Battalion 1944 studio lead apologizes for launch problems

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Battalion 1944 is a competitive multiplayer FPS set in the Second World War. It's an old-school shooter, inspired by the early Call of Duty games, and there's obviously a lot of demand for that sort of thing. The game's launch on Early Access yesterday almost immediately drew in more than 16,000 players, which is good news but also bad, because the player count quickly overwhelmed server capacity.

In a video apology, studio lead Joe Brammer accepted sole responsibility for the issues, saying he made the wrong call when estimating the server capacity required for the Early Access rollout. More than 100,000 keys were given out during the closed beta, which peaked at around 5000 concurrent players, he explained, and based on that and the players counts of other, similar games like Day of Infamy or Days of War, he took his shot.

"We have to pay for these servers that we set up, and I didn't want to put us in a situation where we spend way too much money and we were in trouble," he said. "I made those predictions and I let my fear of us failing get in the way of my confidence in this game being really good."

"It is Early Access, I don't want to get into using that as an excuse. I find this unacceptable and that's why I'm making this apology. I'm just personally embarrassed that I doubted myself and my team on how many units we would sell and how many concurrents we would have."

Battalion 1944 has been updated since yesterday's rollout and should more reliably find servers (there may still be some waits involved), and the team has also tracked down a bug that keeps community servers from hosting more than ten players at a time, although that may take some time to fix. And despite the problems, it seems to be going well: Today's peak concurrent player count fell just a hair shy of 12,000, and at time of writing there are more than 11,000 people playing.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.