Wardogs Beta Tops 200,000 Steam Concurrents Days Before Early Access

Sophie Bennett05/09/20263 min read

Wardogs’ second closed beta test pushed past 200,000 concurrent players on Steam this week, and Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer is already telling players not to panic when that number falls back down. The closed beta surpassed 200,000 concurrents on Steam, and responding to a TimTheTatman clip on X, CEO Joe Brammer spoke on the milsim’s unexpected popularity, and its inevitable decline. The test runs through this weekend, days ahead of the shooter’s September 10 Early Access launch.

Brammer’s post landed in the middle of a familiar internet argument about what a Steam concurrent number actually proves, and players picked a side fast:

Brammer’s Message: “So The Cycle Continues”

Brammer didn’t dress it up. “Wardogs will continue to lose players for months as the hype dies down,” Brammer wrote. “Doesn’t make it a bad game or even a problem, we planned for 5k players concurrent! It’ll maintain a healthy playerbase and we’ll continue to build the 1.0 version of the game then… it’ll boom again And so the cycle continues.”

That’s a studio naming its own floor in public, 5,000 concurrents, weeks before launch. It’s not a normal thing for a CEO to type out loud, and we’d rather see more of it than the usual silence when a graph starts sloping down.

The Beta Curve: 105K, Then 162K, Then 184K, Now 200K+

The climb didn’t happen overnight. Wardogs’ first closed beta, run August 21 to 23, peaked at 105,774 concurrent players. The second beta, which opened September 3, moved a lot faster.

The second closed beta test recorded a daily peak of 162,488 concurrent players on Steam, with the standalone test client reaching 157,113 concurrent users, ranking third overall behind Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2. By the following day that number had already moved again. SteamDB logged the Wardogs Playtest peaking at 184,936 concurrent players on September 4, 62 days after the app’s original release. By September 5, per PC Gamer’s reporting, it had cleared 200,000.

Sitting third on Steam behind CS2 and Dota 2, even for a few hours, is rare air for a new IP from a studio the size of Bulkhead. It puts Wardogs in the same beta-weekend bracket as Arc Raiders and Modern Warfare 4, two of the biggest shooter launches of the past year.

What Ships On September 10

Wardogs drops 100 players into three-team matches over destructible maps, mixing infantry combat, vehicles and a persistent cash economy that carries between lives. Bulkhead and Team17 announced details about Early Access, monetization, pricing, and closed beta, confirming Early Access begins on September 10th at $39.99, a price that isn’t the final launch price and will rise in stages. A Supporter Edition with cosmetic-only extras sits at $49.99.

Bulkhead has also promised the Early Access build launches clean. BULKHEAD has promised that there will be no in-game monetization elements during the game’s early access stage, aside from a ‘Supporters Edition’ that comes with some additional cosmetic items. That’s paired with a wishlist count Insider Gaming put close to a million ahead of the beta weekends, so the interest was already there before a single concurrent chart went viral.

None of that guarantees the “boom again” part of Brammer’s plan actually happens once the free beta access disappears and players have to hand over $39.99. Plenty of tactical shooters have posted huge beta numbers and then quietly bled out once the price tag showed up. What’s different here is that Bulkhead named its floor in writing, on the record, before it needed to.

Early Access opens September 10. The current closed beta window closes 08:00 UTC on September 6, giving Bulkhead one more full day to watch the number climb before it has to start explaining why it’s coming back down.