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 the finale hints at colossal, Cthulhu‑like tentacles.
What didn’t make the cut was the infamous snake‑gun, a quirky weapon that, according to Joe Dietsch—CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games—originated from a simple suggestion by a team member’s child. “His son asked, ‘What if there’s a snake gun?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us spin up a new firearm in about half an hour, so I built one that fires snakes. The kid went nuts, and the weapon stuck around,” Dietsch recalls.
That anecdote captures the chaotic, over‑the‑top gameplay that Join Us promises: an open‑world sandbox survival experience where you can recruit followers—or fellow players—to your 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s tech‑first philosophy, which has enabled a high‑fidelity, large‑scale title to be produced by a surprisingly tiny crew. 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‑person team; twelve will do.’ Most people laughed and said it was impossible.” The team’s confidence stems from a history of doing big things on shoestring budgets. “Our roots are in indie film,” Abbott explains.
“We’ve learned to punch well above our weight.” After a grueling 80‑pitch marathon, the studio finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in Wolf Haus. The founding trio brings deep Hollywood pedigree to the table. 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 Star Citizen venture. Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx.
Join Us began as a playground experiment in Unreal Engine. “I discovered Unreal was free to download and thought, ‘Why not give it a try?’ I’d been a gamer my whole life, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge. I started learning from YouTube tutorials and built a few tiny prototypes,” Dietsch says. Though he had no formal game‑dev background, he managed to craft a couple of small games before committing to a larger vision.
The seed of Join Us was a fascination with a doomsday cult simulator that blended survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics—essentially marrying his favorite film tropes with interactive gameplay. He built a proof‑of‑concept, expecting to hit a technical wall at some point. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter took it to Dooma, a partner studio. Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had previously worked as a producer and screenwriter in Hollywood before shifting to games 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 (about $330 million USD). After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote restaurant on a tiny Canadian island, intending to retire.
“I thought I’d spend my days on the beach with my dog,” he says. Yet, in classic Hollywood fashion, an unexpected call from his old roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back.
Abbott told him a friend had built a video game, and after watching a demo, Wendschuh was blown away and agreed to come out of retirement. He introduced the project to Reid Schneider, a former Warner Bros. Games VP now heading Raccoon Logic, the studio behind Journey to the Savage Planet. Schneider joined as a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, an ex‑Ubisoft Montreal programmer, 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 facing a skeptical market. After initial outreach, they signed with CAA (Creative Artists Agency) in Los Angeles, refined their pitch, and returned to investors in 2024. Their persistence paid off when Lifelike Capital and Krafton closed a seed round, providing the capital needed to keep development moving.
Wendschuh credits CAA’s influence and the presence of seasoned veterans like Schneider and Chartrand for the successful raise. “Derek Douglas, our CAA agent, had represented me for a dozen years in games and even ran the video‑game department at William Morris,” Wendschuh notes. What truly sets Join Us apart is its production model: a full‑time staff of just 13 people.
Dietsch explains that from day one the team was clear about the project’s scope and deliberately kept the crew 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 single, tight‑knit group.” To make an ambitious open‑world title feasible with such a lean roster, Wolf Haus invested heavily in custom tooling early on. “If a system exists in the game, it must be scalable and debuggable by a single developer,” Dietsch says. The studio built a robust toolkit that allowed features to proliferate across a six‑kilometre‑square map without the project collapsing under its own weight. In essence, the first year of development was spent simultaneously designing gameplay and engineering the tools that would later make that design possible—not just for Join Us, but for any future projects.
The equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike allowed the studio to self‑finance the development entirely. “We’ve used the investors’ capital to fund the game itself; only a small portion of recent financing is earmarked for marketing,” Wendschuh explains. This structure aligns the investors’ interests with the studio’s long‑term value creation, encouraging the continued development of in‑house tools. “Whenever we encounter a problem we can’t solve, we simply build a tool to address it.
It may slow us down in the short term, but it enables us to achieve a scope that would otherwise be impossible for a team our size.” Despite the current hype around generative AI in game creation, Wolf Haus deliberately avoids it for creative work. “We don’t use generative AI at all in the artistic process,” Dietsch states flatly.
“Our game is built by humans, and handing that over to an algorithm would defeat the purpose of why we love making games.” Wendschuh adds that the studio only employs AI for mundane tasks like calendar management and email drafting. Interestingly, Krafton—publicly positioning itself as an “AI‑first” company—insisted that Wolf Haus not rely on generative AI for core development, reinforcing the studio’s commitment to handcrafted content.
The team’s stance resonates with broader industry concerns about AI displacing creative talent. “We respect the work of voice actors, artists, and other creators.
AI threatens those jobs, and that’s not a direction we want to support,” Wendschuh says. Consequently, every square metre of Join Us’s map is hand‑crafted, and the game’s 15,000 voice lines were recorded by human actors—a remarkable feat for an indie title. Dietsch reflects on the differences between film and game creation. In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring countless approvals and the involvement of high‑profile talent before a studio greenlights production.
By contrast, games allow for rapid iteration: “You can have an idea this morning, drop it into the engine, see it instantly, and start tweaking it. That immediacy is intoxicating.” Wendschuh agrees, noting that film production is heavily front‑loaded, with intense, high‑stakes set work and a reliance on star power to secure financing.
While anyone can shoot a backyard movie, breaking through without major names or distribution is rare. Games, however, have far fewer gatekeepers; a small team can reach a global audience without A‑list actors or directors.
Both mediums, though, share a core creative impulse: storytelling and immersive experience. “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.
I learned programming on a TI‑83, so I’ve always been torn between the two,” Dietsch muses. “Whether you’re making a film or a game, you’re trying to tell a story, engage the audience, and give them an experience. The tools change, but the goal stays the same."