WARDOGS CEO tells fans to go play GTA 6 in December

Telling your players to go and play someone else’s game is a bold way to announce a holiday. Bulkhead Studios CEO Joe Brammer did exactly that, saying the team will stop work on WARDOGS for the whole of December and that fans should spend the time with GTA 6 instead.

Brammer said the studio needs a proper detox after months of hard graft getting the shooter out the door. He also made it clear that he knows what is waiting for the team when they get back. January will bring a pile of complaints and bug reports, and the studio has accepted that.

WARDOGS only launched in early access in September, and it has done well. It has already become one of the best-selling first-person shooters in recent years, and that early access money is helping Bulkhead fund updates on the way to the 1.0 release.

We have seen this break before

I get the need for rest, and nobody should be crunching through Christmas. But the timing is a worry for me, because ARC Raiders went through the same thing last year. Embark Studios stepped away over the festive period, and in that time bugs piled up, cheaters took over and player sentiment dropped hard. The team returned in January to a mess, and the game arguably never fully recovered.

WARDOGS is a young game with a growing player base, which makes a month of silence a risk. Brammer has been upfront about it, at least. Whether the community stays patient until January is another matter.