Wardogs has spent the past week as one of gaming’s biggest success stories, but its CEO is now using that success to defend one of the industry’s most criticized practices. Bulkhead founder Joe Brammer told The Game Business that intense crunch was essential to getting Wardogs out the door, framing the studio’s punishing final months of development as a trade-off workers accepted in exchange for what he called “life-changing” money once the game took off.

The near-collapse behind the hit

The context makes Brammer’s comments land differently than a typical crunch defense. In December 2025, Tencent decided it no longer wanted Bulkhead, and Brammer warned his roughly 100-person team they were facing potential redundancies as a result. The studio had spent six straight years making annual cuts of around 20% of staff just to stay afloat. Rather than shut down, Bulkhead was absorbed into a new consortium backed by Hiro Capital and Everplay Group — the parent company of publisher Team17 — in an undisclosed deal that kept the lights on and Wardogs in development.

Brammer has said his internal target for Wardogs to be considered a survival-level success was just 400,000 copies sold, with 600,000 counted as a genuinely good outcome. Instead, the game pulled in roughly 1 million pre-orders and crossed 2 million copies sold within a week of its September 10 Steam Early Access launch, alongside more than 400,000 concurrent players. Brammer recalled telling staff the studio might not survive, and the team’s response: “Joe, we’ve got your back, you can do this.”

“I expect people to crunch”

That backdrop is what Brammer is now pointing to when he talks about how the game got made. He was blunt about his expectations, saying he doesn’t believe in remote work for game development and adding plainly that “they know I expect people to crunch.” He described the final stretch before launch in personal terms, saying the project became “more important than a lot of their family lives” for much of the team over the last three months.

Brammer also acknowledged that Bulkhead screens candidates for their public stance on crunch before hiring, effectively filtering out applicants who’ve spoken against the practice online. His framing is transactional rather than apologetic: if a studio is going to ask people to crunch, he argues, it also has to deliver a payoff big enough to justify it, and he says Wardogs’ sales windfall does exactly that for Bulkhead’s staff.

A balancing act, by his own description

Brammer didn’t present the crunch stretch as a permanent state, calling it a swing that now has to correct in the other direction. With Wardogs a hit, Bulkhead is resisting pressure from platform partners to accelerate console versions, which remain targeted for 2028 rather than being rushed forward. The entire team has been given all of December off. On the studio’s broader messaging around transparency, Brammer was similarly direct, telling The Game Business “we’re not transparent, and we’re not honest” about everything Bulkhead does — a comment he framed as owning up to selective openness rather than pretending otherwise.

Why this follows Bulkhead everywhere now

Wardogs was already this year’s clearest example of a small studio outmuscling AAA competition on a fraction of the budget, after Tencent rejected Bulkhead’s original pitch at roughly £10-12 million for wanting a bigger scope. That underdog framing is part of why Brammer’s crunch comments are getting attention now: a studio that nearly went under twelve months ago, that still runs lean enough to screen out crunch-averse hires, is also the studio currently holding Steam’s top-seller spot. Whether “life-changing” payouts for a single breakout hit are a sustainable answer to years of redundancies — or a one-time reward for a team that gambled its jobs on it — is the question hanging over Bulkhead’s next project.

For the sales numbers driving this conversation, see our earlier coverage of Wardogs crossing 2 million copies in five days. And for another studio’s labor practices facing public scrutiny this year, read our report on Rockstar’s employment tribunal over 31 fired GTA 6 developers.