WARDOGS Sold 1.25 Million Copies in Its First Day of Early Access and Peaked Above 340,000 Players on Steam, After a Studio That Planned for 5,000

When we wrote up the WARDOGS Early Access launch on Sunday, the line that stuck with us was Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer saying the studio had planned for 5,000 concurrent players once the hype died down. Four days later, the hype has not died down. It has done the opposite.

Everplay Group, the London listed parent of publisher Team17, put out a stock exchange announcement on September 11 confirming that WARDOGS sold more than one million copies on its first day in Steam Early Access, September 10, and hit a concurrent peak of over 340,000 players on Steam. Bulkhead then updated the number itself. At just after 01:00 UTC on September 11, the studio posted on Steam under the headline "1.25 MILLION COPIES SOLD!", with an apology for the delays attached. At $39.99 for the standard edition, that is a very big first day for a studio in Derby that most players had not heard of a year ago.

Video: BULKHEAD on YouTube

The road to a million, and a rough first night

The numbers had been climbing for months. Team17's own account of the build up is that WARDOGS reached 100,000 Steam wishlists three days after its reveal, 500,000 by May and one million by August. Nearly half a million people joined the August closed beta, and the final test before launch peaked at 245,118 concurrent players. Going from a million wishlists to a million sales in a day is a conversion most publishers would not dare forecast, and it is the biggest launch either Bulkhead or Team17 has ever had. Mikkel Weider, Everplay's chief executive, called it "a truly fantastic achievement by Bulkhead and Team17."

The launch itself was not smooth, and Bulkhead did not pretend otherwise. On the evening of September 10, the studio pushed a client hotfix that forced every logged in player to close the game, download an update and return to the login queue. Players were then let back in "in controlled batches" while the team confirmed that servers were filling properly. The stated targets were players unable to join servers, players being kicked mid match, and long queue times, and the post promised the team would be "working through the night" on it. The 1.25 million post a few hours later reads like a grateful, slightly overwhelmed studio: "We're watching everything, monitoring servers, and enjoying watching you play."

What players are buying into

If you have not followed the game, WARDOGS is a 100 player tactical shooter where three teams fight over a control zone on a large destructible map, with a persistent cash economy that carries your money from match to match and pays for loadouts and vehicles. It is Windows only for now. The official launch trailer, titled "Play Like You Used To", confirms the game is coming to consoles in 2028, and PS5 and Xbox wishlists opened on launch day. The Season 1 changelog that shipped with pre-load also rebalanced progression, slowing levels 10 to 20 and flattening the curve from level 35 upward, so that a typical player with 20 to 25 hours lands around level 20 while the "big ticket items" such as artillery are pushed deep into the career track for the top few percent.

Brammer's own comment on the milestone stays in character. "To cross a million copies sold as we launch into early access is mental," he said, before pointing out that the studio has "things to fix, things we want to improve and a lot more we want to build," and that the best thing players can do now is keep playing and keep sending feedback.

Our take

A million copies in a day is a genuine event, not just for an Early Access title but for the shooter genre in 2026, where the crowds usually gather around the next Call of Duty beta rather than a new name. The honest caveat is the one Bulkhead itself keeps repeating: this is the beginning of one to two years of Early Access, the servers are still being scaled, and the first-night queue is exactly the kind of thing that shows up in reviews. If the game holds even a tenth of that 340,000 peak in a month, the 5,000 player plan will look very conservative.