By Dor Zairi
Bulkhead announced the FPS Games Show on 19 August. This is how the studio's CEO, Joe Brammer, explained it in the announcement:
FPS games have been a cornerstone of the industry for more than three decades, building one of the biggest and most dedicated player communities in gaming. Yet that audience is underserved when it comes to a dedicated place for news, updates and new game reveals.
The show goes out live on Twitch on Thursday 3 September at 19:00 BST / 20:00 CEST, at twitch.tv/thefpsgamesshow . It is pre-recorded, it runs sixteen games, and each studio brings one exclusive. Steam is running a third-party event alongside it with discounts, demos and free weekends on selected titles.
Brammer and Howard Philpott, Bulkhead's UI/UX designer, also said in the announcement video that a 60-second trailer slot at an existing showcase had been quoted to them at $300,000. Bulkhead has not named the showcase, and the figure is the studio's own account rather than anything a seller publishes.
Derby, England. Five graduates of the University of Derby made the first-person puzzle game Pneuma: Breath of Life, then folded their two small companies, Deco Digital and Bevel Studios, into one studio in 2015. The Turing Test followed in 2016 through Square Enix Collective and sits at Very Positive across 6,239 Steam reviews, the best reception anything with Bulkhead's name on it has had.
It is a puzzle game on Europa, which matters mainly because it is the last thing the studio made that was not a shooter.
Battalion 1944 is the one that set the studio's course. The Kickstarter opened in February 2016 asking for £100,000, cleared it in under three days, and closed at £317,281 from 10,096 backers. Early Access arrived in February 2018, 1.0 in May 2019, and Square Enix bought a 20% stake in Bulkhead in November 2018.
The campaign had also sold PlayStation 4 and Xbox One keys. Those versions were never delivered. Bulkhead's own announcement of 9 August 2022 is the record of how it ended:
We have formally ended our relationship with Square Enix. We want to start this exciting new chapter where we began, focusing on the players. With this in mind, we will be releasing BATTALION: Legacy for free on Steam. We are deeply disappointed that Battalion 1944 never made it to console and we will be refunding all console Kickstarter backers. Thank you to everyone that backed the console version and we're sorry it has taken so long to rectify this.
In July 2023 the offer was widened to every backer, on any platform, at any tier. Battalion: Legacy, described by the studio as the final version of the game, has been free on Steam since 16 August 2022. Its review band across 12,837 reviews is Mixed.
Ownership has moved three times since. Splash Damage, then Tencent-owned, acquired Bulkhead in December 2022. In November 2025 Tencent sold it to Super Media Group, a holding company whose leadership includes Brammer, CTO Kevin Chandler and CFO Mark Pinney. Everplay Group , the parent of Team17 , took 20% of SMG for £2 million, with Hiro Capital also backing the deal. The studio says it has made the GamesIndustry.biz Best Places to Work list two years running.
Put that $300,000 in the currency a studio actually earns in. WARDOGS goes into Early Access at $39.99, so after Steam's 30% cut the slot costs the revenue from roughly 10,700 copies sold. What it buys is one minute inside a two-hour programme, between celebrity segments and single-player tentpoles, in front of an audience that mostly did not come for shooters. That is the trade Bulkhead turned down.
The FPS Games Show inverts the payment. There are no paid placements and no marketing spend required to appear. Every studio on the bill is there for free, contributing a piece of exclusive content and, in the organisers' framing, promoting the other fifteen games as well as its own. Bulkhead is running it with BOOST , a games marketing agency. Shed Wilson, BOOST's director and co-founder, put the pitch this way:
There's a real sense of unity around FPS games, both among the studios making them and the players who love them. This really is the first time studios have come together like this to showcase their games to the wider community.
What replaces the money is work. Somebody has to book sixteen studios, cut a show, sell the Steam event and build an audience for a channel whose first video went up on 19 August. Bulkhead is paying in production time and in its own team's attention during the month it ships a game, which is a real cost even though it does not appear on an invoice. Whether that trades well is not knowable yet: a first-run showcase with no established viewership is a bet that a genre audience will turn up for a genre show, and nothing about the announcement proves it will.
Philpott described what the show leaves out: no sketches, no musical interludes, no non-FPS content. For anyone who has watched a publisher showcase pad twenty minutes of announcements into ninety, that is the pitch.
Sixteen games, listed here as the show itself lists them: Rainbow Six Siege , Escape from Tarkov , Ready or Not , WARDOGS , Gray Zone Warfare , SCUM , STALZONE , Hell Let Loose: Vietnam , Beautiful Light , Bellum , Incursion: Red River , Road to Vostok , Sand Raiders of Sophie , Bodycam , Terminal War and 83 .
