'83: the Cold War shooter that took seven years to launch and five months to stop selling

Search for "'83 steam charts" and you're usually trying to answer one question: is anyone still playing it? The short answer is on our '83 page. The longer answer is a seven-year story of a game that kept nearly dying.

Timeline

13 March 2019. Antimatter Games, the studio behind Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, announces '83: a persistent first-person shooter for more than 80 players, set in "an alternate Cold War that got hot".

May 2022. Work on '83 is paused so the studio can focus on another project, IGI Origins.

24 May 2023. Antimatter's owner, EG7, starts winding the UK studio down.

October 2023. A new studio, Blue Dot Games, founded by Tony Gillham, who had founded Antimatter in 2013, starts recruiting testers and says it plans to take on the rights to '83.

8 November 2024. Blue Dot announces that '83 is "officially back in development", with funding from a fan from the game's Discord community. PCGamesN reported that the backing paid for five months of full-time work.

31 January 2025. Blue Dot says Early Access will start at the end of 2025.

7 November 2025. After feedback on its Steam Next Fest demo, Early Access is pushed back to early 2026.

23 April 2026. '83 launches in Early Access on Steam: three maps with two modes each, two factions with tanks and jeeps, and commander and squad leader roles. Full release is planned for mid-to-late 2027. Steam players peak at 813 that day; reviews are mixed.

July–September 2026. Blue Dot runs a 50% sale with UKIE, the UK games trade body, then releases its first content update (a new map, Marshlands, airstrikes and a cosmetic progression system), adds Easy Anti-Cheat, and offers a free demo with a 67% sale.

25 September 2026. Blue Dot suspends sales. Its post says the update, sale, demo and show appearance didn't lift the game as hoped, and that "the current commercial reality is that we have to suspend sales of the game while we seek other options". It adds: "The game will still be playable and there will be servers up."

What the numbers say

Large-team shooters need full servers. '83 is built around 40-versus-40 matches, so it needs 80 players in one place at the same time for a single full game. Its launch-day peak of 813 was enough for about ten full matches across every region at once, and numbers fell from there. That makes the problem different from a small co-op game with the same player count: below a certain level, matchmaking itself stops working.

What happens next

Blue Dot hasn't given a date for resuming sales or for the planned 1.0 release. If you already own '83, the servers are still up. If you don't, it can't currently be bought on Steam. We'll update the '83 page if that changes.