WARDOGS: the guide hub with the sources attached — how to play, money, towers, patch notes, requirements and the live player count

BULKHEAD describes WARDOGS as a 'Tactical All Out Warfare FPS' and spends a lot of words saying what it is not: 'This is not another Battle Royale. This is not another Extraction Shooter.' The store description is precise about the mode — 'three teams fight for control of randomized 2x2km Control Zones within larger maps. The team with the most players within the Control Zone earns points — the first team to reach 100 points wins the match.' The February 2026 'TOP QUESTIONS' post adds the map figure (256 km²), the three factions with their one-line backstories, the setting (a war-torn region called Kolchia and a resource called PV-1), unlimited squad sizes, and the engine — Unreal Engine 5 with BULKHEAD's own 'War Dynamics Framework' layered on top for 100-player density.

The design lineage is public too. A 19 February 2026 post says the design team 'spent years collaborating directly with the original ARMA mod creators' to build a standalone King of the Hill. If you played the Arma 3 KOTH mod, the cash-for-teamplay economy, the single contested zone and the persistent bank balance will feel familiar; if you did not, the guide hub below is written for you.

Because so many sites quote each other, it is worth listing what the primary parties said and when. BULKHEAD posted '100,000 Steam Wishlists, in just 3 days' on 10 February 2026, '200,000' on 18 February, '500,000' on 26 May and '1 MILLION' on 14 August. Pre-orders opened 11 August with guaranteed access to a closed beta on 21–23 August; a second closed beta followed the FPS Games Show on 3 September and became an open beta on 5 September until 08:00 UTC on the Sunday. Early Access launched on 10 September. At 01:05 UTC on 11 September BULKHEAD posted '1.25 MILLION COPIES SOLD!'; PCGamesN's 12 September studio visit reported 1.5 million; SteamDB recorded a 400,196-player peak on 12 September; and when we read the Steam API on 13 September, 381,899 people were in the game.

The launch was not clean. A 'Launch Stability Hotfix #1' on the evening of 10 September forced every client to restart and re-queue so that BULKHEAD could admit players 'in controlled batches'. PCGamesN's report quotes UI/UX Director Howard Philpott — 'we either fix the queue now, or we're f***ed' — and puts numbers on the problem: 45,590 people in game against 168,000 in the queue, and roughly ten players a second getting through where a hundred should have. The fix handed each player a fresh Steam login ticket at the front of the queue instead of the stale one from when they launched. That story is in the servers guide; the point here is that the numbers on this site come from posts you can open, not from memory.

Every guide on this site comes back to the same loop, so here it is once. You begin with $10,000. Before each life you buy a loadout: weapons, gear, utility items, vehicles. During the match, teamplay pays — the wiki's Game Mechanics page lists reviving squadmates, transporting friendly players, killing enemies, spotting, controlling the objective and 'other teamplay actions'. The Hot Zone, a smaller shifting area inside the Control Zone, counts each player inside it double for control and pays double cash. Cash persists between matches; you can save for a $500,000 Artillery Tank or convert it into Gold Bars, which buy cosmetics in the Black Market and are, per BULKHEAD, never sold for real money.

Two consequences follow. First, dying with an expensive loadout is a financial event, not just a respawn — PCGamesN's money guide opens with exactly that warning. Second, the roles that new players skip (taxi driver, supply runner, base builder) are the ones that pay without exposing you to fire. The money guide walks through each published method; the classes guide explains the six progression tracks the cash and XP feed into.

If you played a beta, the game you bought is slower to level and pricier at the top. BULKHEAD's 9 September changelog says the beta curves 'were designed specifically for weekend long beta tests' and that from launch 'our median players, at 20 to 25 hours, will be around level 20, and those wanting the big ticket items, the top 5%, will need to grind.' Level 15 now needs 110,000 XP instead of 54,750; level 20 needs 250,000 instead of 111,500; level 50 needs a round 1,000,000. The Artillery Tank moved from Career level 55 to Career level 90 and from $400,000 to $500,000. The Forward Operating Base tripled from $2,500 to $7,500 'to make them more of a choice'. A few things got cheaper — the Z20 Lakota, URAL and Dune Buggy all dropped — and the full list is charted on the Season 1 changelog page.

Then, two days after launch, patch 0.11 split the server browser into Community and Official tabs, added a text search and persistent server IDs, and — 'by way of apology' for under-serving community servers — gave community servers a 5% end-of-match cash bonus for a week. The same post sets out the studio's penalties for cash exploits: a timed ban plus cash and XP reset to zero, and a permanent ban for anyone publishing exploit tutorials.

The Steam listing's minimum is an Intel Core i5 8600 or AMD Ryzen 5 3500, 16 GB of RAM, a GTX 1660 or Radeon RX 590, 50 GB of storage and Windows 10, with the target stated plainly as '1080p Low @ 60fps (Upscaled)'. Recommended is a Core i7 12700K or Ryzen 7 5700X, an RTX 3070 or RX 6700 XT and Windows 11, for '1440p Medium @ 70fps+ (Native) or 4k Medium @ 60fps+ (Upscaled)'. Windows is the only platform; BULKHEAD told GamingOnLinux on 5 September that it 'cannot commit to having Linux support for our Early Access launch' and asked Linux buyers to refund. The launch trailer post says consoles come in 2028.

The Early Access price is $39.99 (£36.99 per PCGamesN), with a $12.99 Supporter Pack of cosmetics as the only other purchase — BULKHEAD's words: 'There will be no monetization on WARDOGS during Early Access with the sole exception of this optional supporter edition.' The Steam Early Access Q&A says the price will be 'lower during Early Access, with a higher price at full release', and PCGamesN reports the planned steps as $49.99 and then $59.99 by version 1.0. The requirements, price and console pages go into each of these.

Every page lists its sources with read dates, and the register behind the whole site is a file we keep in the repository with a 'does-not-exist' list: things WARDOGS does not have that other sites assert anyway. There are no redeem codes. There is no class-select screen. There are no published weapon damage tables. There is no console version until 2028 and no Linux support today. When a fact is only in a press interview we say 'per PCGamesN'; when it is only in a community guide title we say that too. Live data is read from Steam's public API (player counts, the official news feed) and labelled with its read time. Images are either charts we drew from the register numbers or screenshots from BULKHEAD's official press kit, marked as such.

The site is not affiliated with BULKHEAD or Team17. If you are the rights holder and want an image removed, the contact page works. If you are a player and spot a number that disagrees with a patch note, the same page works — the patch note wins and we correct.