You ever get the feeling that a game is about to make a big splash, but nobody you know is talking about it yet? That's where I've been with Wardogs, the 100-player milsim FPS that I haven't stopped thinking about for weeks. Wardogs has steadily built buzz over the past year, recently eclipsing a million wishlists.

Developer Bulkhead held a closed beta this past weekend for those who pre-ordered the $40 early access release, which reached over 100,000 peak Steam players on Sunday—more simultaneous players than Squad, Hell Let Loose, or Arma has ever seen on PC. In a beta debrief video published today, game director Howard Philpott said nearly 500,000 total players tried Wardogs.

"The reaction from the FPS community has been insane," Philpott said, "with nearly half a million unique players showing up to play the closed beta the same week as Call of Duty's beta and Battlefield 6's massive update."

I don't share these figures to stoke obsessive number comparisons between very different flavors of shooter, but to point out how different it is for an FPS as crunchy and complex as Wardogs to already have an audience this large.

I reckon it speaks to a shift in tastes that's been in progress since PUBG and Escape From Tarkov came around. Wardogs is neither a battle royale nor an extraction shooter, but the popularity of those genres has set the groundwork for its shared qualities to be instantly accepted—milsim stuff like realistic ballistics, large maps, and restrictive inventory isn't as niche as it once was.

It also helps that Wardogs makes a good impression with its economy hook. Players have a persistent wallet of in-game money used for buying guns, unlocking gear, tipping pilots, and bribing medics to save your life. Money is earned by doing anything useful: killing enemies, reviving teammates, capturing objectives, or giving someone a ride. It's a fun, freeform system for encouraging teamplay through selfish desires (cash money).

Wardogs enters early access on September 10.

Most reasonable people would say charging for ad space on leaked footage from the most anticipated media launch of all time warrants a pretty strong response from the IP holder, but when it comes to Rockstar's years-long predicament with GTA 6 leaks, unfortunately there is reliable reporting that suggests that response disproportionately impacts employees with no involvement in the leaks.

According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Rockstar implemented tight security measures including a return-to-office mandate for all employees following the explosive GTA 6 leak from 2022, which added salt to the wound when more leaks surfaced last week. The new leaker causing everyone at Rockstar to lose sleep currently has yet to be identified and has threatened substantial story spoilers. Rockstar has yet to respond publicly but has pursued aggressive legal action, as is its right, in the view of former Rockstar technical lead Obbe Vermeij, who was with Rockstar from 1995 to 2009.

Over on Twitter, Vermeij used his insights as a former lead at the company to say, "[Rockstar New York] overreacts a bit at times" before adding, "But it is their job to try to stop these kind of leaks."

Never thee mind, though, as Vermeij said in the same breath that the leaks "are a nothing burger" because 90% of prospective players aren't looking around online for spoilers. "I was there during Hot Coffee," he added, referring to an incident in which a very NSFW mini-game mistakenly made its way into GTA San Andreas.

"It was a nightmare for management [Rockstar's New York offices] but didn't affect us [Rockstar North] much. The current leaks are far less consequential than [Hot Coffee] was. It looks like GTA 6 will be phenomenal and sell for the next 15 years or so. The leaks are just a tiny blip."

A tiny blip feels a little reductive considering gameplay and map details have been revealed against Rockstar's will and now story spoilers are on the table, but at the end of the day, GTA is going to GTA and there's little that could stop GTA 6 from being the biggest video game launch of all time.

GTA 6 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are "the north stars of gaming," says Gamescom chief, but they won't last forever because "most gamers aren't only interested in a single game"