WARDOGS is still clocking 230k+ concurrent on Steam weeks after Early Access launch, laughing in the face of every extraction shooter that launched with bigger marketing budgets and smaller balls. The 100-player tactical brawler from Bulkhead and Team17 hit a 428k all-time peak on September 13 and has already moved over 2 million copies, putting its one-week revenue haul ahead of what Marathon managed in six months across all platforms.

Bungie creative director Julia Nardin personally torched the Destiny-Marathon merger fanfiction that bubbled up from 4chan and Reddit this week, calling it fake and reminding everyone the two IPs are "independent entities" that share Bungie DNA but nothing else. The timing is delicious — while Bungie delays Marathon's next update to December and pivots toward permanent PvE experiments, WARDOGS is just out here printing money with destructible maps, cash systems, and zero live-service cope.

Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer told everyone upfront they were planning for a sustainable 5k concurrent floor, not this nuclear hype. The devs are still patching queues and crashes while the player count refuses to die. Extraction shooters are cooked when a paid tactical FPS can hold these numbers without a single battle pass.