The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulation where robed followers ride pigs, unleash machine‑guns, and eventually confront colossal, 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 team members’ kids suggested a snake‑gun," Dietsch recalls.
"We had a rapid‑prototyping tool, so in about thirty minutes I built a weapon that fires snakes. It blew his mind, and it stayed in the final build." This anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit NPC followers or friends into a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has allowed a small group to deliver a high‑fidelity experience.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, says the team set out to be “disruptors.” "We told everyone we could build a AAA‑ish title with just twelve people. Most people laughed and called it impossible," he says. Their confidence stems from a background in independent filmmaking, where they learned to achieve big results on shoestring budgets.
After 80 pitches, the studio finally secured equity investment from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, giving Wolf Haus the runway it needed. The founders’ Hollywood credentials run deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who later co‑founded Wolf Haus and co‑wrote the indie films 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 his Star Citizen venture.
Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us began as a hobby project in Unreal Engine. "Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games but felt blocked from creating anything myself," Dietsch explains. He taught himself the engine through YouTube tutorials, built a few tiny prototypes, and eventually gravitated toward a doomsday cult simulator—a concept that merged his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics.
He built a proof‑of‑concept demo and showed it to Abbott, who then presented it to Dooma, the studio that would later back the project. Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, entered the video‑game arena after a career in film production and screenwriting. He founded Sekretagent Productions, providing narrative work for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins.
Later he built several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis‑formulation company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million. After a brief retirement on a remote Canadian island, a call from his old Hollywood‑hill roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back into game development. He was impressed by Dietsch’s demo and agreed to join, bringing on former Warner Bros. Games VP Reid Schneider as a strategic advisor and hiring Ubisoft Montreal veteran Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand as chief technology officer.
Funding proved to be the hardest hurdle. The team began pitching in the summer of 2023, a period marked by an industry downturn. Initial outreach yielded interest but no commitments.
After signing with CAA in Los Angeles, the studio relaunched its pitch campaign in 2024 and eventually closed a seed round with Lifelike Capital and Krafton. Wendschuh credits the CAA connection—and the credibility of veterans like Schneider and Chartrand—for opening doors. Despite the high ambitions, Join Us is being built by a core staff of just 13 full‑time developers.
Dietsch emphasizes that the small‑team ethos is intentional: everyone should have a voice, touch the creative process, and feel ownership of the final product. To make such a scope feasible, the studio invested heavily in internal tooling from day one. "Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," he says. The first year of development was split between designing gameplay and building the pipelines that would let that gameplay scale across a six‑kilometre‑square open world without collapsing under its own weight.
The equity partnership with Krafton and Lifelike allowed Wolf Haus to self‑fund the development, using the investors’ capital to cover salaries, tools, and later a modest marketing budget. Because the investors share in the studio’s enterprise value, they encourage the team to keep building robust tools rather than cutting corners. "When we hit a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool for it," Wendschuh explains.
This approach may slow short‑term progress but enables a tiny team to produce a game of this magnitude. When asked about generative AI, the studio is unequivocal: they do not employ it for creative work. "We believe a game needs a human touch.
Handing creation over to an AI would defeat why we get up in the morning," Dietsch says. Wendschuh adds that they only use AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Interestingly, Krafton—publicly branding itself as an “AI‑first” company—specifically required that Wolf Haus not rely on generative AI for artistic development, mirroring a similar stance taken by Krafton‑owned Neon Giant.
All voice work in Join Us—over 15,000 lines—was recorded by human actors, and the entire map was handcrafted. This commitment to handcrafted content reflects the team’s belief that AI could threaten jobs for voice talent and artists, a concern they share with many creators. Dietsch also notes a key advantage of game development over film: immediacy.
In cinema, an idea can take years to secure financing, cast talent, and finally shoot. In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a single morning, inserted into the engine, and instantly tested.
Wendschuh points out that film production is heavily front‑loaded with high‑profile talent negotiations, whereas games have far fewer gatekeepers. Anyone can publish a game without needing an A‑list director or star, dramatically increasing the odds of success for small teams.
Both mediums, however, share a common creative goal: to deliver an experience, tell a story, and engage an audience. Dietsch reflects that his childhood wish to make either movies or games came down to a coin toss and a camera for Christmas. He learned programming on a TI‑83 calculator, and that early curiosity has guided his career across both industries. Today, Wolf Haus’s Join Us stands as a testament to what a tight‑knit, tool‑driven, Hollywood‑savvy team can achieve without relying on generative AI, proving that small numbers can still produce big, memorable games.