The whole Bulkhead studio is taking December off. CEO Joe Brammer told Edge magazine (issue 430) that the team will step away from WARDOGS for the entire month, and that players should not expect much from the studio until January (Confirmed). His message to players: "Go play GTA 6, we need to detox." He also said the studio will "make sure players know they can f*** off in December", according to GamesRadar, which published the quotes on 3 November.
His reason is the launch workload. He told Edge that everyone at Bulkhead has worked outside their job description to get the game this far.
Community manager Brian McCrann (L0ssy) put it more gently on X the same evening. The plan, he wrote, is to "take the foot off the pedal in December" and come back in the New Year. He added that the team still has more to talk about, and new content to show, before the break (Confirmed).
When does the break start and end?
December, with the team back in January. Brammer said the entire month. Neither he nor L0ssy gave an exact last working day or return date.
What does it mean for Season 3?
Season 3 would get under three weeks of developer attention before the studio goes quiet. The start date is still 12 November, from a developer reply and press reports, not an official post (Reported). On the Hot Zone podcast, Bulkhead said seasons will now run about three months, with a smaller update partway through. A season that starts on 12 November would run into February, so the break falls early in Season 3. Bulkhead has not said when the mid-season update lands.
L0ssy's promise of new content before December fits a November launch, but it does not confirm the date. The Season 3 preview devlog, postponed on 30 October, still has no new date.
Season 3 still starts with a wipe: levels and cash reset. What resets in a wipe →
Will servers and fixes keep running in December?
Nobody has said (Unconfirmed). Neither Brammer nor L0ssy said whether hotfixes will ship, whether anti-cheat bans and support tickets will be handled, or who watches the servers. Brammer expects bug reports and balance complaints to pile up until January, which suggests little will be fixed in December.
Some open problems go into the break with no fix announced:
- Flying vehicles. Bulkhead promised a server-side fix on 20 October. No fix announced yet →
- The region lock. Bulkhead has not said when the 175 ms ping cap will be replaced. Why it is backfiring →
If the servers go down over the holidays, we track outages on the server status page.
Has Bulkhead done this before?
Probably, but the September post is ambiguous. On 16 September, answering crunch claims, Brammer wrote on X: "We gave everyone the entire month of December off". It is in the past tense, next to a claim that half of development ran on a four-day week. It reads as a December during development, not an early announcement of this one. Some outlets read it as the latter.
After launch in late September, Brammer also said a large part of the team had been made to take holiday because of exhaustion, DDoS attacks and cheaters.
What does not change
The game stays on sale at $24.99 on Steam. The break falls while the player count is falling: Steamcharts averaged 137,734 concurrent players in October, 38.5% below September. Live player count →
We will update this post if Bulkhead says anything about servers, fixes or support in December.