A few words before our Steam Release

S! WWII Online Community. As we prepare to move the game from Early Access to Full Release on Steam, I wanted to share some thoughts with you. This is a massive deal for the game, and thousands of new players are about to flood the server. Please continue reading this article, and I hope you all have a fantastic 4th of July celebration coming up.

Hey everyone,

Hopefully by now you know that this coming Thursday (July 6th, 2023) WWII Online will be transitioning from Early Access to Full Release on Steam. Essentially what this means is the hard work for getting onto Steam was done some years ago, and since then we've added a lot of new features and fixes to the game. 

Unlike our inaugural Early Access launch (where we limited the release by territory) this will be a full world-wide opening all at once. We will literally be hitting a button that will then supercharge the algorithm over at Steam to push people to our page, with launch posters and all deployed to many new first time viewers. Since our original release, Steam concurrent numbers have nearly doubled which means we should anticipate a significant amount of traffic.

After speaking with our team about our infrastructure, we've not only improved our regional location by having the campaign server be located in New Jersey (USA) but we've also added 4x the computing power and 10x the bandwidth capability on a much more stable hub. But because people from all over the globe will be entering the server, their connectivity will be everything. Especially for low bandwidth users, we cannot recommend a hardline connection (ethernet cable) to your router/modem enough. Additionally, it will be imperative to not have all players concentrated in a single attack objective in-game. Veteran players will be needed to help distribute folks around the game map to keep things healthy.

Our Game Management team is starting to introduce more supply on the server now and will continue rolling it out (and monitoring accordingly) post-launch. Making sure we have enough supply for everyone to use while maintaining attrition to take place will be a careful balance. Ratios of existing kits will not change, just a double, tripling, etc of numbers as-needed.

Our Community and Marketing team will also have a series of events going on for you to stay actively engaged, and of course we'll be having incentives for returning players to get back into the fight as well.

This is a defining moment for WWII Online. With the tumultuous atmosphere that has been the WWII gaming genre as of late, WWII Online - a 22 year old game now as of June 6th 2023 - is pushing hard to get back to modernization with its developments like WWII Online 2.0 and WWII Online: Chokepoint. While these take time, they are the right calls to make. Our organization had some significant changes in recent years which has led to us being able to re-align our focus, to start investing in our future appropriately and to keep the game healthy in terms of developments and on the corporate side. Things that have impacted other games in recent times do not apply here, and so long as the community is actively engaged, supporting what we do, you can be confident and sure that WWII Online will not only carry on, it will achieve its objectives outlined.

And I think that is the biggest thing to take away from all of this... WWII Online is the place that has demonstrated large scale game play, who has the proprietary (proven) technology to get it done and just needs time and support from its players to reignite the glory days of WWII Online. It's essential to help these new players understand not just what they're seeing, but where we're going and the role they can play in that.

This Steam release marks that possibility accelerating at a faster pace. The leadership team and I at Playnet/CRS have provided new incoming Steam users wtih 90-days of free premium trial access. This was done because we want to get WWII Online's battlefield populated and we want them to have no reason not to join or stick around to experience what we all know the game can be. We noticed for example during our original Steam release that after their 30-day trial was complete there was a rather large attrition following. So 3x that duration, with voice comms and a lot of improvements... should yield the most success in retention as possible.

Finally, I wanted to thank you all for helping to get us to this point where this will be possible. We cannot state enough how vital the WWII Online community is, as many of us (myself included) were once players first here. The community is literally supporting and running the game. The opportunity ahead is in our hands solely, where else can you say that you had a hand in the rebirth of a fantastic game and are in the front row seat of being able to actually do something meaningful? Let's stick together and continue the good work done to date.

Let's make sure to keep the atmosphere healthy, to encourage new players and guide them to get answers and into squads so they can succeed. I'll see you on launch day. Salute!