Wardogs sold over 1 million copies in its first 24 hours, making its launch a bright spot in an otherwise tough year for multiplayer shooters

All signs have pointed to Wardogs being a hit for a while now. Its beta weekend in August was rapturously received, with half a million players lining up to check out its prerelease playtest. When the game launched into early access last week, so many people rushed to get on board that it collapsed the game’s servers.

Now, developer Bulkhead has released its initial sales figures for Wardogs, and they are unsurprisingly very strong. The multiplayer FPS sold 1.25 million copies within 24 hours, and that number is likely to be much higher by now.

Bulkhead played it cool while announcing the milestone, simply thanking players and reassuring them that the studio is “watching everything, monitoring servers, and enjoying watching you play”. That middle point is likely made in response to the flurry of negative reviews Wardogs received in the wake of its server troubles.

Nonetheless, it’s heartening to see an unambiguous hit in the multiplayer FPS sphere after what has been a difficult year for new competitive shooters. 2026 started badly when Highguard ran directly into a brick wall in January, launching to initially high player counts that quickly plummeted to an unsustainable level—resulting in the game shutting down mere weeks later.

In March, Bungie released Marathon, which is one of my favourite games of this year and a real triumph of both art and game design. Yet despite its qualities, it’s pretty clear that Marathon has not been the success that either Bungie or Sony hoped. Despite numerous experiments to revive the game’s fortunes, its concurrent player numbers are now significantly lower than those of Destiny 2—which Bungie rather suddenly wrapped development on earlier this year.

Other promising shooters that failed to attract an audience include Last Flag and Empulse. The former was a fun take on Capture the Flag that sadly never really got off the ground, while the latter was the latest in a rather chaotic run of FPS experiments by Splitgate 2 devs 1047 Games—a spiritual successor to Titanfall which, despite some cool ideas, failed to generate sufficient revenue to justify ongoing development.

All of which makes it reassuring to see Wardogs rush out of the gate so strongly. As for the key to its success, I think it lies in the fact that, despite being a blend of ArmA and Battlefield, Wardogs is actually quite laissez-faire in how it lets you play. You’re free to approach its massive 100-player battlefields however you like, and instead of forcing teams to work together, it incentivises cooperative play through using cash as a mechanic. You can offer monetary rewards to other players for all manner of different things, ranging from getting a helicopter ride into battle to bribing medics to revive you when downed.

The big question of course, is whether Wardogs can maintain this momentum. There’s a lot of big games still to release this year, including Grand Theft Auto 6, which is likely to suck up attention on all fronts, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, a more direct competitor to Wardogs. Then again, the fact we can say CoD and Wardogs are in competition at all indicates just how well the latter is doing.

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