Where Did WARDOGS Find Its Players?

Every time a new shooter launches, the marketers at every other shooter start asking whose players it's going to pull. WARDOGS hit early access on September 10, and the teams behind the top shooters were asking the same thing. Is it taking players from the titles they play right now? Is it picking up players who already quit? Or is it the same group that tries every new release?

Open World's R/DA team tracks what over 3.7 million players actually play through PlayDX, which means we could go find out. We took five audiences (Battlefield, Call of Duty, ARC Raiders, VALORANT, and Fortnite) and followed them every day from June through the first two weeks of WARDOGS.

What Lapsed Players Did

We started by looking at lapsed players. We wanted to know if people who had stopped playing the top shooters were likely to pick up a new game in the same genre. We found out that it depends on which game they left. Among lapsed Battlefield players, 17% tried WARDOGS, and so did 17% of lapsed ARC Raiders players. For Call of Duty, VALORANT, and Fortnite, it was only 6 to 7%. Battlefield also stood out because more than half of its players who tried WARDOGS had already stopped playing Battlefield before WARDOGS launched.

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What Active Players Did

Next we looked at active players to see if people who were still playing the top shooters would try a new one. Among active Battlefield players, 29% tried WARDOGS, the highest of the five titles. ARC Raiders was 21%, Call of Duty was 20%, and VALORANT and Fortnite were around 5%. We also checked if those Battlefield players had been playing less before WARDOGS came out, but they had played about 14 hours of Battlefield over the prior month, the same as the players who didn't try WARDOGS.

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What This Means for Your Launch

So what do you do with this if you have a game coming out next year? It starts with the titles most like yours, because some of your first players are playing those titles right now and some used to play them and stopped, and WARDOGS pulled from both groups. Before you launch, you can find out how many players are in each group and what else they play, which lets you pick creators and messaging for those players instead of targeting everyone who has ever played a shooter.

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While two weeks is a great sneak peek, we are going to watch the first month and see how many of those players stay in WARDOGS and how many go back to the titles they came from. We'll keep you posted.

If you want to know this about your own players, talk to us.