You may remember seeing the Join Us trailer during the Xbox Showcase in June. The clip introduced a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator where robed followers zip around on pigs, wield machine guns, and eventually confront colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. What didn’t make the final cut was the infamous snake gun, a feature that Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—attributes to a spontaneous idea from a team member’s child. "His son asked, ‘What would a snake gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool, so in about thirty minutes I built a weapon that actually fires snakes.
The kid was blown away, and the weapon stayed in the game," Dietsch recalls. That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit of Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit followers—or fellow players in co‑op mode—to their retro‑70s cult. It also highlights the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has allowed a small group to produce a high‑fidelity title 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.
While everyone else assumed you need a hundred developers, we believed twelve could do the job. They thought we were dreaming, but we proved them wrong." The team’s confidence stems from a background in low‑budget, high‑impact filmmaking. "We come from indie cinema and are used to punching far above our weight," Abbott says.
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 connections run deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who 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 originally founded by Chris Roberts before he turned his attention to Star Citizen.
Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine.
"Unreal was free to download, and I’d always loved games, but the barrier to actually building something felt huge. I started learning from YouTube tutorials and made a few tiny prototypes," he explains.
Though he had no formal game‑dev experience, he soon built a couple of small titles before deciding to tackle something larger: a doomsday cult simulator that fused survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the duo took the concept to Dooma, a production partner.
Dooma Wendschuh, Wolf Haus’s CFO and narrative director, began his career as a film producer and screenwriter before moving into games in the early 2000s. He founded Sekretagent Productions, providing writing services for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Later he launched several tech ventures, including the cannabis formulation firm Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million (about $330 million USD).
After that windfall, he bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire. Yet a call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back: "Joe showed me a demo that completely blew my mind and convinced me to come out of retirement." Wendschuh then introduced the project to Reid Schneider, a former Warner Bros. Games vice‑president now heading 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 assembled, the next hurdle was financing, a difficult task during the industry downturn of 2023‑24. The studio pitched extensively, eventually partnering with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) for representation. Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton provided a seed round, allowing development to continue without compromising the studio’s vision.
Wolf Haus deliberately kept the headcount low—13 full‑time staff at the time of writing—to preserve a tight‑knit creative environment where everyone’s voice matters. Dietsch notes, "We entered the project knowing exactly what we wanted to build, but we also wanted a small‑team culture where each person touches the creative and technical aspects." A critical factor in achieving such ambition with a lean crew was the early investment in custom tooling.
"Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch says. The studio spent the first year simultaneously designing gameplay concepts and building the internal tools that would let those concepts scale across a six‑kilometre‑square open world without collapsing under their own weight. The equity funding model gave Wolf Haus the runway to perfect those tools.
"Krafton and Lifelike’s investment funds the development directly, making the game essentially self‑funded. We’re now adding a modest amount of project finance for marketing, but the core development was covered by their equity stakes," explains Wendschuh. This arrangement aligns investor incentives with the studio’s long‑term value creation, encouraging the team to continue building reusable tools even if it slows short‑term progress. When asked about generative AI, the team is unequivocal: they do not rely on it for creative work.
"We believe a human touch is essential. Using AI to generate core game content would defeat the purpose of why we love making games," Dietsch asserts.
Wendschuh adds that the only AI they employ is for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Interestingly, Krafton—publicly positioning itself as an "AI‑first" company—explicitly required Wolf Haus to avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline, mirroring similar statements from Krafton‑owned Neon Giant. The studio’s commitment to handcrafted content is evident in the game’s massive map and voice work. The entire six‑kilometre‑square world was manually built, and all 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors, a point the developers consider non‑negotiable even for a modest indie title.
Dietsch also reflects on the differences between film and game creation. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and studio greenlights.
In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped within hours, allowing immediate iteration: "You can have an idea this morning, drop it into the engine, see it in action, and tweak it on the spot. That immediacy is exhilarating." Wendschuh notes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense pre‑production phases focused on securing high‑profile talent and financing. While anyone can shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without established names or distribution is rare.
Games, however, have fewer gatekeepers, making it easier for small teams to reach a wide audience without A‑list actors or directors. Both founders agree that the core creative impulse—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 boiled down to a coin toss and whether I got a camera for Christmas. I learned to program on a TI‑83, so the passion has always been there," Dietsch says. "Whether you’re crafting a film or a game, you’re aiming to engage, entertain, and move the audience, and that fundamental goal doesn’t change."