Million-selling tactical FPS Gray Zone Warfare has a “healthy fear” as it plans future updates

Gray Zone Warfare developer Madfinger Games didn’t expect to sell a million copies of its open-world tactical shooter quite so soon after its launch, but it quickly propelled the new FPS game into the conversation among the likes of Escape From Tarkov, The Division, and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon series. As it prepares to deploy its first major update, introducing a full day/night cycle complete with plenty of suitable gear, I sat down at Gamescom 2024 with Madfinger PR director Rick Lagnese and community manager Corey Smith to talk about the game’s success and its place in the hardcore military FPS space.

“We have a very healthy future – we’re here for years, we’re not going anywhere,” Lagnese remarks. With such an incredible sales number since Gray Zone Warfare arrived on Steam in April 2024, it’s rapidly grown a big community of players, and Lagnese says the huge response has led to Madfinger working to bolster its development team. Indeed, Smith is a figure many fans of the best FPS games will already know – he’s been covering tactical shooters for over a decade as ‘TheDevilDogGamer’ on YouTube, and even has his own in-game Tarkov item, the DevilDog mayonnaise.

Of course, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Madfinger CEO Marek Rabas apologized in June after the studio initially ignored negative feedback from players about issues in a new hotfix, saying it “will always trust our community from now on.” It’s a sentiment that Lagnese echoes during our conversation. “There’s a lot of semantics, but at the end of the day we want to make a better game.”

The hardcore tactical FPS space is very busy at the moment, with the likes of Delta Force, Arena Breakout Infinite, and Level Zero Extraction all taking on the might of Escape From Tarkov. Gray Zone Warfare adopts a different approach to proceedings, offering a persistent open world that players stay in at all times. Madfinger doesn’t consider it an extraction shooter, Lagnese explains, saying that he thinks of it more akin to tactical military open-world games such as the original Far Cry, or Ubisoft’s Wildlands, but with the additional threat of potential player confrontations.

“It’s more like an MMO because it’s persistent, it’s not match-based,” he says. “We’re not a competitive game. I get all these people trying to sell us on competitive stuff or esports, and that’s cool enough – maybe we’ll do something later down the road, I don’t know. But right now we just want to make a game where there’s that Ghost Recon Wildlands type thing but with other players.”

Indeed, Gray Zone Warfare allows you to jump into pure PvE servers without the risk of player hostilities if that’s your preferred play style. “You can take your time, and we found the community helping each other out for keys, or exchanging weapons and stuff. Because they didn’t have to rush, people started talking more in proximity chat, and it became a really healthy community. Not perfect – but we’ve sold over a million units, and we’re very fortunate.”

Since the game’s early access launch in April, where the developer’s headcount was in the 60s, the team has now scaled up to “around 80 to 85,” with plans to bring on even more. It’s currently working on the upcoming GZW night combat update, which is just the first in a roadmap that’s planned to roll out major updates every six months, culminating in late 2027 with the arrival of Ground Zero.

Currently, the center of the map plays host to a large region that is functionally inaccessible due to immense radiation levels that will quickly wipe out any player bold enough to venture too close. Eventually, however, it will become the core of the Gray Zone Warfare endgame, and should act as another way to distinguish it from others in the genre. “I think people will stop comparing us [to other tactical shooters] a couple of updates in,” Smith remarks.

“I’ve met the Delta Force developers,” Lagnese adds. “I played their game, it’s beautiful. We’re all friends and want to help each other. But we don’t want to step on toes either. This game is Gray Zone Warfare – the persistent world alone is completely different. Delta Force is amazing, they have their extractions but it is more arcadey – it reminds me of Battlefield, you know? It’s great. We’re looking at Arena Breakout, at Tarkov, at Arma, and all these things – we have to be aware of that. But at the same time we’re our own thing.”

Lagnese nods to the upcoming Stalker 2 release date. “Stalker 2 is coming out and we’re also releasing this [night ops] update later this year. We really respect Stalker – we were there hanging out [at Gamescom] and their devs were here. We don’t want to release stuff at the same time – not that we all know when everyone is releasing stuff, but there’s a respect for that. And there’s a healthy fear, because we don’t want to be arrogant.”

“Some of the comparisons are good, flirtatious compliments,” Lagnese continues. “We really appreciate Arma and a lot of what it’s done.” Yet he’s confident that Madfinger is bringing a distinctive level of realism to the table – pointing to the new NVGs as an example. Carefully modeled after real-world night vision devices such as the monocular AN/PVS-14, these have been built to act as closely to the real thing as possible, even allowing you to maintain peripheral vision around the scope. “We have a lot more that we want to do with the night vision, too,” Smith notes. “There’s a lot of content coming – a lot of stuff that excites me knowing the plans.”

Lagnese says having Smith’s perspective has been helpful to the team. “Sometimes I say, ‘Corey, please put on your creator cap – tell me what you think from a creator side. Does this suck?’” Smith, meanwhile, says seeing the other side has been enlightening. “I always would rag on developers – ‘Oh, I can’t believe they did this!’ And now that I’ve seen the other side, I’m looking at all the struggle and all the work that goes into it and I think, man, maybe we were the problem.” He laughs. “I owe some apologies.”

Lagnese isn’t too worried about players dropping off to try other games, either. “The whole ‘game is dead’ thing – at this point I almost laugh a little bit,” he smiles. “I don’t take it personally. When we don’t have a lot of people playing, it gives us more time [to work on future content]. We do believe it’s going to pick up – there will be more replay value here. We have a ways to go before we get to a consistent player base and we know that. The game isn’t dead.”

“The amount of times I’ve seen people say other games are dead and then they do a content drop,” Smith notes, “people just get bored quickly. We’ll go through the droughts and then have a sudden saturation [of games].” “DayZ went through it, Hunt Showdown went through it – and they’re great games,” Lagnese muses, “when people say there’s a drought, I’m like, ‘Sorry guys, but I have a backlog of 50 games.’”

Gray Zone Warfare is out now on Steam in early access, priced at $34.99 / £29.50. Lagnese notes that there are currently no plans for paid DLC, although the game might increase in price in the future. “In my opinion, even if you get 30 or 35 hours of fun – and you’re going to get more than that – a dollar an hour is not too bad.”

Love that feeling of playing games with other real people? Jump into the best co-op games if you prefer to work alongside them, or the best multiplayer games if you’d rather prove why you’re number one.

You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or grab our PCGN deals tracker to net yourself some bargains.