The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulation. In the teaser, robed followers charge on pig‑back while firing machine guns, culminating in a shot of massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the cut, according to Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—was the infamous “snake gun.” "One of the developers’ kids asked, ‘What would a snake‑shooting gun look like?’ We had a modular weapon system, so within half an hour I built a gun that launches snakes. The kid went nuts, and the weapon stayed in the final build," Dietsch recalls.
That anecdote captures the chaotic, over‑the‑top tone of Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival title where players can recruit AI followers—or friends in co‑op mode—to form a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has allowed a tiny crew to produce a high‑fidelity experience that would normally require a much larger staff.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed it up: “We set out to be disruptors. We told everyone, ‘We don’t need a hundred people; twelve will do.’ Most people laughed.” The team’s confidence stems from a history of achieving big results on modest budgets. “Our roots are in indie film,” Abbott says.
“We’re used to punching far above our weight.” After 80 pitch meetings, Wolf Haus finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in the studio. The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep.
Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson—son of Mel Gibson—and the two later 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 move to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 with Jamie Foxx.
Join Us began as a side project for Dietsch while he was experimenting with Unreal Engine. "Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games. The barrier to creating something felt huge, so I started learning from YouTube tutorials and built a few tiny prototypes," he explains. Although he had no formal game‑development background, Dietsch managed to finish a couple of small titles before deciding to tackle something more ambitious.
The seed of the game was a “doomsday cult simulator” that blended survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics—essentially a mash‑up of his two passions. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, expecting to hit a technical wall quickly. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter immediately took it to Dooma, a partner studio that helped refine the concept.
Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s chief financial officer and narrative director, entered the picture after a varied career in film and tech. He began as a producer and screenwriter, later founding Sekretagent Productions, which supplied narrative work for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. In the 2010s he launched several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million (about $330 million USD).
After that windfall, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, planning a quiet retirement. Yet a sudden call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into game development.
"I watched the demo Joe sent me and it blew my mind," Wendschuh says. He then introduced the project to Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros. Games and now head of Raccoon Logic (the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet). Schneider joined as a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer.
With the core team in place, the next hurdle was financing—a task made tougher by the industry downturn of 2023‑24. The studio began pitching in the summer of 2023, receiving polite interest but few commitments.
After signing with CAA (Creative Artists Agency) in Los Angeles, they relaunched their pitch in 2024 and eventually closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton. Wendschuh credits CAA’s clout—its roster includes titles like 007: First Light—and the credibility of veteran advisors Schneider and Chartrand for the successful raise. Despite the high‑profile backers, Join Us is being built by only 13 full‑time staff members. Dietsch emphasizes that the small‑team model is intentional: “We wanted everyone to have a voice, to touch the creative, and to feel ownership of the final product.” To make a large open‑world game feasible with such a lean 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 explains. The first year of development was split between designing gameplay concepts and building the internal tools that would let those concepts scale across a six‑kilometre‑square map without the project collapsing under its own weight.
Funding from Krafton and Lifelike is structured as equity, allowing Wolf Haus to self‑finance the development. "We’ve used the investors’ capital to build the game itself; later we’ll add a modest project‑finance component for marketing," says Wendschuh. This equity model aligns the investors’ incentives with the studio’s long‑term value creation, encouraging the team to keep building robust tools rather than cutting corners. 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 mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting, not for art, design, or writing. Krafton, which markets itself as an “AI‑first” company, actually discouraged Wolf Haus from using generative AI in the creative pipeline, fearing it could dilute the studio’s artistic integrity.
This stance mirrors comments from Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio that publicly rejected the parent company’s AI pivot. The commitment to handcrafted content is evident in the game’s scale. The entire six‑kilometre‑square island is hand‑modeled, and all 15,000 voice lines are performed by human actors—a notable achievement for an indie‑size project. Dietsch reflects on the differences between film and games, noting the immediacy of the latter.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialize, requiring countless approvals and the involvement of high‑profile talent. In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped within hours and tested directly in the engine. "You can have an idea this morning, drop it into Unreal, and see it instantly. That immediacy is exhilarating," he says.
Wendschuh points out that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense set‑life and a reliance on star power to secure financing. While anyone can shoot a low‑budget movie, breaking through without established names is rare. Game development, however, has far fewer gatekeepers; a small team can reach a global audience without A‑list actors or directors. Both founders agree that the core creative drive—telling a story and delivering an experience—remains the same across mediums.
"When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games. It came down to a coin toss and a Christmas camera. I learned programming on a TI‑83, so I’ve always been split between the two," Dietsch muses. "Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re crafting an experience, a narrative, and that essence never changes."