Update, 11 August 2026: the embargo has been lifted. Bulkhead emailed playtesters under the heading "CLOSED ALPHA EMBARGO": "Thank you for taking part in the WARDOGS Closed Alpha weekend and for respecting the NDA throughout. You are now free to share gameplay, screenshots and streams from the Closed Alpha." Footage recorded that weekend is now publishable. Everything below describes the terms that applied while it was in force, and stands as the record of what they were.
Our own capture is now live: the 25 weapons we recorded in the alpha vendor →
You can record. You cannot publish. That was the whole rule, and it covered written detail just as much as clips, screenshots and streams.
That distinction mattered more than it sounded, because it is where most people got it wrong. The restriction was not a streaming rule with a text loophole — Bulkhead's notice restricted publishing generally, and specifically named the written kind.
What the NDA actually says
Bulkhead issued a notice to Closed Alpha playtesters headed "THE NDA IS STILL IN EFFECT, BUT…". The operative line:
Gameplay capture is allowed, but nothing is to be published or streamed yet.
Note nothing, rather than no footage. Three details in that notice settle the scope:
| Action | Status |
|---|---|
| Recording and capturing gameplay | Allowed, and encouraged |
| Streaming live | Not until the green light |
| Publishing clips, screenshots or footage | Not until the green light |
| Publishing written detail, thoughts or opinions | Not until the green light |
| Using your footage after the lift | Allowed |
| Breaking the NDA | Ban, and removal from alpha and beta tests |
The fourth row is the one nobody else has written down. Bulkhead says it knows players are keen to share their "moments, thoughts and opinions" and that it wants them to — just not yet. Thoughts and opinions are not footage. The ask is to "hold off on publishing any content for a little while longer," and any content is doing real work in that sentence.
So a written weapon list, a map description, a stat sheet or an impressions piece all sit on the wrong side of this NDA until it lifts. There is no text loophole.
Why Bulkhead says it is holding: the notice makes the reasoning explicit — this is "a real alpha, focused on server stability and back-end performance," not a marketing beat, and things can break at a scale the game has not run at before. Judging a build from a weekend of stress testing was never going to be fair to it.
The enforcement line is worth taking seriously. Bulkhead describes the consequence as a ban plus removal from alpha and beta tests — not a takedown request. For anyone hoping to be in the next test, that is a bad trade against a weekend of early views.
Where the rules are, and where they are not
Here is the part still worth knowing: the NDA terms are nowhere on Steam.
Bulkhead's pinned developer FAQ in the Steam discussions covers the game, the playtest signup route, platform plans and whether pre-alpha cash carries over. It does not mention an NDA, an embargo, or streaming at all. The Steam news hub's most recent post is the livestream announcement from 22 July. Everything operational about this alpha — the login window, the invite waves, the content rules — went out on X and Discord.
That gap is why the Steam discussion board filled up during the alpha with players who did not know what they were allowed to do. If you want the version that applies to you specifically, also check the FirstLook terms you accepted at sign-up; creator access has separate terms again.
When does it lift?
No date has been given, and we are not going to invent one.
What Bulkhead has said is that it will lift the NDA "very soon," that the green light is "right around the corner," and — the useful tell — that it has "some massive announcements coming up next week." Read together, those point at days rather than weeks, and they line up with third-party reporting that tied the lift to the week beginning 10 August. Close enough to plan around; not a commitment.
There is also precedent for the shape of it. The pre-alpha ran under the same arrangement, and when it lifted, creators who had been sitting on footage said so plainly and posted immediately. Expect the same: silence, then everything at once.
How to know the moment it lifts
Bulkhead named the channel itself: its creator programme is where influencer updates about the NDA lifting will go, and it says to sign up regardless of channel size.
- Creator signup:
community.wardogs.com/creator - Watch the Discord announcements channel — operational news lands there before Steam
- @WARDOGS on X is where every previous alpha instruction broke first
What this means for anything you read this week
Any "WARDOGS alpha weapons list" published before the lift is either fabricated or an NDA breach. Both are good reasons to distrust it. No in-game weapon names, prices or map locations have been legitimately published anywhere, and that includes by us — we played the alpha and we are holding what we saw until the green light, because "any content" includes ours.
If you see a site with a confident weapon table right now, check whether it also had one in March. Several did, built from trailer lookalikes, and a list that existed before anyone could play is not evidence of anything.
Related
- WARDOGS Closed Alpha access and playtest guide — the login window, regional times, and how invites are actually delivered
- WARDOGS Closed Alpha access problems — no invite, ACCESS DENIED, and crashes on launch
- Weapons, the Kolchia map and the meta breakdown — held until the NDA lifts, then filled with sourced data
Last verified: 9 August 2026. The terms on this page are Confirmed, quoted from Bulkhead's own notice to Closed Alpha playtesters (@WARDOGS, 4 August). Earlier versions of this page labelled them Reported, because we were working from outlets citing that post rather than the post itself. None of it is mirrored on Bulkhead's Steam news hub, so if the FirstLook terms you accepted differ from this, those govern you — and we want to know.
Changelog
- 9 August 2026 — Upgraded from Reported to Confirmed against Bulkhead's primary notice. Added the written-content scope, which we had previously inferred rather than sourced, plus Bulkhead's stated reasoning, the creator-programme route to lift notification, and its own wording on timing.
- 7 August 2026 — First published, from third-party reporting of the NDA update.
