Wardogs Cashes Its King of the Hill Bet at 1.5 Million

Bulkhead’s Wardogs sold 1.5 million copies after Steam early access opened on September 10, with more than 340,000 people playing at once. The Team17-published tactical shooter is still early access and still PC-only.

Three teams fight over a moving 2 by 2 km control zone, and leftover cash carries into the next match. Studio CEO Joe Brammer spent months telling people not to buy it.

1.5 Million Copies, Still Early Access

The figure in Bulkhead’s Launch Day Recap, posted on September 11, is 1.5 million sales. A Steam news post the night before had already put the count at 1.25 million. everplay group plc, which holds a stake in Super Media Group, Bulkhead’s parent, exceeded one million copies on day one and more than 340,000 people on Steam at the same time, and will talk about the rest in interim results on September 15.

Mikkel Weider, everplay’s group chief executive, called the day-one million “a truly fantastic achievement by Bulkhead and Team17.” The store still prices the game at $39.99, with a $49.99 Supporter Edition. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions are dated 2028. Steam Deck is listed as Unsupported.

LAUNCH SNAPSHOT

• Latest sales: 1.5 million copies, from Bulkhead’s September 11 recap.
• Peak presence: Over 340,000 people on Steam, per everplay’s September 11 filing.
• English reviews: 83 percent positive from 24,171 ratings, labeled Very Positive.
• All languages: 35,459 ratings, still labeled Mostly Positive.

Those review labels split for a reason. English owners who got in after the hotfix are happier than the global pile that sat in a login queue on September 10. The game is still early access, and Bulkhead says that window should last about 1 to 2 years, with the price likely to rise when the full version ships.

Cash Carries Over, Classes Do Not

The Steam page puts up to 100 players across three teams on a destructible Eastern European industrial map. The mode is King of the Hill. A 2 by 2 km control zone can land anywhere on the larger map, and the team with the most people inside it scores. First to 100 points wins.

There are no fixed classes. Each life starts at a shop. Every player account opens once with $10,000, then buys a kit: guns, gear, gadgets, a vehicle if the bankroll can take it. Die and you buy again. The money does not refill on death, and it does not reset when the match ends, so a tank that wins you the hill can leave you broke for the next one.

HOW THE HILL PAYS

• The zone: Holding the control area is the scoring job and a cash job at the same time.
• Logistics: Ferrying teammates to the hill, including by helicopter, is paid work.
• Revives: Picking a downed ally up puts money in the account.
• Kills: Taking enemies out still pays, and it also thins the other two teams’ numbers in the zone.

Brammer has called that loop “selfish teamwork”: a sniper farming the edge of the zone is still standing on the objective. The store copy is blunter still, and it is the design bet in one line. “This is not another ‘Battle Royale’. This is not another ‘Extraction Shooter’.”

The live complaint that replaced the queue is the other half of that economy. Hit registration on European servers is getting described as blood and impact audio with no damage, especially on snipers, and official servers are drawing cheater reports even with Steam listing Elytra kernel-level anti-cheat. A mode that makes every bullet and every revive a bank transaction falls apart if those two systems lie.

Joe Brammer Listed Reasons to Stay Away

Bulkhead did not sell this as an unfinished live-service that would grow into something else. Brammer’s pre-launch line, repeated when the million-copy mark hit, was that the studio had spent months saying what Wardogs is and is not.

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

The “ten reasons” tape was a warning about the present build: no flood of new maps and guns in the first stretch, a focus on fixing the core, and a request that people who wanted a finished shooter wait. An eleventh-reason follow-up sat on the official account two days before launch. The joke in the launch trailer is older than that. It borrows the cadence of Halo 3’s Believe commercial, which is the punchline inside “play like you used to.”

Brammer has also said Tencent, during an earlier chapter, would not look at a UK game under £50 million, and that Wardogs was “too big” in the wrong way for that mandate. Bulkhead spun out under Super Media Group instead, with Team17 publishing and everplay taking a stake. The million-copy filing is the first public receipt on that split.

Inside the Studio on Launch Night

Early access went live on September 10. The servers did not. Login queues stacked up, matches dropped people, and Bulkhead took the game down, then fed players back in waves after a hotfix for join failures, mid-match kicks and those queues. The official account posted an apology the same night, then the 1.25 million sales note.

The recap film from inside the studio, posted on September 11 with no PR pass, is the cleaner record of that night. Staff are short on sleep. Sales are “through the roof.” And a human still has to approve anti-cheat bans, which is how the streamer Summit1g got banned instead of the cheater on his stream. Brammer’s on-camera verdict on that staffer is not a press quote.

WARDOGS launched on Steam Early Access yesterday.

This is what it looked like from inside the studio.
No PR pass, no tidying. Just what actually happened.

