WARDOGS has sold two million copies in five days, and the player numbers are holding

Bulkhead’s 100-player shooter WARDOGS launched into Steam early access on September 10 and passed two million copies sold in under five days. It hit an all-time concurrent peak of 428,666 players on September 13, according to SteamDB.

A week and a half in, the drop-off that usually follows a launch spike has not arrived. The game was still running between roughly 300,000 and 400,000 concurrent players across the September 19–20 weekend.

A million on day one

The first million landed within 24 hours, and 1.25 million by the second day. Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer marked the day-one figure by calling it mental to cross a million copies as the game entered early access, while pointing out that the studio still has plenty to fix and build.

That was not marketing bluster covering for a smooth launch. Servers buckled under the opening weekend and Steam reviews slid to Mixed before recovering to Very Positive as capacity caught up.

WARDOGS is PC only for now, priced at $39.99 in the United States and £36.99 in the United Kingdom. Console versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox are not targeted until 2028.

Outpacing Arc Raiders and Helldivers 2

Analyst Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics put the game at around 2.2 million copies in six days, ahead of Arc Raiders at 1.7 million and Helldivers 2 at 1 million at the same point in their lifecycles.

Alinea estimates around $70 million in revenue so far, which ranks WARDOGS seventh among the most profitable new Steam releases of 2026. Elliott’s sharper comparison: one week of early access has earned more than Marathon has made in six and a half months across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

The Twitch picture, correctly

WARDOGS did have a Twitch moment against Call of Duty, but it came earlier than the launch coverage suggests. The game peaked at just under 200,000 viewers during its August 21 beta weekend, when it briefly ranked above the Modern Warfare 4 beta on the platform.

It did not out-peak it. Modern Warfare 4’s beta hit roughly 271,000 to 274,000 viewers on its first day.

A Derby studio taking on the big two

Bulkhead is based in Derby, England, with The Turing Test, Battalion 1944 and Killrun behind it. The marketing leaned into that underdog position, headlined by a “10 Reasons NOT to Buy” trailer, and wishlists passed a million in August.

Brammer has taken some heat since launch, both for saying he expects his team to crunch and for pushing back on the studio’s reputation for transparency, drawing a line between clarity and transparency.

The open question is what happens when the early-access novelty and the promotional window fade. For now, WARDOGS is the only new shooter of 2026 forcing Call of Duty and Battlefield to share a conversation.