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The way our hobby talks about player counts is all sorts of messed up. Steam concurrents are a useful metric for gauging a game’s general popularity, but they paint an incomplete picture. They’re a single data point, yet have become the flimsy scaffolding on which the internet builds elaborate headcanon about a game’s quality, viability, or deadness. Sometimes dogpiling is so successful, and the resulting perception so difficult to fight, that simply saying a game is dead is enough to help kill it.
It’s a trend that annoys me to no end, so it’s refreshing to see a developer speaking openly about concurrents—both about how many it considers “healthy,” and why it’s normal for the number to rise and fall. It’s been a recurring topic for Wardogs developer Bulkhead, whose closed beta surpassed 200,000 concurrents today on Steam. Responding to a TimTheTatman clip on X, CEO Joe Brammer spoke on the milsim’s unexpected popularity, and its inevitable (but healthy) decline.
“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 :)”
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It’s a cycle many of us are familiar with, but rarely acknowledge. I tend to build a rotation of multiplayer favorites that I regularly return to, either to check out an update or scratch an itch. It is, I think, a pretty healthy way to enjoy videogames, but the rise of live service “forever” games, as well as high-profile failures, have proliferated the idea that videogames are those species of shark that will die if they ever stop swimming.
Much like the majority of videogames before 2016, Bulkhead does not need Wardogs to be a consistent, top-charting megahit to continue making it. In a video published last month outlining “10 reasons not to buy Wardogs,” game director Howard Philpott expanded on Bulkhead’s expectations:
“We expect our initial days after launch to have a lot more players than expected, but we can tell you for a fact that this is completely normal. Those players will fall away over the next coming months. Player numbers will drop off, and journalists and influencers on the fringe of the community will try to ragebait your enjoyment out of the game for social media clicks. This doesn’t mean the game is dying. We’re thinking longer term than a flash in the plan. Our goal is to settle into a sustainable, close-knit community. If we’re pulling in 3,000 to 5,000 daily concurrent players who genuinely love the game, it’ll allow new players to buy in anytime and join an active community.”
If we put our hands together on this one, we can all be normal about a multiplayer shooter. Wardogs is out September 10, but pre-ordering grants access to the closed beta ending Sunday.
