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 charge on pig‑back while wielding machine guns, culminating in a shot of colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the final edit was the infamous "snake gun," a quirky weapon that Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, proudly explains.
"One of the developer’s kids asked, ‘What if there was a gun that shot snakes?’ We had a rapid‑prototype tool that let us spin up a new weapon in about thirty minutes. I built the snake‑shooter on the spot, and the kid went nuts.
It’s still in the game today," Dietsch recalls. That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit of Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival title where players can recruit followers—or teammates—to build a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a small crew to produce a high‑fidelity experience that would normally require a much larger staff. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, sums it up: “We set out to be disruptors.
We told everyone, ‘We don’t need a hundred people; twelve is enough.’ Most people thought we were crazy.” The team’s confidence stems from a history of achieving big results on modest budgets. Abbott notes that many of them came from indie filmmaking, where “punching above your weight” is a daily reality. After 80 pitches, Wolf Haus finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which now hold stakes in the studio. The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep.
Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who later co‑founded Wolf Haus and 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 started by Chris Roberts before he moved on to Star Citizen.
Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine.
“I discovered Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt there was a huge barrier to actually creating something,” he says. He taught himself through YouTube tutorials, built a few small prototypes, and eventually settled on the idea of a doomsday cult simulator—a blend of survival mechanics and grindhouse cinema that merged his passions for film and gaming into a single intellectual property.
He created a proof‑of‑concept demo, assuming he would soon hit a technical wall. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter took it to Dooma, a partner who helped shape the project’s direction. Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, began his career as a producer and screenwriter before transitioning to games in the early 2000s, providing writing for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. He later founded several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation firm Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million.
After a brief retirement on a remote Canadian island, Wendschuh was lured back by an unexpected call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott. “I thought I was done, but when I saw the prototype, it blew my mind and pulled me back into development,” he says.
He introduced the game to Reid Schneider, a former Warner Bros. Games VP now heading Raccoon Logic, the makers of Journey to the Savage Planet. Schneider joined as a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, formerly of Ubisoft Montreal, as chief technology officer. With the core team in place, the next hurdle was funding—a task made harder by a market downturn that began in 2023.
Despite the challenges, the studio kept pitching, eventually enlisting Creative Artists Agency (CAA) as representation and securing a seed round from Lifelike Capital and Krafton in 2024. Wendschuh credits the CAA connection, noting that their agent Derek Douglas had previously represented him during a twelve‑year stint in game development and had headed the video‑game department at William Morris. What truly sets Join Us apart is the scale of its ambition relative to its size.
The studio operates with just 13 full‑time staff members, each of whom wears multiple hats. Dietsch emphasizes that the team deliberately kept the group small to preserve a collaborative atmosphere where “everyone has a voice, everyone touches the creative, and the game feels like it was made by a specific group of people.” To make such a sprawling title feasible, Wolf Haus invested heavily in custom tooling from the outset. “If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single person,” Dietsch explains.
The first year of development was split between ideating gameplay and building the internal tools that would later allow the open‑world map to expand without collapsing under its own weight. This tooling‑first approach also aligns with the studio’s funding model: Krafton and Lifelike’s equity investment has essentially self‑funded the project, allowing the team to prioritize tool creation over short‑term deadlines. The investors’ equity stake means they are motivated to increase the studio’s enterprise value, which translates into support for the extensive tool‑building philosophy. “Whenever we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool for it,” says Wendschuh.
“It may slow development in the short term, but it enables us to deliver a game of this magnitude with a tiny team.” In an industry increasingly obsessed with generative AI, Wolf Haus deliberately steered clear of it for creative work. Dietsch offers a blunt answer: “We don’t use generative AI. The human touch is essential to us.
Turning the creative process over to an algorithm would defeat the reason we get up in the morning.” Wendschuh adds that the studio only uses AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting, never for art, design, or narrative. Krafton, despite branding itself as an “AI‑first” company, actually required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline. This mirrors a similar stance taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio, which publicly distanced itself from the parent company’s AI pivot.
Both studios argue that AI threatens jobs for voice actors and artists, a concern shared by Dietsch, who notes that Join Us’s six‑kilometre‑square map is entirely hand‑crafted and its 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human talent. Dietsch reflects on the differences between film and game production. In film, an idea can sit on paper for years before it reaches a set, requiring numerous approvals and the involvement of high‑profile talent to secure financing.
By contrast, a game idea can be prototyped in a matter of hours, allowing creators to see their vision materialize instantly. “You can have an idea this morning, drop it into the engine, and see it in action by afternoon,” he says, highlighting the immediacy that draws many filmmakers to interactive media. Wendschuh points out that traditional filmmaking is front‑loaded with intense, high‑budget set work, whereas games have fewer gatekeepers. “Anyone could rent a camera and shoot a backyard movie, but without big names or distribution, the odds of success are slim.
In games, you don’t need an A‑list actor or director to reach an audience,” he explains. Both founders agree that the core creative impulse—telling stories and delivering experiences—remains the same across mediums. Dietsch recalls his childhood fascination with both cameras and calculators, noting that whether one is making a movie or a game, the goal is to engage an audience and convey a narrative. This shared purpose fuels their ambition to push boundaries, even with a dozen‑person team, and to prove that a small, dedicated group can deliver a large‑scale, fully realized game without relying on generative AI.