Thank you. We'll see you in-game this weekend, and then back to work on Monday to prepare for our next update. pic.twitter.com/SHO7zHrZZ9

— WARDOGS (@WARDOGS) September 11, 2026

The recap ends on the 1.5 million figure and a plan to play through the first weekend, then go back to work on Monday. That is the honest shape of the bet now. The copies are sold. The hill still has to hold a population that did not exist on the old closed tests, and it has to do it without a published content roadmap, which Bulkhead has refused to post on purpose.

What Valheim 1.0 Adds

A day before Wardogs opened, Iron Gate and Coffee Stain Publishing shipped Valheim 1.0, the Viking survival game that went into early access on February 2, 2021. That is five years and seven months in the same Steam program Wardogs just entered. Lifetime sales were put above 17 million copies when 1.0 was announced.

The 1.0 drop is the Deep North, the last planned biome: ice, snow, new weapons and armor, new tools, new creatures, new build pieces, and an animated intro. PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 versions arrive with it, with crossplay across PC, Xbox, PS5 and Switch 2 for 1 to 10 players. Saves do not follow you everywhere. Xbox and PC progress only sync if the PC copy is launched from the Microsoft Store.

THE 1.0 PACKAGE

• Price: Iron Gate’s FAQ sets a full-release price of $29.99, with regional differences.
• Oceans: The 1.0 update does not overhaul the Ocean biome. The work went north.
• Download: About 4.3 GiB on most storefronts, smaller on Xbox One, larger on the Mac App Store and Microsoft Store.
• After 1.0: Bug fixes and quality-of-life work continue. Further content, and how long updates last, is “too soon to say.”

Steam’s English page now shows 94 percent of English reviews positive from 260,181 ratings, Very Positive, with 462,361 ratings across all languages and 53 achievements. Iron Gate still recommends a fresh world for Deep North generation, even though old saves keep working. The 1.0 bet was the opposite of Wardogs: stay in early access until the last biome is in, then leave. Wardogs is starting that clock in public, at a scale most early access shooters never see.

A Worm, Two Decks, and ASCII Armor

The same window is packed with smaller games that would have owned a quieter weekend. Mewgenics, Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel’s cat-breeding tactics RPG, reached PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Switch 2 on September 8 at $39.99, after a PC launch on February 10 that sold a million copies in its first week. McMillen’s line on the gene math last year was “74 sextillion (basic) cats,” before mutations, classes, abilities and voices.

Worming from Home, from Zach Northrop and Mason Sabharwal, is the physics joke that stuck: you are a worm in a remote finance job, shoving a mouse, dodging typos, and unlocking Control-B with help because you cannot hold two keys. It launched on September 4 at $7.99, sits at $5.99 until September 18, is Steam Deck Verified, and has 98 percent positive ratings from 615 reviews.

Shroom and Gloom, from Team Lazerbeam and Devolver Digital, entered early access on September 10 at $14.99 with 91 percent positive ratings from 418 reviews. It is a double deckbuilder, one deck for fights and one for the map, and it will cook an enemy you kill with fire into a card that costs nothing to play. Steam Deck is Unsupported. Effulgence RPG, Andrei Fomin’s party RPG made of ASCII characters in 3D, left early access the same day, with a 25 percent discount until September 24 and a five-to-seven-hour run that feeds dead enemies into a matter printer.

OUT NOW ON STEAM

Further out, Tobspr Games’ Puzzlez is a 2027 automation-puzzle spinoff from Shapez with more than 75 handmade stages. Jinjja’s Yuzutsu, also 2027, is a capybara monk named Taomaru who swaps places with whoever just shot at him. Ingame Studios and 505 Games have Mayhem à la Carte in 2027 early access, a first-person kitchen game that also wants you to shoot the dining room. Windup and Knights Peak dated Hela: of Mice & Magic for December 1 on Steam, Epic, PS5, Xbox and Switch 2, with Game Pass on day one. 9000 Legends will put a demo of Graveheart, a boomer shooter about an undead William Wallace, into Steam Next Fest in October.

Full Release Is a One-to-Two-Year Bet

Bulkhead’s own early access note says the present build is “the core vision,” and that the full game is supposed to add maps, guns, vehicles, jets, a thicker seasonal meta, and better reasons to play than a single match. It also says they “do not want to be in Early Access for a long time.” One to 2 years is that clock. Consoles sit behind it in 2028.

The copies already sold are the easy part of the wager. A three-team hill with a bank account that never resets needs honest hit detection, a cheat story that is not a highlight reel, and a population that still shows up when the launch spike dies. Brammer’s ask after the million-copy mark was the same as the recap’s last line: keep playing, keep telling them what is broken, and they will be back at the office on Monday.