As Wardogs blows past 200k Steam concurrents, its developers are prepared for the day 'hype dies down'

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) d...