INTERVIEW: WARDOGS Devs On Monetization in 1.0: ‘We Have Kids To Feed’

WARDOGS promises to be the ‘next big thing’ in the first-person shooter space. Following an immensely successful closed beta, expectations are flying high, with players worldwide being seriously impressed by the game’s innovative elements and emergent scenarios borne from a ‘sandbox’ approach to the large-scale combat loop.

At Gamescom, I sat down with BULKHEAD, the team behind WARDOGS, to discuss their plans to deliver on early access promises made, pushing the shooter towards the next major milestone. It was my first time learning about the game alongside Mark Pinney, Senior Game Director and CFO, and Executive Producer and CEO, Joe Brammer, and I came away very excited for what comes next when it comes to earning from WARDOGS.

WARDOGS is Breaking The Habit

WARDOGS isn’t your everyday first-person shooter; that much is obvious from the moment you boot the game up. It’s a ‘King of the Hill’ style game off the bat, inviting three teams totaling up to 100 players to fight for riches across large-scale environments bursting with all manner of traditional warfare elements.

It’s all centered around money, and as you play, every action you commit to rewards you with cold, hard cash. This has led to some incredible, emergent gameplay, with users becoming very inventive and finding unique ways to earn their money. Behind the scenes, Brammer and Pinney let me know that simply being a driver in WARDOGS has become one of the most popular ways to play the game.

Think of becoming an Uber driver in a war zone – that’s what we’re talking about. You’ll take your car, deliver fighters to the front line, and they’ll give you a rating and a bit of cash, then free you up to go and scoop up the next soldier or two.

In August, WARDOGS underwent a closed beta, and it saw the game skyrocket up the charts, hitting 105,774 concurrent players on Steam and becoming, at one point, the most-watched game category on Twitch. When I spoke to Brammer and Pinney, they assured me that this hugely exceeded their expectations.

However, it hasn’t moved the needle for the time.

A while ago, Brammer took to social media to be transparent, stating that ‘success for them’ was represented by a Steam CCU of 3,000 to 10,000 players, which was the figure they were aiming to support. The team is fully appreciative of the inevitable drop-off that happens to every live-service game on the market, and again, they’ve been forthcoming about how they feel about the rhetoric around that topic.

Soon, the game will launch into early access, and this is where the team has promised to do things differently. They will not monetize the game beyond base sales and a ‘supporter’ edition for the entire duration of the early access window. They also will not publish an ambitious roadmap and make bold promises about what’s coming during that phase.

Instead, they’ll be heads down and working on 1.0, which is the ultimate goal. That’s also when monetization mechanics will commence and when the game’s base price will increase to reflect the extra content introduced for that launch. Of course, if you get in at the lower price point, you’ll also have access to everything added (or everything that’s going to be added).

That’s new maps, modes, weapons, and ways to play the game.

RELATED: WARDOGS Early Access Release Date Confirmed

I did ask the pair if they were apprehensive at all about this approach – about going without monetization for so long and then adding it for 1.0:

Potentially, but we’ve got enough records where we said this would happen and we just deal with it. We’re a business that needs to make money. We’re quite open about that.

I don’t think making a good game and supporting a community and making money from that… Those things aren’t mutually exclusive. I think we can do them together. I think what’s most important is that the game comes first, and we are using early access as early access. We don’t want to be compared to other businesses.

Earlier in the game’s marketing beat, BULKHEAD struck out at other, bigger studios, like Activision, making some tongue-in-cheek comments about their monetization tactics over the years, specifically celebrity collaborations and bizarre ‘skin packs’ that have really ramped up over the last few iterations of the Call of Duty series.

They’re hyper-aware of not having to eat their words now.

We have to set he example for other studios, especially now we’re getting a bit older, how we thnk it should be done.

We cannot criticize Call of Duty, and we have done that in the past, and Battlefield and moan about them, without actually providing the change ourselves.

We’re not always going to get it right, but the intention is always going to be in the right way.

Ultimately, BULKHEAD’s approach to monetization is different, but it’s also deeply necessary. This is a live-service shooter that will (all going well) be supported for years to come. And it’s obvious why:

I think for us, alright, people could say, ‘This is bulls***, why are they charging us now?’ Well, you know what? We have kids to feed. What do you want us to do?

We could just go and sell cars. What do you want us to do?

At the end of the day, the industry isn’t great right now, and we’re kind of at our wit’s end just going… Well, this is it, otherwise, you cannot have good performing, nice shooters.

Towards the end of this segment, Brammer especially took a harder turn and stance on the topic. I mentioned not being able to please everyone, which is something we see all the time with live-service games. There’s always an update or a release or a patch that irks some portion of the community.

Brammer, the CEO of BULKHEAD and the Executive Producer of WARDOGS, said:

We’re not trying to. We said ‘Don’t buy the game.’ Don’t buy the game, refund the game, this is our message.

We know who we’re making it for, the people who like it know who they are. We’re not going to change it because one person or a group of people don’t like it.

We have a really strong vision for the game, and that has carried us through some very difficult investment conversations, publisher conversations, and a difficult few years of business.

Pinney, CFO and Senior Game Director, pointed out that not even status can dissuade BULKHEAD from their decisions:

We have to kind of solidify that philosphy now, as well in terms of like… We are seeing big streamers say, ‘We don’t like this part, we don’t like the snipers, I want a sniper-only mode,’ for example.

We have to stick to what we’ve said. We just have our vision, and that’s the game.

WARDOGS is shaping up quite nicely, and it was a pleasure chatting with Mark Pinney and Joe Brammer about their goal for 1.0.

Have you given WARDOGS a try yet? Let us know what you thought about it on the Insider Gaming Discord server.

For more, check out how big the map really is in GTA 6. Also, don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter