Once upon a time, the videogame sphere was in its #deckbuilder era, kickstarted by Slay the Spire and the relative ease of creating similar games. Then came the #survival era, with the likes of Palworld, Nightingale, and Enshrouded being three of many entries to a busy genre. In 2026, we’ve hit our #hardcoreFPS era. It’s a slightly messier hashtag, sure, but a quick look at Steam’s top seller list sees Bulkhead’s Wardogs sitting right up top, with it ranking a coveted fifth on Valve’s most-played chart. Not bad for a hardcore FPS game – a genre that is notoriously divisive by nature.
Wardogs isn’t alone in its success. We’ve seen a resurgence in hard-as-nails shooters: Ready or Not, Bodycam, and of course, Escape from Tarkov’s 1.0 release. I’d argue that 2026 marks a hardcore Renaissance: two words that feel like they don’t go together. Tarkov, in many ways, is the game that defined the genre, acting as the primary cornerstone for the sector. Game Director and Battlestate COO, Nikita Buyanov, knows quite a bit about the hardcore sphere, then, so who better to ask about this new influx of shooters? Why does he think we’re seeing a sudden rise in hardcore games?
“We built a pretty big part of this community with Tarkov,” Buyanov tells me. With that knowledge, he notes that “the whole lifespan of gamers is getting close to pretty big numbers – we can have 50 or 60 year old gamers already. The whole army of gamers is getting aged up.
“This means that, at some point, your intellectual capacities and your interest in games also changes: you need to play something intelligent; something that you can put a lot of effort and your brain activity into. That’s why we have these games like Tarkov, for example, [ones] with a lot of functionality and complexity inside. They give you the idea that you can actually level yourself up, literally – with your intellectual capacity and abilities right in the game.
He notes that this, in turn, “creates a whole category of gamers that treat games not as games – not for fun. They can actually be like a second-life experience kind of game.” While he notes that these don’t actively “replace” elements of players’ actual lives, “it means that they use their knowledge in the game in the same way that they can use it in real life.” He explains that the depth of weapon and loadout systems, as well as the general map knowledge and tactical understanding of games like Tarkov, force players to really think. “Basically, they treat games as life.”
Tarkov, and games like it, “created a whole movement of these people,” Buyanov says. “It’s a lot of them already.”
Buyanov believes that, while players have been playing “simple and arcadey games,” they now want to play something “intelligent that utilizes their experiences more than ever.” But beyond that, he also thinks players have grown bored of “all of the sequels and games that have a repetitive cycle. They just got tired of those games.” Instead, there’s a wider interest in “complexity” and a “linkage to real life.”
“We have more and more people in the army of gamers, and the more experienced, older gamer will select something more intelligent and complex to play,” he says. “I think this combination created this status of the whole gaming industry.”
What Wardogs and Tarkov do well is offer flexibility: you can approach situations your way, with your own strategy. Devising said strategy is a core part of the experience – as Buyanov says, it forces you to think. As someone who knows her League of Legends builds like the back of her hand, and can effectively lock them in without really paying attention, the prospect of having to actually use my brain is exciting, and the rewards for a clever strategy actually feel good.
To echo Buyanov’s point, it seems like a lot of online live-service titles are struggling with player retention at the moment – a question I’ve heard across the multiplayer industry is ‘how do we level up our game?’ The era of battle passes, seasonal heroes, and new maps and modes seems to be over. What comes next? I’m not sure. But for now, hardcore FPS games reign supreme.