A big new military FPS, Wardogs (not to be confused with the 2016 Jonah Hill/Miles Teller crime-comedy War Dogs) launched today in early access on Steam, and it’s off to a hot start. The shooter reached 300,000 peak concurrent users on Steam right out of the gate and the $40 game is currently Steam’s No. 1 best-seller. Pretty impressive for a game that the developer told you not to buy.
Given the flood of players, developer Bulkhead instituted a server queue system, and this quickly became something of a meme on social media. Players shared screenshots of the queue and their place in it–some people reported having more than 300,000 people in line in front of them. Yeesh.
Bulkhead responded to the brutal queueing situation, saying it was partly due to the developer being “rate limited.” The company said it was working with Valve to resolve this limit and get an increase in line with “larger titles.”
Things got worse, temporarily albeit, for some, as Bulkhead made the decision to kick everyone from the queue as a fix that, in theory, would help more players get into the game faster.
Bulkhead boss Joe Brammer gave an update on the queuing situation, saying the queue itself is not “specifically broken,” but instead he said Wardogs didn’t get the kind of treatment that AAA games receive when it comes to rate limits.
“Hang in there,” Brammer said.
That wasn’t the extent of the launch-day issues, as people reported getting banned for seemingly no reason. Bulkhead said it’s aware of these “incorrect bans” and is working to address them immediately.
Wardogs is a large-scale military FPS featuring 100 players, divided into three teams, on a map battling it out in a fictional version of Eastern Europe.
In addition to launching Wardogs into early access, Bulkhead revealed that the game’s console edition for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S will be released in 2028.