The two names carrying the bill are the two biggest live shooters on it. Rainbow Six Siege is Ubisoft Montreal's, out since 1 December 2015 and still operating ten years later.
Escape from Tarkov is Battlestate Games , which spent eight years in closed beta selling directly off its own site, and only reached 1.0 on 15 November 2025. That was also the day it arrived on Steam, in front of an audience that had never been able to buy it there, and the verdict has been cool: Mixed across 63,306 reviews, 49% of them positive. A decade of development and a storefront debut do not buy goodwill, they spend it.
The middle of the bill is where the genre's current centre of gravity sits: slow, lethal, squad-based shooters that would have been called niche ten years ago, and several of them now outweigh the games that used to be called mainstream. Ready or Not is the clearest case. VOID Interactive shipped a SWAT game with no respawns, no health bar to speak of and a scoring system that punishes you for shooting a suspect who was about to surrender, and it has 344,226 Steam reviews, more than any game on this bill except Siege.
Gray Zone Warfare is the other one worth watching. MADFINGER Games spent a decade making mobile shooters, then put an entire island in Unreal Engine 5 and asked players to run contracts across it for three warring factions. It launched into Early Access in April 2024 to a rough reception, kept shipping, and now sits at Mostly Positive across 78,628 reviews.
SCUM is the quiet giant. Gamepires shipped it into Early Access in 2018, spent seven years there, and left in June 2025 with 126,526 reviews behind it, the third-largest audience on the bill. STALZONE is the one whose numbers are easy to miss: it is the free-to-play relaunch of STALCRAFT: X, renamed in June 2026, an extraction MMO set in an alternate Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, and it carries 107,386 reviews from a player base EXBO built across the CIS over thirteen years and is now pointing at everyone else. Incursion: Red River is smaller and narrower, a PvE-only co-op extraction shooter in modern Vietnam from Games of Tomorrow, in Early Access since April 2024 at 9,241 reviews.
Hell Let Loose: Vietnam is developed by Expression Games and published by Team17, which released it on 13 August after a delay from June. Team17's parent company holds a fifth of the group that owns Bulkhead, and Team17 publishes Bulkhead's game too, so two of the sixteen slots sit inside the same corporate structure as the host.
'83 shows what the show is for. Blue Dot Games built a 40v40 Cold-War-gone-hot shooter and released it in April 2026, and a 40v40 game has a problem no amount of craft solves: it needs eighty people online at once or it is nothing. It sits at Mixed across 1,254 reviews. That is not a verdict on the game, it is a description of the hole it is in, and an audience is the only thing that fills it.
At the other end of the bill are studios that would never clear a six-figure slot fee. Bodycam is Reissad Studio , two brothers in France, who built a shooter around the visual language of police camera footage and shipped it into Early Access in June 2024.
Road to Vostok has one full-time developer, Antti Leinonen, who moved the whole project off Unity and onto Godot in 2023 after the runtime fee announcement, and shipped it into Early Access on 7 April 2026.
SAND: Raiders of Sophie is the odd one out, and the most interesting failure on the bill. Hologryph and TowerHaus built a game where your base is a walking mech fortress you assemble compartment by compartment, tinyBuild published it in June, and it landed at Mixed across 13,589 reviews. A game that ambitious splitting its audience down the middle is the sort of thing a genre show can actually help with, in a way a minute of trailer between celebrity segments cannot.
Three of the sixteen have nothing to review yet, which is the point of putting them here. Bellum is Astarte Industries with the YouTuber Karmakut and developers off Arma 3, Squad and Ready or Not, an 80-player squad shooter set in a 2030s African proxy war, due in Early Access this year. Beautiful Light is Deep Worlds, six squads of three fighting over one artifact, due in December. Terminal War is Albatross Interactive , set in a fractured 1990s America, undated, and third-person, which makes it the one game on The FPS Games Show that is not a first-person shooter.
WARDOGS enters Early Access on 10 September, seven days after the show it is presenting, published by Team17 at $39.99. It puts a hundred players in three teams on one destructible map in the industrial mountains of Eastern Europe, fighting over a control zone, with cash as the connecting mechanic.
Bulkhead is also on its own bill, a week before its own Early Access launch. That is a self-interested arrangement and the studio has not pretended otherwise. The other fifteen slots still cost their studios nothing, which is a different offer from the one the genre normally gets.
Thursday 3 September, 19:00 BST, which is 20:00 in Berlin and Paris, 21:00 in Tel Aviv, 14:00 in New York and 11:00 in Los Angeles. The Steam event runs alongside the broadcast, with discounts, free demos and free weekends across the participating titles.
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Tags: fps, showcase, marketing, bulkhead, news