800,000 Steam wishlists
Bulkhead put the figure at 800,000 and rising in the pre-order devlog — 300,000 added since May, and the number it is using to size servers for the 10 September launch.
WARDOGS is at 800,000 Steam wishlists and rising, stated by Bulkhead in the 11 August devlog that opened pre-orders and set the Early Access date.
That is 300,000 added since 26 May, when the count passed half a million. The curve is steeper than it was in the spring — the opposite of what usually happens to a wishlist count four months after reveal — and the reason is not mysterious: the Closed Alpha on 7–9 August put the game in front of players and creators for the first time, and the pre-order announcement followed two days later.
Why the number is doing work here
Bulkhead is not quoting it as a vanity metric. In the same devlog the studio says pre-orders exist so it can “more accurately predict how many players and servers we need to be running in each region” ahead of launch. Wishlists are the input to that estimate.
The studio also spent the devlog managing expectations downward against it, which is the more interesting half. It expects the launch spike to fall away over the following months, and describes a sustainable target of 3,000–5,000 daily concurrent players — a fraction of a percent of the wishlist count. That is a studio deliberately setting a floor it can clear rather than a ceiling it will be measured against.
Keep it in proportion
The same caveat applies as at half a million: a wishlist is a click, not a purchase. Conversion in the launch window generally runs in single-digit percentages, and WARDOGS is launching into Early Access at $39.99 with a studio openly telling people not to buy it if the content volume does not suit them.
What 800,000 does establish is that the audience exists. Whether it converts is a question the Closed Beta on 21–23 August and the 10 September launch will answer.