The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator. In the clip, robed followers zip around on pigs while firing machine guns, culminating in a shot of colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles.
What didn’t make the cut was the infamous snake gun, a weapon that Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—credits to a spontaneous idea from a team member’s child. “We were brainstorming and his son asked, ‘What would a snake‑gun look like?’ With our rapid‑prototype tool we threw together a snake‑shooting weapon in about thirty minutes.
He was thrilled, and the gun stayed in the final build,” Dietsch recalls. This anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit followers—or fellow players—to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a high‑fidelity experience to be built by a remarkably small crew. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their philosophy: “We wanted to be disruptors.
We told everyone, ‘We don’t need a hundred‑person studio; twelve people can do this.’ Most people thought we were crazy.” Their confidence stems from a history of achieving big results on modest budgets. “We come from indie film,” Abbott says, “so we’re used to punching far above our weight.” After 80 pitches, the team finally secured equity financing from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, giving the studio the runway to continue development. The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who now co‑heads Wolf Haus.
Together they co‑wrote and co‑directed the indie features Happy Hunting and Manifest West. Abbott is the son of veteran makeup artist Larry Abbott and helped launch Ascendant Pictures, the production company founded by Chris Roberts before his shift to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx. This blend of cinematic experience and entrepreneurial grit informs the studio’s approach to game design.
Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine. “Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt blocked from creating my own,” he explains.
He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few tiny prototypes, and eventually settled on a doomsday cult simulator—a concept that merged his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the two took the prototype to Dooma, a production partner. Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, entered the video‑game arena after a career in film production and screenwriting.
In the early 2000s he founded Sekretagent Productions, providing narrative services for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Later he launched several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million (US$330 million). After that windfall he bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, planning a quiet retirement. Yet a call from his old Hollywood‑Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back: “Joe showed me a video‑game prototype that blew my mind, and I came out of retirement to help.” Wendschuh recruited Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros.
Games and now head of Raccoon Logic (the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet), as a strategic advisor. Schneider then brought in Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer. With this core team in place, the next hurdle was funding—a difficult task in the midst of an industry downturn in 2023. The studio’s initial outreach yielded interest but no commitments.
After partnering with CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and re‑pitching in 2024, they finally closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton. Abbott credits the CAA connection and the presence of seasoned veterans like Schneider and Chartrand for the breakthrough. “My agent Derek Douglas had been my agent when I was making games for twelve years and had headed the video‑game department at William Morris. That network opened doors,” Abbott notes.
Despite the high‑profile backing, Wolf Haus has deliberately kept its staff lean—only 13 full‑time employees. Dietsch emphasizes that the small size is intentional: “We wanted everyone to have a voice, to touch the creative, and to feel ownership of the final product.” To make a sprawling open‑world game feasible with such a tiny crew, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling early on.
“If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person,” Dietsch says. The first year of development was split between ideating gameplay and building the internal toolchain that would allow those ideas to scale across a six‑kilometre‑square map without the project collapsing under its own weight.
The equity funding model gave Wolf Haus the breathing room to perfect those tools. Krafton and Lifelike’s investment was used to self‑fund the game’s development, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing.
“Our investors are motivated to increase the studio’s enterprise value, so they support us in building extensive tooling,” Wendschuh explains. “Whenever we hit a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool. It may slow us down in the short term, but it enables a small team to deliver a AAA‑ish experience.” When asked about generative AI—a hot topic in game development—Dietsch gives a clear answer: the studio does not use it for creative work. “We believe a human touch is essential.
Turning development over to an AI would defeat why we get up every morning,” he says. Wendschuh adds that the only AI they employ is for administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Even Krafton, which has rebranded itself as an “AI‑first” company, insisted that Wolf Haus avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline, fearing it could compromise artistic integrity and job security for voice actors and artists.
Indeed, the six‑kilometre‑square world of Join Us is handcrafted, and the game’s 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors—an effort the team deemed vital despite their indie status. Dietsch contrasts the immediacy of game development with the lengthy gestation of film.
“In movies you write a script, wait years, get studio approval, then finally shoot. In games you can prototype an idea in the morning, drop it into the engine, and see it instantly. That immediacy is exhilarating.” Wendschuh notes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, requiring a handful of high‑profile talent to secure financing, whereas games have far fewer gatekeepers.
“Anyone can rent a camera and shoot a backyard movie, but without big names or distribution it rarely succeeds. A game, however, can reach a massive audience without A‑list actors or directors,” he says. Both founders agree that storytelling is the core driver across mediums.
“When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games. It came down to a coin toss and maybe getting a camera for Christmas,” Dietsch recalls. “Whether it’s a film or a game, you’re trying to give someone an experience, tell a story, and engage them. The medium changes, but the purpose stays the same.” Join Us thus stands as a testament to what a tight‑knit, tool‑centric studio can achieve when it leverages Hollywood experience, savvy financing, and a refusal to rely on generative AI.
With a modest crew, a hand‑crafted world, and a uniquely chaotic cult‑sim premise, Wolf Haus aims to prove that size isn’t the only determinant of ambition in today’s gaming landscape.