Bulkhead’s military shooter Wardogs had the kind of launch most studios dream about, and then it immediately fell over.
The game reportedly sold more than one million copies and peaked at over 300,000 concurrent Steam users on its early-access launch day. For a paid multiplayer shooter without a Call of Duty or Battlefield logo on the box, that is a huge number.
The problem: barely anyone could actually play.
Login queues stretched into the hundreds of thousands, with players reporting positions near 340,000. So that 300,000 concurrent figure needs an asterisk. Steam counts anyone with the game running, and a large chunk of that audience was sitting in a queue, not in a match.
Players described queue positions resetting after errors, one even said they dropped from around 10,000 back past 200,000 twice. Others reached the front only to find servers they couldn’t join, or server lists that vanished entirely. Crashes and lobby disconnects were common. Some managed to get into the firing range and nothing else.
Review bombs and a possible DDoS
The result was predictable. Wardogs slid to a Mixed rating on Steam, around 49% positive during the opening window. Most of the negative reviews were about access, not the shooting.
Bulkhead was reported to be dealing with malicious traffic on top of the organic demand, with a DDoS attack mentioned repeatedly during the outage. That claim hasn’t been backed by a detailed technical breakdown, and heavy launch traffic can look a lot like an attack when infrastructure is already maxed out. Servers were restarted during the opening hours, with concurrency reportedly sliding to about 180,000 as people gave up.
What makes it stranger is that the betas worked. A recent open playtest reportedly drew around 250,000 concurrent users and ran far more smoothly than release day. Launch traffic hits differently: a tighter time window, heavier account and inventory database load, and thousands of players spamming retry.
Wardogs itself is a large-scale team shooter sitting between Battlefield and Squad, with obvious DNA from Arma 3‘s King of the Hill mod. Three teams, big maps, helicopters, base building, supply runs, and revives. You get paid for support work, such as spotting, healing, driving people around, and repairing, which is a big part of why military-shooter communities latched onto it.
