, the studio's gone ahead and taken the inevitable Steam player count discourse out back to tell it about the rabbits.
In a Twitter statement that initially scared players with its "studio apologizes for delay or layoffs" formatting, Bulkhead says, "Our goal was never to be the biggest FPS." Rather, "it was to build a healthy, sustainable community and to learn from past mistakes and apply those lessons to Wardogs."
Bulkhead's history is one of ups and downs and maybe a few more downs, beginning with its first Steam release, Pneuma: Breath of Life, an abstract first-person adventure. The puzzles of The Turing Test won it many fans, but Battalion: Legacy's stated goal of recapturing "the core of classic shooters in the final iteration of Battalion 1944" proved to be a partial success at best, earning mixed ratings as a free game. The studio's most recent release, Killrun, was a short, cheap game that likewise saw mixed reviews.
With Wardogs, Bulkhead's pulling out all the stops, but also keeping expectations in check. The devs don't expect to release the next Battlefield 6.
"We have planned to sustain a community of 3,000 to 5,000 players," the studio says, "and anything beyond that is a bonus."
Here's the key line: "Player numbers will undoubtedly decline significantly after the Early Access release... but that will not deter us."
Steam provides some of the only publicly available data points for many game engagement metrics, and the likes of SteamDB can yield useful and interesting stats, but a culture of obsession and competition that seems hellbent on willfully misreading those stats has poisoned a lot of online discourse. I think people have also hammered some very unrealistic player counts into their head and forgotten what a flop actually looks like, so Bulkhead's ballpark estimate of 3,000 to 5,000 long-term is useful.
Internally, Wardogs is apparently doing so well, with "thousands of testers" reportedly giving "very positive" feedback and saying "performance and optimization has exceeded their expectations," that Bulkhead is pushing to release the game sooner.
"See you at the Future Game Show, 7pm UTC on Saturday June 6th," the statement concludes.
Hey, wait a minute, that's us. Here's how to watch the Future Games Show Summer Showcase.
