Less than two weeks are left before WARDOGS launches, and two separate things happen in that window. 3 September the studio runs its own show; 10 September the game opens Early Access on Steam. The first is about expectations, the second about what we actually get to play.
3 September, 18:00 UTC — The FPS Games Show
BULKHEAD is not buying a slot in someone else's showcase — it is running its own show on Twitch: sixteen shooters in one stream, with WARDOGS as the host. The studio promises a "big announcement" one week before its own launch.
We are not going to guess what it is. What we do know is the date, the time, and that it is worth watching live — the recap clips usually drop the details that get said in passing. Our page on it: the 3 September show.
10 September — Early Access
This is not the final version, and the studio says so plainly: the game will spend one to two years in Early Access, and the length depends on what players say. In practice that means one simple thing — the numbers you see today will change.
- The Steam price is ₴829 as of today; the store page is still marked "coming soon".
- Balance patches start right after launch — and prices and stats, the very things we collected in the database, go first.
- No exact hour has been announced, neither in the posts nor on the store page, so our countdown runs to the start of the day.
How many people are waiting
We already have the honest answer to that, and it is not a rumour. During the August playtest the player count reached 105,774 concurrent — the level at which a shooter enters the Steam top on day one. We measure it ourselves, every ten minutes through the public Steam API, and the last day is charted on the stats page.
Our rule for these two weeks stays the same: every number in the database is re-checked after each patch, and every entry carries a source label. When we do not know something, we say so.
What to do before launch
Two things worth having ready before the servers open: a kit for the first run, so the first hour is not spent picking a rifle, and a plan on the map for where the squad goes from the first spawn. A tactical room opens from a link, needs no account, and lives for two weeks — exactly up to launch.