We go into Early Access on 17 September. A lot more people are about to be playing, which is great, but it also means more teaming in FFA, more bot accounts, and more banned players making a fresh account and coming straight back the same evening.

A few of you have asked what we're actually doing about all this, so here's what we've been building.


These are lobbies you can only join if you meet certain criteria. Account age, games played, purchases, that sort of thing.

At the moment, banning a cheater costs them about thirty seconds. New account, back in a lobby, same behaviour, and the person who reported them gets to play against them again. Trusted Lobbies deal with that. A new account can still play OpenFront, it just can't drop straight into the lobbies that expect some history behind you, and history is the one thing you can't throw together in an afternoon.


This is a service that looks at the commands players send during a game and flags anything that doesn't look like a person playing.

Bots stop being subtle the moment you look at their inputs. Timing that never varies, the same sequence of actions over and over, a click rate nobody keeps up for an hour. The analyzer picks up on that across a lot of games at once and puts the suspicious accounts in front of us, rather than us waiting for someone to notice and open a ticket.


When a game ends, you'll be able to see who you played with. We're also putting this behind an API so you can build your own tools with it.

We think this one will make the biggest difference of the four. Teaming is almost impossible to prove from a single game and completely obvious across twenty. Plenty of you have been tracking it by hand already, with screenshots and notes and a lot of patience, and you've been better at it than we have. Now you'll have the real data. If someone wants to build a proper detector on top of it, please do. We'll be watching what you make.


Click the i info button and you'll get a report option, so you can report someone while it's happening instead of trying to remember the details later in a Discord ticket.

Mods and admins will be able to see how many times a player has been reported and factor that in when they decide what to do. Worth being clear about how we'll use it. A pile of reports gets you looked at, it doesn't get you banned. And if a group decides to mass report someone they've got a grudge against, that's going to go badly for the group.


None of this ends cheating. People who are determined enough will work around all four of these eventually, and we'd rather say that now than act surprised later. What we can do is make cheating a lot more effort than it's worth, and make it much faster for us to catch someone when they try.

These are rolling out over the next few weeks and through Early Access. If you find a hole in any of them, tell us on Discord. The teaming reports we've had from you so far have already led to bans, so it does genuinely make a difference.

See you on the 17th.

The OpenFront team

OpenFront enters Early Access on 17 September 2026.

We announced it live from Gamescom in Cologne this week, alongside the first showing of the release trailer. This post is the written version for everyone who could not be there.


OpenFront is a real-time multiplayer strategy game where hundreds of players and AI opponents fight over one shared map. You build an economy, forge alliances, break them, and launch nuclear strikes at whoever deserves it. Around 200,000 people play it every day.

The Steam release brings:

• Windows, macOS, Linux and Steam Deck
  
• Offline play — the game runs without a connection
  
• Preloaded assets — faster launches and noticeably less jitter on older hardware, or if you live a long way from our servers
  
• Cross-play with the browser version, on the same account

• OpenFront — $4.99 — one free month of Warlord, unique cosmetics, and a verified name
  
• OpenFront Masters — $9.99 — one free month of Sovereign, plus cosmetics available no other way. It also includes everything the base edition gets: custom patterns, offline play, and trusted account status.

The browser version stays free. Permanently. We are not sunsetting it, not feature-gating it, and not turning it into a demo.

Steam is a way to support the project and get something back for it. That support pays for a mobile port done properly, an overhaul of the game's audio, and the infrastructure that keeps latency down for players worldwide — including routing we pay for daily and are not obliged to.

• Workshop support — targeted for Q1, starting with custom maps in private games
  
• Mobile — App Store and Google Play, funded by this release
  
• Trusted accounts — trialled on Steam first, then coming to openfront.io with a free route to earn it

Wishlist the game, and if you play it at launch, leave a review. For a team of three, the first hundred reviews genuinely decide how far this goes.


Play free in your browser: https://openfront.io
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/openfront
Reddit: r/Openfront

See you on the 17th.