In June 2022, on the road to Arma 4, Bohemia Interactive released Arma Reforger, another immersive military sandbox title that would serve as the foundation for a UGC network and mod-backed ecosystem for millions of gamers everywhere. It was also a checkpoint on the path to the next generation of the franchise in Arma 4, and it was a full-fledged outing for Bohemia’s new engine, Enfusion.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the big hit the team was hoping for, and the game spent a year barely scraping a few hundred concurrent players on Steam. It was a commercial failure that scattered the community, but after a year of knuckling down, Bohemia brought Reforger back to life.
During a talk at Gamescom Dev, Bohemia’s Natalia Agafonova, Executive Producer, explained how.
‘We Gave Ourselves One Year to Right the Broken Ship’
Arma Reforger is a full-fledged game in its own right, but it’s expected to pale in comparison to Arma 4, the developing title that’s the next major iteration of the series that stretches back more than two decades. However, the early access launch of Reforger was not the success Bohemia intended it to be, which somewhat marred expectations for Arma 4, which remains mostly under wraps.
During a transparent talk at Gamescom Dev, Arma’s Executive Producer, Natalia Agafonova, explained that it took a massive overhaul of Bohemia’s operating model to get things back on track. It wasn’t just a case of ‘fixing the broken stuff’, but fundamentally rewriting the rules at the studio itself, including how teams worked together, how tasks were prioritized, and how team culture flourished – or didn’t.
It all started with Reforger’s flop:
We knew the product didn’t feel right, so we did a review, checked what features were missing, worked on everything, and released a beautiful, massive roadmap. We gave ourselves one year to right the broken ship.
We kept treating the product. We did a three-month sweep with everyone just improving the game.
But it didn’t feel right.
She admitted that they’d ‘really disappointed’ fans of the franchise, especially the veteran followers who had been around for two decades. Unfortunately, the team had fallen prey to five myths that prevented them from succeeding, especially amid an engine change, a coding language change, and several other evolutions in the company’s operating model.
These myths were:
- We need a complete design before we can build
- We don’t have time to teach
- What worked before will work now
- A public roadmap will repair our reputation
- One brilliant change can fix this
She spoke frankly, explaining that the studio had misunderstood the franchise DNA going into Reforger, resulting in a game that just didn’t feel right, especially to the tenured fans out there. She quipped that some fans had been playing Arma for longer than some of the more junior developers on the team had been alive.
‘Less Promising, More Doing’
Going forward, the team now needed to learn how to develop by prototyping, immerse themselves in the game, and try to lean on the community to define and prioritize what was truly needed to bring this Arma experience back to life.
This resulted in the leadership team ordering a lockdown on new features. For a time, nothing went into a stable build other than improvements and performance activations (aside from helicopters), which meant there were fewer opportunities for new things to break old code.
This meant that lots of content was left behind:
We cut many features for 1.0, and some of them have never made it into Arma Reforger, even now, many years later.
We were already in early access, which meant that players were actively playing the game, and that was breaking the game. It was still not stable enough; not performant enough.
We had the rule that everything you commit has to be backwards compatible. That means that if you commit new code, it cannot break any of the older code.
The overambitious roadmap had also been a problem. The team had pushed out this expansive, three-page roadmap packed to the gills with features that would be delivered before the intended full release date of 1.0 in 2023, but it was far too much to handle.
Agafonova explained that it took them as long to deliver the first page as it should have taken to deliver the entire roadmap.
The community noticed. They always notice, because those guys are spending thousands of hours in our game. They’re building mods, they’re creating community content, they’re running servers, they’re paying for those servers.
They didn’t just take this as a wishlist for Santa for Christmas, they took it as a debt. That debt had a very punishing interest that we as a team could not service.
We realized it, so we switched our tactics. Less promising, more doing.
The face of the brand changed, the team’s community-driven tactics were altered, and small groups of veteran players were encouraged to actively provide feedback to the team about the development of Reforger going forward.
This is why we talk to them directly. We do unmoderated live streams… It’s because they deserve it. After twenty-five years of being loyal to us, they deserve it.
The cost that we paid was dealing with a lot of frustration from the community, because we made a big promise and then said, ‘Sorry guys, it won’t happen in time.’ Of course people were not happy.
We had a lot of passionate players, from within the team as well. About 20% of the Arma team are modders that come from the community.
Proof in the Numbers
The new culture ingrained into the studio at Bohemia Interactive, the fresh approach to development, and the community-led discussions turned out to all be a winning formula.
Throughout 2022 and into 2023, Arma Reforger boasted peak player counts on Steam every month of around 500 or 600 users, which was woeful when compared to other games in the space, especially previous Arma titles. It was never going to be good enough for the team to just accept it.
When 1.0 came around in December 2023, the wheels slowly started turning, and folks were switched on to all the improvements that had been made. By April 2024, the peaks were floating around 5,000 users a month, and by December 2024, a year later, it was around 10,000 peak CCU on Steam.
In March 2026, the game hit an all-time high of 25,000 peak users and was enjoying growth following a PlayStation launch that introduced cross-platform collaboration and mod support.
The turnaround was appreciated by the community as much as it was by Bohemia Interactive, and now the team is dedicated to ensuring that things play out very differently for Arma 4, the next major iteration in the series.
Were you disappointed by the failed launch of Arma Reforger, and do you think it’s in a much better shape now? Let us know on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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