WARDOGS Playtest just stacked 105,774 concurrent players on Steam during its closed beta weekend, and the extraction shooter hype is real — but the servers are already catching strays. Players waited half an hour in queue only to get kicked two minutes into a match, and EAC login failures are popping up like bad netcode in every other big launch. The game from BULKHEAD and Team17 puts 100 players across three teams on a destructible battlefield with vehicles, building, and a cash economy that rewards sticking with your squad, and that scale is exactly why the queues are melting.

SteamDB logged the 105k peak on the final day of the August 21-23 playtest, beating previous records and sitting within spitting distance of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's beta numbers that same weekend. Nearly 500k unique players jumped in across the three days, according to the devs, while Twitch numbers climbed toward 200k viewers at points. The playtest app is separate from the main game, so those charts won't carry over when Early Access drops September 10, but the momentum is undeniable.

The pain points are classic: EAC refusing to initialize, server capacity errors, and matches that load you in just to boot you right back out. One player straight-up told the devs their game is stupid after burning time in queue for a two-minute session, and troubleshooting threads are full of people deleting EasyAntiCheat folders, verifying files, and restarting routers just to get back in. The ambition is there, but the infrastructure is still learning to walk.